Category — Florida

Angela Fritz writing at Dr Masters’s blog: Torrential rain causes widespread flooding in Florida panhandle

Torrential rainfall led to widespread flooding along the northern Gulf Coast on Saturday, and Pensacola came about 2 inches shy of matching its all-time rainfall record for a calendar day: 15.29 inches. On Saturday, Pensacola airport received 13.13 inches of rain. The previous record was set on October 5, 1934, as Tropical Storm 9 of that year was making landfall. The record for any 24 hour period is 17.1 inches, spanning October 4-5 in 1934, according to Wunderground weather historian Christopher C. Burt.

We have a stalled front right along the coast that is pumping the Gulf on top of us. This isn’t a problem for me because there is still a lot of natural sand in my area which will let the water drain. but people with those ‘wonderful manicured lawns’ are flooding. The major roads are a mess here, and we didn’t get anywhere near that much rain.

They have some pictures of the flooding in Pensacola at the blog and at the Pensacola News Journal.

Everyone think dry thoughts for Hipparchia and her kitties because she lives over there.

It must be the heat because for the second time in a few weeks the editors of the Libertoonian Local Puppy Trainer have published an editorial that agrees with me. This one is on the changes in Florida’s election laws. [This is getting creepy.]

In another case of the headline not matching the story, the Miami Herald published Investigation of two non-citizen voters may bolster Scott’s fight with feds which contains this information:

On Friday, county elections supervisors showed so little faith in the state-led purge that their state association said they shouldn’t cooperate. The announcement came just hours after the U.S. Justice Department ordered Florida to stop its effort citing two federal voting-rights laws, partly because the purge could disproportionately affect minorities.
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The 13 total noncitizen voters identified so far on the Miami-Dade rolls are minuscule compared to the 492 people identified as citizens and, therefore, lawful voters.

Of the more than 1,600 potential noncitizens in Miami-Dade; about 65 percent have cast ballots. About 72 percent have cast ballots of the 262 identified in Broward.

In all, the Florida Division of Elections has identified nearly 2,700 voters who may not be eligible to vote because they are not U.S. citizens. But, supervisors say, the vast majority found have turned out to be citizens.

Excuse me, but how does a purge of 1600 voters, of which only 13 have been determined to actually be non-citizens justify what the Fraudster-in-Chief did? The Federal case is bolstered by this information, not Scott’s.

This is just like his waste of tax dollars on the drug testing program that showed that poor people can’t afford to buy drugs. The thinking that resulted in that give away to drug testing companies, was based on personal prejudice towards the people at the bottom of the economic scale, the ‘everyone knows that they’re poor because they are junkies’ excuse for not caring about them.

As a Florida tax-payer I’m sick and tired of watching public money wasted for programs based on Republican mythology.

The Florida Republicans suffered two defeats in their War On Voting™.

First, the Miami Herald reports that the DOJ remembered it is supposed to uphold Federal laws:

The Justice Department ordered Florida’s elections division to halt a systematic effort to find and purge the state’s voter rolls of noncitizen voters.

Florida’s effort appears to violate both the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which protects minorities, and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act – which governs voter purges – T. Christian Herren Jr., the Justice Department’s lead civil rights lawyer, wrote in a detailed two-page letter sent late Thursday night.

State officials said they were reviewing the letter. But they indicated they might fight DOJ over its interpretation of federal law and expressed frustration that President Barack Obama’s administration has stonewalled the state’s noncitizen voter hunt for nine months.

Florida is on the Federal watch list for its history of suppressing minority voters, so changes to election laws require approval before taking effect, and purging the voters list can’t take place within 90 days of an election, which was May 16. These are not new requirements if you look at the year of the affected laws. These only affect the election to Federal offices.

In another loss, Federal Court Enjoins Oppressive Florida Rule Designed to Make Voter Registration Difficult.

