Category — Florida

Since Isaac can’t make up it’s mind where to go, I’m running around and ensuring that I have all of the standard procedures for these storms covered.

Just remember that your last purchase should be at least a gallon of your favorite outrageously expensive ice cream. Since it is too expensive to waste, and the power could go out at any time, you obviously have to eat all of it as quickly as possible.

It has been a few years since we have had one in the area, so people have let things go, which has resulted in a lot of crowds out and about.

They haven’t raised the price of gas yet, but they will. Now that they have ethanol in it you can’t store it for extended periods or it will absorb water, especially with all the rain we’ve had. You can just add a preservative to regular gas and it is good for the entire season, but you have to use the new stuff within a month.

I’ll be by for the updates, but little else for the next few days.

We have had over 12 inches of rain so far in August and the local weather guys don’t think the stalled front to the North of us is going to move out before September.

As a result of Helene down in the Bay of Campeche, we can expect another major rain event to affect the coast next week. The forecast shows thunderstorms predicted every day.

There are a lot of people on the other side of that front who want and need rain, but it is stuck down here. I expect there will be mushrooms growing in the pots with my Mother’s flowering cacti, which may rot.

You can’t keep the bugs out as they head for dry ground. In the areas where there are still snakes, people will see them on their porches.

Raincoats are worthless in the heat, as your choice of soaking is rain or sweat. I’m ready to put my wallet in a plastic bag and leave the umbrellas and raincoats behind.

Definitely the normal mixed bag for local elections.

Reelected were the Sheriff, the Tax Collector, the Judge, and the School Board Member.

We have a new Public Defender, Superintendent of Schools, and two new white guys on the County Comission to replace the two white guys who didn’t seek reelection.

The Sheriff’s contest received the most votes, 34,138, which represents 27.6% of the registered voters.

The County has 123,539 registered voters with about 60% registered as Republican, 20% Democrat, and 20% Other affiliation.

Since most of the County elected positions are filled by these low turn-out ‘primary’ elections, about 20% of the voters get to choose the officials.

The entire state uses Clarity Elections to report the Official Results. This was owned by a Tampa company, SOE Software, but they were bought by a Spanish corporation, SCYTL, at the first of the year.

It is primary election day in Florida. This is the only election you get in this county, because the winner of the Republican nomination is the winner of the election in one-party South Fundistan.

If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.

The polls are open until 7PM CDT [no matter what they think in the state capital], but the state will start releasing results at 6PM CDT because they can’t remember there are two time zones.

We do use paper ballots because this is a Republican election and they know how easy it is to steal elections if you use anything else.

For the first time in the month of August there were no flashes of lightning, no clashes of thunder, no rattle of rain against the windows, and the eaves weren’t dripping.

On the road no one had their headlights on, and windshield wipers were motionless. People had to readjust to sunglasses and leave their umbrellas in the car.

Very strange … probably that climate change that everyone locally talks about not believing in…

I waded through all of the literature and websites of the local candidates and am ready to vote on Tuesday. All of the local candidates, in case you are interested, are white, Christian, conservative Republicans who promise not to raise taxes. Almost all of them are ‘small business owners’ [for a given value of small]. The only major difference is that some of them are incumbents who have had some “minor problems” while in office as they try to ‘make government more efficient and smaller.’

I am only really interested in how many of the incumbents win their elections. If local voters return them to office, they are telling them that those “minor problems” [involving a lot of money and violations of laws] don’t really matter. [IOKIYAR]

In the end my choices were easy as there was usually at least one person running for every office who didn’t have any obvious conflicts of interest. They may actually have conflicts, but they are at least intelligent enough not to highlight them in their campaign literature or on their web site.

You can’t avoid evil, so you may as well opt for some sign of intelligence.

Oh, don’t trust the polling for the Panhandle. I’m one of the few people who still have a landline, so I’m skewing a lot of polls.

Marc Caputo of the Miami Herald explains what Paul Ryan’s selection does to Republican hopes in Florida.

Mitt the Twit has been avoiding being seen with Florida’s Fraudster-in-chief because of his subbasement poll numbers, but Ryan’s numbers are two levels below Scott’s among Florida’s senior voters.

