So, this past Sunday Former Speaker Ray Sansom finally resigned from the Florida House just before the start of hearings on his alleged “ethics violation”. You would think that with that mess still on people’s minds, as well as the recent replacement of the head of the party for various reasons, the Republicans would find a new Speaker who was as pure and new fallen snow.

Well, this is the Republican Party of Florida, so you would be totally wrong.

Meet the new Speaker:

The home of Rep. Chris Dorworth of Lake Mary is in foreclosure. He is struggling to pay a $2.7 million legal judgment from a bad land deal. And his driver’s license was temporarily suspended this month after what he called a misunderstanding with his car insurer.

Now that he is the new Speaker, of course, many of these problems will recede into the background as certain interest groups look for “favors”. Nothing untoward, of course, just some minor adjustments and recalculations. Mr. Dorworth is in real estate, so he is just having some “temporary cash flow problems” due to the “business downturn”, but that won’t have any effect on his performance in one of the three most powerful offices in the state. 😈

I’m going to call it the “edifice complex”, the way Obama, the Blue Dogs, and the Republicans worship corporations.

Apparently what few members of the middle class who still exist in this country have reached their limit on paying for health insurance, and Obama et al. feel the need to herd new customers into the corporate feed pens to be drained of their last penny.

The so-called “Health Care Proposal” that the White House has posted for the latest photo op displaying Obama’s obsession with “bi-partisanship”, is, to no one’s surprise a warmed over version of the worst of the two bills that made it out of Congress – the Senate bill. Obama’s competence was barely able to cope with the Senate, and he is lost as an executive.

Obama doesn’t want any real competition for his corporate masters, so there isn’t even a reference to a “public option”, which was never defined in any case. They do intend to tax the health care benefits that a few unions have managed to secure for their members after years of negotiations, and they intend to sic the IRS on to people who object to throwing away money by giving it to insurance companies who have a track record of denying claims.

Oh, they are going to “review” rate hikes. That ought to be effective, telling companies that their 30% rate hike after a year with 30+% profit is somewhat excessive. No doubt there will be a board of former insurance company executives to advise on what is reasonable.

If they pass this turkey the Democratic Party will cease to be anything more than a name.