A law suit was filed in the Federal Court in Tallahassee by the League of Women Voters of Florida, Florida Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, and Rock the Vote over the changes the Republicans made to the election law covering the registration process. One of the first people to run afoul of the change in the law was a teacher who was trying to get students to register and vote if they were eligible.

Mustang Bobby also noted that Florida Election Laws Get Federal Attention, and he has different sources, so the emphasis is different.

In order to generate “local excitement” [sell stuff] the chamber of commerce is once again annoying people with the Billy Bowlegs Festival. This year the unavoidable part runs from Thursday, May 31^st and finishes up on Sunday Saturday. The really obnoxious parade that screws up traffic and sends a lot of noisy people through my neighborhood had been taking place on Monday in previous years, but they decided to change things. Now the parade will be held on Thursday. This year that is also the day of the graduation from a local high school, so things will be even worse.

Almost at bad as the parade traffic jam are the Friday Saturday fireworks. I know a lot of people enjoy fireworks, but they probably have not seen what loud noises and flashes of light can do to people and aircraft – I am definitely not a fan.

Update: They changed the schedule this year.

[Read more →]

Winning a Bronze Star in the World War II Battle of the Bulge won’t stop Florida’s Fraudster in Chief from removing you from the voting rolls. McClatchy has the latest effort to purge qualified voters from the rolls to help the Republicans to steal elections more reliably.

They don’t care that the last known incident of voter fraud involved a woman named Ann Coulter, who is apparently a celebrity of some kind, and a known Republican. They are going after people who are suspected of voting for Democrats.

The Republicans don’t think they can win honest elections, so they try to remove voters with their changes in the election laws and purges of voter lists.

Locally the smoke is real and caused by a burning swamp on Eglin AFB. Last night it was like the fog came in as visibility was down to a quarter mile in some places [like my house], but one whiff made it obvious it was smoke.

It is fundamentally wrong for swamps to burn.

The Local Puppy Trainer reports on the unpleasant surprise just handed out to Florida schools: Statewide FCAT drop worse than expected

In the fourth grade alone, only 27 percent of students earned a proficient score on the standardized test. That’s a 54 percent drop compared to last year. Similar trends occurred in eighth and tenth grade.

FCAT is the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test, which is supposed to impose ‘accountability’ on the public school system by providing a ‘metric’ to judge performance. Testing, which involves big buck contracts to private companies, like the one owned by the brother of our former governor, John Ellis Bush, were supposed to provide an objective yardstick to judge the quality of schools. The fact that it only showed how well a school could ‘teach to a test’ is irrelevant as it gave politicians a reason to continue to reduce funding to education.

Well, they changed the test, and the way the test is graded, and schools haven’t mastered teaching to the new test, so scores have dropped like a rock. What we don’t know is if the kids are actually learning anything, or if they can think for themselves.

Update: Florida’s Board of Education has ‘fixed’ the problem – they lowered the score need to pass.

Essentially the change in the test for writing skills was to begin grading spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Before the test was just scored on the ability to present a reasoned argument in written form. It really amounted to creating a wordy outline, rather than a finished essay.

The Miami Herald reports on the dilapidated condition of the Miami sewer system.

Having raw sewage flow into the local waterways is a beginning for a cholera outbreak. There are a lot of people in the area who visit Haiti, where cholera is a major problem, and they will bring it back with them. Given the diminished state of the public health system caused by austerity budgets, an outbreak would be devastating. A crumbling infrastructure and reduced public health resources is a recipe for an epidemic.

First, thank you for visiting. We really appreciate the business you bring to out area, and hope you will make visiting our beaches part of all future vacation plans.

As there seems to be some confusion, especially for motorists from Minnesota, I would like to say that the speed limit signs in the state of Florida are in miles-per-hour, not kilometers-per-hour… really, I wouldn’t kid you. You may think that 35 miles-per-hours is a bit fast for four-lane roads with a separate center turn lane, but the traffic signals are set for that speed. This means that if you travel at the speed limit you will never have to stop for more than one light for long stretches.

Again, thanks for stopping by.