So much for appealing to swing voters. After this choice the “fiscally conservative” thing to do would be to cancel the GOP convention and stop campaigning. Just concede and try again in four years.

Here’s the deal: I live in a specific voting precinct. That precinct is located in specific districts for county, state, and Federal officials. If someone is running in a different district, I don’t get to vote for them. This is why you have to notify the Supervisor of Elections when you move.

The thing is, if you are trying to convince me that you are going to be really careful with public funds, why are you wasting your campaign funds sending flyers to people who can’t vote for you?

When you get the mailing list from the Supervisor of Elections officer I’m certain that the number of the precinct is included, and it is simple to find out what precincts are in the district of the office for which you are running, so why aren’t you limiting your mailing to those precincts?

I have flyers for candidates from every county commission district except the one that represents me. They are all telling be they are small business owners who know the value of money and will fight ‘wasteful’ spending, as they waste money sending me an expensive four-color, glossy card stock flyer.

Since people have given up trying to run for any office if they don’t belong to the Republican Party, the primary election on the 14^th will be the actual election for local offices. The election law was changed several years ago so that when the primary is effectively the election, everyone gets to vote in the primary.

The strangest race, for me, is the one for Public Defender. I just have a hard time dealing with the concept of an elected Public Defender. Given the people who vote in my county, what kind of ‘promises’ do you make to appeal to the whacko voters? Do you tell them that you can guarantee that no guilty person will get off if they elect you as Public Defender? If you are running for re-election, do you tell people that you haven’t won a single trial in 4 years?

I got a mailer from the incumbent and it is a piece of work. He is a proven ‘conservative’ because he cut the budget – well, except that the budget is established by the state legislature, they cut it.

He reduced personnel costs. If people in your organization are suspended while under investigation, I’m not sure you can take credit for not having to pay them.

I’m not really clear on the process for collecting money from people represented by the Public Defender, so I can’t comment on that claim.

Then he uses the back of the mailer to attack his opponent.

The opponent ‘worked for & supported liberal Democratic Senator James Abourezk’. Actually, his opponent was an intern for Mr. Abourezk while still in law school in 1993. Mr. Abourezk served one term in the Senate, from 1973 to 1979. A lot of people who have attended the law school at the University of South Dakota have interned for him.

Mr. Abourezk was the first Arab-American to serve in the Senate. His parents were Lebanese Christians who emigrated to the US early in the twentieth century, before he was born in 1931 in Wood, South Dakota. He served one term in the House followed immediately by one term in the Senate, and then returned to his private law practice. Not much of a politician.

As for not voting in 2008, you would have to check the supervisors of elections in four counties to find out if that was true.

The problem is all of the missteps the incumbent has made in the last four years, not who the challenger worked for in college, or whether he voted locally.

This is really pathetic.

Take a look at the Weather Underground’s local calendar view for July, 2012. You will note that you only see the sun icon on 3 of the 31 days. I did exaggerate a bit about all of the rest having thunderstorms, as there were a few days when it was just rain without all of the flashing and booming.

This morning we had the entire show. Twice the lightning was close enough to suck all of the juice out of the wires and leave me on the batteries. The main road was a mess because they are resurfacing it and have the storm drains covered to keep out debris. I assume the stores on the road will want the town to post it as a no wake zone until the road work is done.

Meanwhile, the hurricane season has restarted with Invest 99, a wave that moved off of Africa and is headed West through the MDR [Atlantic Main Development Region defined as 80W-20W, 10N-20N] towards the Antilles.

The Fraudster-in-chief doesn’t seem to be able to keep department heads and managers in his administration. His latest loss is Gisela Sala, the director of the Division of Elections, who has resigned effective tomorrow, August 1, two weeks before the state’s primary election.

She has only had the job for a little over a year, but it has been a year in which the legislature and governor have been playing multiple games with Florida’s elections. During that time she has been commuting from Ocala, which tends to indicate that she has been reluctant to commit to the $90K/year job.

All the public really knows is that she resigned, and only found out when local supervisors of elections were notified by e-mail.

People who know her from her years working on elections in South Florida and Ocala are surprised that she would leave this close to an election.

