Category — Florida

It is getting to be time to practice for that decennial abstract art competition known as reapportionment. Every ten years, following the publication of the Census, states begin redrawing the lines for their Congressional districts.

The GOP is already practicing with their Redistricting Majority Project, which, of course, doesn’t mean they are planning to win with a pencil what they can’t win with a ballot box. [Yeah, right…]

I have previously highlighted the GOP cartography in Florida, which results in the minority party in the state having 65% of the seats in both houses of the state legislature, and the majority of Florida’s Congresscritters.

Fair Districts Florida has managed to get two amendments on the Florida ballot to address these issues. Amendment 5 deals with state districts, and Amendment 6 deals with Congressional districts. They are simple and straight-forward stating that political considerations should be removed from the process.

As Fred Grimm noted in the Miami Herald the Republicans in the legislature are working on their own amendment to gut what the citizens have proposed.

The current problem in Florida is that most of those who represent the people in the state are elected in party primaries, not in the general election. This results in the party activists having inordinate power in how the state is governed. The majority of voters are locked out of the process because the state has closed primaries.

If you are a Florida voter, you should vote “yes” on Amendments 5 & 6 and tell the politicians to put away their crayons.

Our coast could be polluted even though Florida derives no benefit from the drilling according to MSNBC: Oil rig leak could take 2 weeks to plug

Officials have been trying for days to use the remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to activate a “blowout preventer” aboard the sunken Deepwater Horizon. The preventer is essentially a cutoff valve at the well head.

On Sunday, crews operated a ROV nearly a mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, but were unable to activate the switch.

Those efforts are expected to continue but other options listed by the federal Office of Response and Restoration include:

• “Use an undersea dome to contain leaking oil, rigged by ROVs” — an idea that “has not been tried at this depth before”;
• Drill relief wells to detour the oil and which could then be plugged, a process that “could take several months”;
• Continue aggressive skimming and dispersing of oil on the surface using boat crews.

Oil was oozing slowly toward the coast Monday, endangering hundreds of miles of marshes, barrier islands and white sand beaches in four states from Louisiana to Florida.

The sea life in the Gulf is already stressed by the dead zone off the mouth of the Mississippi, and now it will be attacked by crude oil. Yes, they can disperse it, but it will still kill the lowest level of life in the Gulf, which will impact the entire food chain.

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It’s that time of year again, Spring, when the bull alligators thoughts… uh, actually, when bull ‘gators stop thinking with their brains and control is passed to the other end of their spines. MSNBC reports that a ‘gator came to the door of a Volusia County home.

If they pick up the scent of a female, they will head directly for it, no matter what is in their way. They will go through screens and end up in people’s houses when they would normally avoid people whenever possible. You learn to just stay out of their way and don’t expect anything that is even a reasonable facsimile of rational thought from ‘gators at this time of year.

They have a lot in common with college students on Spring Break.

For a given value of good.

McClatchy reports that the Feds have taken Charlie Crist up on his suggestion: FBI, IRS launch probe of Florida GOP’s credit card expenses

The U.S. attorney’s office in Tallahassee, the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service are all involved in the probe, which grew out of the state investigation into former House Speaker Ray Sansom. He was indicted on criminal charges that he stashed $6 million in the state budget for an airplane hangar for a friend and campaign donor.

In the federal case, Sansom and others could be charged with making false statements on their tax returns and tax evasion.

If someone gave you a lot of grief during an arrest or booking, and they had a lot of cash on them [pimps, dealers, etc.], you always had the option of dropping a dime to the IRS. You had to really not like the prep to do this, because the IRS would assume that the wad of green was the individual’s weekly income, check to see what they had paid in taxes [normally nothing], and then put a tax lien on the individual’s life. It was a brutal thing to do to anyone.

The IRS is going to look at the records and if they determine that the charges were for personal, rather than professional expenses, that will be classified as unreported income. A rock hard rule of taxes: never, ever, under-report your income. You can get fined for over estimating your expenses, but you can go to prison for under reporting income.

IRS proceedings are “administrative”, not “judicial”, as in “Rights? You don’t get no stinking rights!” These proceedings are to determine how guilty you are.

Prior to the crash in Georgia on Monday, Training Squadron 86 had gone over 25 years without an accident, which remains the record.

The Pensacola News Journal reports that the Victims identified in Monday Navy jet crash. Retired Lieutenant Commander Charles McDaniel of Cantonment was the pilot, flying as a contractor. The passengers were: Marine Captain Jason Paynter of Pensacola, Naval Flight Officer instructor, and two students, Marine First Lieutenant Shawn Nice of Levittown, Pennsylvania and Navy Ensign Zachary Eckhart of Orefield, Pennsylvania. They were all assigned to VT-86.

It will take months for the cause of the crash to be established.

The Local Puppy Trainer reports that Mike Huckabee is now a Walton County resident,

Walton is the neighboring county to my East and no doubt he got a great deal on wherever he lives because of the tanking of the local real estate market [or he already had a vacation place, like Karl Rove, and couldn’t unload it.]

The Florida state constitution, like the constitutions of three-quarters of the states, has incorporated the language of the 19^th century Blaine Amendment. The original purpose of the language was to ensure that no public money was used to pay for the “icky Catholic schools”. Since they didn’t want to say “icky Catholic schools”, they said:

“No State shall make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; and no money raised by taxation in any State for the support of public schools, or derived from any public fund therefor, nor any public lands devoted thereto, shall ever be under the control of any religious sect; nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations.”

The sponsor was Republican Congresscritter James G. Blaine, but the initiative was started by Republican President US Grant in a speech to veterans. Grant thought public schools were a good thing and wanted them funded. [Oh, yes, the Catholic immigrants voted for Democrats, but that, of course had nothing to do with this.]

