Mike Miller's Waterford no like this web site
"Political mockery, a complete lack of respect, shameful, embarrassing, degrading" -- looks like one of Mike Miller's employees found a thesaurus
The Gondo's November 9th Let 'Em Have It column featured a familiar theme: Wal-Mart is good, Mike Miller is great, anyone who says otherwise is scum
-- John Patten, 11/09/07
-- jpatten@veniceflorida.com

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The stealthing of Waterford
During the elections, I blasted land developer Mike Miller over his stealth election campaigning tactics for the incumbents, tactics that backfired in a big way. This included the use of a staged spontaneous protest at city hall, ostensibly by random citizens wanting jobs. It turns out that the picketers were all employees of Mike Miller's Waterford company, various Waterford sub-contractors, plus a few possible Wal-Mart employees.

Then came the wave of letters from random citizens to the newspapers, all in favor of building a Wal-Mart on Laurel Road. Strangely, these citizens all had names that appear on Mike Miller's weekly payroll sheet.

This was accompanied by groups of enthusiastic citizens standing on street corners, all waving campaign signs supporting city council pro-development incumbents. I took photos of a number of these spontaneous citizen support groups during the election campaign and emailed them around for identification: again, all Mike Miller / Waterford employees (one individual was identified as Miller's mother-in-law).

Post-election stealthing
Then came this morning's Gondolier with a hilarious entry in the Let 'Em Have It column.

For online readers who have never seen the Gondo's print edition, the Let 'Em Have It column is a regular print feature that does not appear on the Gondo's web site. It is made up of transcriptions of various anonymous phone calls made to the Gondo's Let 'Em Have It phone line.

Having been stung and outed, both online and in print, it looks like Mike Miller's employees have resorted to their last haven of pitiable whines: the anonymity afforded by the Gondo's column.

Below is an entry from this morning's column. I made the mistake of reading it while drinking coffee. I don't know if Miller ever paid the $400 to city hall that I asked about, but add this one to the pile, Mike: somebody over at Waterford now owes me a new keyboard.

Lack of respect? Me?
Me? Lack of respect? I protest. I... I... I'm hurt. Devastated. I... don't know what to say or even if I can go on.

Yes, this column is causing me to lose my will to live. The horror... the horror...

Tell you what. Let me try to make amends. To the insulted party who wrote this, I can only offer my sincerest apologies and an invitation. Please contact me and I will be more than happy to (in the words of Ian Anderson) very, very respectfully bugger you with a hot poker.

You can't ask for more respect than that, can you?

John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times -- THIS IS ONE OF THOSE TIMES.