There are a lot of good people running for office in Florida, and I get e-mail from many of them. I give them what support I can, which isn’t a lot, but I won’t endorse them on the blog.

There is a good reason for that and it deals with the nature of politics today.

They aren’t the problem, I’m the problem for them. I have written about three issues [Cuba, Israel, and Iran] that would create trouble for candidates in Florida, and I don’t want these people to waste limited resources dealing with corporate attack ads about my views as a supporter of these candidates.

This is going to be a disgustingly negative campaign season because of the Synod’s decision in the Citizens United case. We have already seen in the Republican primary that these super-PACs have decided that they will be the mud-slingers, while the candidate’s campaign will have ‘plausible deniability’ for the attacks.

The stupid uproar generated by DonaWho in the last Presidential season over the Edward’s campaign hiring Amanda & Melissa was a pale shadow of what will occur in this age of corporate propaganda unleashed by a male, Catholic majority on the Supreme Court.

OK, so just before the Tourist Development Council director resigned [later committing suicide] over buying a yacht and house with public money, the city council of Crestview, the county seat, fired its police chief because he was shielding one of his friends, a senior officer, from various complaints that resulted in the protected officer being indicted for racketeering.

The county replaced the TDC director with the airport manager, so I guess we will be buying an airplane next.

That appointment has to be looked at in a new light, as the guy the airport manager had just hired to be the chief of the airport police, just resigned before he was indicted for various illegal doings at his last job.

The Fort Walton Beach city council just fired their city manager because he couldn’t get along with the city’s employees.

The little town I live in hasn’t really had these kinds of problems … well, since the town manager was indicted for insurance fraud after Ivan, but that had nothing to do with the town, and it was a long time ago.

Republicans don’t like government because they are so bad at it.

The Miami Herald had an election-related story, that will confuse, not clarify the issue involved.

The headline was: “Florida finds nearly 2,700 non-U.S. citizens on voting rolls” which sounds like there is a problem, unless you read on to discover that they left out all of the qualifiers to that statement, things like ‘possibly’ or ‘might be”.

That enters almost immediately in the sub-head: “The state has found thousands of potential non-U.S. citizens on voting rolls and an analysis indicates a third could have voted in previous elections. But some of the voters say they’re lawful citizens who legally cast ballots.”

See, the state doesn’t actually know that these people are non-US citizens, only that they might be. So Florida found almost 2,700 people whom it isn’t sure are US citizens.

Now we get to the actual story:

Consider the case of Miami’s Maria Ginorio, a 64-year-old from Cuba, who said she became a U.S. citizen in August 2009. She said she was angered by a letter she received asking her to go to the elections office to document her status. Ginorio, who said she typically votes by absentee ballot, is ill and homebound.

“I’m not going to do anything about this,” Ginorio said. “I can’t. I guess I won’t vote anymore. I say this with pain in my heart, because voting is my right as a citizen.”

Citizens like Ginorio were flagged as potentially ineligible after the state’s Division of Elections compared its database with a database maintained by Florida’s Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, which records whether a newly licensed driver is a U.S. citizen.

As a result, some citizens could appear to be non citizens now because the DHSMV computer system doesn’t automatically update when someone becomes a citizen, said Chris Cate, a spokesman with the Florida Division of Elections.

So, what actually happened is that they compared the voters rolls against the drivers license records and came up with a list of nearly 2,700 who don’t have a driver’s license or said they were not citizens when they applied for a driver’s license. That means the record could be up to six years old.

The good news is that the problem seems to exist primarily around Miami, which means most of those on the list will be Republican-voting Cuban immigrants. I would like to congratulate the Republicans in the state legislature for screwing their own base with another of their hare-brained laws.

The Mittster has had unkind things said about him by the editors of the Local Puppy Trainer: Romney, Carter and Desert One

The Daily News isn’t interested in defending President Obama’s role in the killing of terrorist Osama bin Laden. The president reinvigorated the hunt for bin Laden after it had gone slack; he overruled advisers to launch the final raid; and he succeeded where his predecessor had failed. We don’t have to defend him. He doesn’t need our help.
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“Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order,” Mr. Romney said with a sly smile.