Given the number of people who have resigned from major offices under Rick Scott, I can’t say that any reason would surprise me. The current top soap opera is the court case involving his lieutenant governor. It is hard to beat CEO leadership … if you want cheap entertainment. 😈

Romney seems to be using the same staff that made Sarah Palin famous. No one tells him what he needs to know before he goes out and talks in public.

Digby notes that he talked in glowing terms about Israel’s health care system and seemed blithely unaware of its tax-supported, socialist foundation or heavily regulated environment.

Then, Yves Smith made my day brighter by noting that the Romney people are looking at Florida’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, as a possible candidate for VP. Ms Bondi is best known to the country at large for leading the opposition to Obamacare, which lost in the Supreme Court. She is certainly a graceful loser, but that is possibly because she has had so much practice. Her main strength is her ability to speak fluent whacko to the Republican base. The only down side is that since it is a Federal office, she isn’t required to resign to run.

So the Department of Homeland Security said fine, go ahead and use our data base for your voter purge, Florida.

Now the real fun begins because the primary key for the DHS data base is the alien registration number. You have to have that number to search the file and no one knows where Florida will get the numbers for the people they are trying to purge. Undocumented immigrants don’t have an ARN, and about the only people other than DHS and the IRS that would use them are individual employers, as it is treated like a Social Security number.

The DHS told the state that the data base wouldn’t help them, so now the state can waste time and tax dollars finding out for themselves.

That we have a governor who came from the health care industry to help the state through the changes that are coming. He obviously knows a lot about Medicare and Medicaid to have had the largest fines in the history of the programs levied against his corporation for fraud.

It is possible that he turned down the Medicaid expansion, to avoid having any Florida plan rejected because of his history with the program.

Of course it would be nice if he and his minions would stop doing stupid things like this:

JACKSONVILLE —The CDC officer had a serious warning for Florida health officials in April: A tuberculosis outbreak in Jacksonville was one of the worst his group had investigated in 20 years. Linked to 13 deaths and 99 illnesses, including six children, it would require concerted action to stop.

That report had been penned on April 5, exactly nine days after Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed the bill that shrank the Department of Health and required the closure of the A.G. Holley State Hospital in Lantana, where tough tuberculosis cases have been treated for more than 60 years.

I’m sure the Fraudster-in-chief is already looking for a for-profit hospital to take over the TB care for no more than three times what it would have cost at the state hospital, because everyone knows how much more efficient the private sector is than the public sector … 😈

The Fraudster-in-Chief doesn’t give up once he gets a bad idea. The problem with ‘running government like a business’ is that you end up with a CEO like Ken Lay for a governor.

The Miami Herald documents the atrocity:

Gov. Rick Scott and the Obama administration traded legal barbs and counteraccusations Monday as each side announced it would sue the other over Florida’s controversial noncitizen voter purge.

Scott’s chief elections official sued first, filing a federal lawsuit in Washington that accused the U.S. Department of Homeland Security of unlawfully refusing Florida access to a federal database that could help the state spot and remove noncitizens from the voter rolls.
…

Moments after the state filed suit, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Thomas E. Perez roared back in a sharply worded five-page letter from the U.S. Department of Justice, which ordered the state two weeks ago to stop the purge because it could violate two federal voting laws.

The state’s program is too “faulty” ” and comes too close to election time to not endanger the voting rights of thousands of lawful U.S. citizens, Perez wrote. He said Florida has repeatedly ignored Homeland Security’s warning that the department’s database, known as SAVE, isn’t designed for the noncitizen hunt on which Florida embarked.

“The significant problems you are encountering in administering this new program are of your own creation,” Perez wrote.

While the reporter is attempting to be ‘fair and balanced’, the reality is that there is no ‘silver bullet’ for purging a voters list. There are 67 counties in the state, and each of them is headed by an elected Supervisor of Elections, who has great latitude in how they run the system in their county. There is no one, uniform model for voter lists which aren’t even on computers in the less populated counties.

The state doesn’t seem to understand that the DHS data base was not designed for the purpose that the state wants it to perform, and DHS certainly isn’t going to put any effort into a ‘special request’ unless it is accompanied by the money to pay for it.

More taxpayer money wasted on lawyers.