His message was clear: The raid to kill bin Laden was such a high-reward, low-risk affair that even an indecisive fop like Carter would have OK’d it.
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The Emerald Coast has never forgotten the sacrifices of those who died at Desert One.

Jimmy Carter is not our favorite former president, but implying that he was a doofus who took the easy way out shows that Mr. Romney either doesn’t know what happened on April 25, 1980, or doesn’t care.

Five airman stationed at Hurlburt Field died on the Desert One mission. Mr. Romney needs to find some competent people to advise him on national security and recent history, because he just ticked off the Special Ops people, and their supporters.

Cyrus Vance, Carter’s Secretary of State, opposed the mission, and resigned when Carter approved it, holding his resignation until after the mission took place to avoid giving any indication that something significant was about to happen. It definitely wasn’t a unanimous decision by Carter’s advisors, nor an easy decision to make.

So, the chairman of the county’s Tourist Development Council got into trouble and resigned after he used county money to buy a 40-foot yacht. Well, at least the title of the boat was made out to the county. He made another purchase and kept the title in his own name, according to reports today.

The Local Puppy Trainer has the story: Sheriff’s Office issues warrant for Mark Bellinger’s arrest

The Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office has issued an arrest warrant for Mark Bellinger, the former director of the Okaloosa County Tourist Development Council.

The Sheriff’s Office, in conjunction with the Northwest Florida Mortgage Fraud Task Force, obtained the felony warrant late Thursday.

Bellinger, 52, is facing charges of felony theft.
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Bellinger is accused of using TDC funds to purchase a home in Destin, according to an OCSO news release.

The $747,000 home is located in the Kelly Plantation neighborhood of Destin and was purchased in August 2011. The Sheriff’s office’s ongoing investigation determined that some of the funds used to purchase the home might have come from BP money funneled to the TDC following the 2010 oil spill.

No doubt he got a great price for an all cash deal and immediate closing … 😈

He must have figured out this was coming, which is probably why he resigned after they found out about the boat, to give him more time to get away.

He left a suicide note for his wife to find.

Update: Mr. Bellinger died of an apparent drug overdose in Pelham, Alabama.

I lost my appreciation of anything that involves large bodies of water after an incident that involved a significant period in an inflatable that was definitely not of my choosing, so my reaction to the purchase of a boat is ‘a hole in the water into which you pour money’.

I know a guy who kept buying larger boats until he reached the point that he had purchased a boat that he could only use a few times a year because that was how often the tide went low enough for him to sail the boat under the bridge over the creek he lived on to get to the bay. He didn’t discover this until after he had purchased the boat and brought it home at the time of one of this tides, and found out afterwards about this problem. He knew when he bought it that it was too wide to put it on the trailer at his house without cutting down a couple of large trees, and about two feet off one side of his house to reach the road. This was however, THE BOAT that he had always wanted.

Apparently, the guy that the county hired to head the Tourist Development Council also has a ‘boat problem’, as the Local Puppy Trainer reports: TDC director resigns after $710,000 yacht purchase

Okaloosa County’s top tourism official stepped down under pressure Tuesday after acknowledging he bought a $710,000 yacht with bed tax money.

Mark Bellinger, who has been the head of the county’s Tourist Development Council since May 2010, told county commissioners he bought the yacht in December to use in a year-long promotional campaign.

County Administrator Jim Curry and the Sheriff’s Office are investigating the purchase.

This guy bought this boat planning on keeping it for a year to use in some tourism promotions. The final promotion involved giving away the boat!

The county is slicing and dicing everything that it does to avoid default, and this guy blows through three-quarters of a million dollars for a boat he intends to give away …

This is your fiscally conservative Republican local government that you keep hearing about, the one that thinks you should run government like a business.