Fast forward to today, and you have Florida Legislature to take up public funds for religious institutions.

The Republican legislature of Florida hates public schools [which has nothing to do with the fact that teachers tend to vote Democratic] and wants everyone to have “choice” with vouchers. Alas, the only viable private schools in the state are religious and the Florida Supreme Court keeps throwing out voucher bills because of the Blaine language. [Which has nothing to do with the fact that the Catholic immigrants in Florida tend to vote Republican.]

It’s nice to know that the legislature has already solved all of the state’s problems and has time to play games… oh, wait, they haven’t solved anything.

The Pensacola News Journal reported that yesterday afternoon an aircraft assigned to NAS crashed in Georgia killing 3 with one still missing. I have been waiting for identification of the crew, but with one still missing, officials will probably wait.

The aircraft was a T-39N Sabreliner assigned to Training Air Wing Six at NAS Pensacola. This was probably the standard low-level navigation training flight that is flown from Pensacola to Tennessee and back. In 2006 another T-39N flying that mission crashed in the same general area of North Georgia near the Tennessee border.

Although the aircraft belongs to a Navy unit, the unit trains personnel for the Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and foreign countries, and has US Air Force instructors.

Update: Ms Fernald lost, but she got over one-third of the votes in a rushed election, with almost no money to spend. She didn’t have a single sign that I’ve seen in Okaloosa County but over 5,500 people turned out to vote for her. Normally Republicans win with around 75% of the vote in this county, so this was a very good showing.

We have a special election tomorrow to fill the seat left vacant when our local Florida house rep got caught with his hand in the “cookie jar” of the state budget to the tune of several million dollars.

We actually seem to have a person who is a self-declared Democrat running, Jan Fernald. Despite her late start, she seems serious about this, and, surprise of all surprises, the Democratic Party of Florida is actually helping out with telephone banks.

She even has a website with an issues page, but she hasn’t used the blog that her host provided with the site.

I will vote, and I will vote for her, not because she is running as a Democrat, but because she: opposes off-shore drilling [for the right reasons, which she clearly states]; supports public education; and thinks the best way to balance the budget is to stop all of the corporate hand-outs.

Her opponent raised more than 80 times as much money as she did, but three-quarters of his money came from outside of the district, while hers all came from local friends and family.

It’s a long shot, but Republicans are so used to the primary being the only election, Ms Fernald could pull off an upset.

During the most of the 1960s the Republican leader of the Senate was Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, and he was worth watching whenever he was on television. “Ev” was good for a quote. When he was in the House he had said “When a member of the House moves over to the Senate, he raises the IQ of both bodies.”

He was a conservative Republican. He supported Joe McCarthy, tried to get a school prayer Constitutional amendment passed, backed the Vietnam War etc., but he also worked to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The thing is, he wasn’t mean spirited. A fiscal conservative people remember a reported aside: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” I remember it as “million”, not “billion”, because in the days of the 15¢ hamburger, a million dollars was “real money”.

I don’t think Senator Dirksen would be pleased with what has been going on in the Republican Party of Florida.

The local paper carries the St. Petersburg Times/Miami Herald story: Sansom staffer rang up $1.3 million on credit card

ST. PETERSBURG — She was a 25-year-old junior staffer when the Florida Republican Party gave her an American Express card.

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The local paper reports that:

Maj. Randell D. Voas and Senior Master Sgt. James B. Lackey, both from the 8th Special Operations Squadron, died when a CV-22 Osprey carrying U.S. forces crashed about seven miles west of Qalat, the capital of Zabul province, according to an Air Force Special Operations Command press release.

Major Voas and SMS Lackey were the squadron’s flight evaluation team, rating pilots and flight engineers on their job performance. They were the primary instructors at the squadron for flight crews. It takes years for people to attain their proficiency.

The local paper reported that a CV- 22 Osprey went down in Afghanistan with four dead:

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — A CV-22 Osprey from Hurlburt Field crashed in southeastern Afghanistan Thursday night, killing three service members and one government contractor.

The Osprey, an Air Force tilt-rotor aircraft that can take off and land as a helicopter, went down about 7 miles from Qalat, the capital of Zabul province, a NATO news release said. It was carrying U.S. forces.

“Numerous other service members” were injured and were taken to a nearby military base for treatment, NATO said.

The aircraft was assigned to the 8th Special Operations Squadron, so the names that will be released tomorrow will probably be of some of my neighbors. The area was getting hyped for the big air show that is part of the Eglin celebration, and now the missing man formation will be inserted.

The Miami Herald reported that Crist requests probe of GOP ‘mess’

TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Charlie Crist asked federal authorities Friday to investigate the Republican Party of Florida amid growing concerns about secret deals and misspent money.

“It’s a mess,” he said. “This thing stinks.”

In an interview, Crist said the U.S. attorney’s office needs to take over the criminal investigation of former Chairman Jim Greer and examine the use of party credit cards by top GOP lawmakers.

“A federal comprehensive investigation is . . . fully appropriate,” the Republican governor said. “Particularly because of the significant IRS implications throughout this thing.”

OK, everyone has been reporting on all of the dubious uses of the RPOF [Republican Party of Florida] credit cards, which looks bad and is embarrassing for individual politicians, but the real problem is Jim Greer’s consulting firm, which Jim neglected to tell people was his firm. That’s where this drifts away from the normal stupidity of politicians with credit cards and access to campaign funds, and enters the domain of the IRS.

Charlie was a major backer of Greer, and this certainly isn’t going to be good for him, but if the RPOF doesn’t clean this mess up, a lot of donors will stop contributing. Charley didn’t have a party credit card, so he was golden on that problem, but Greer’s consulting firm is definitely a negative for Charlie.

It’s time for more popcorn.

The Pensacola News Journal reports that Sneads’ job losses could benefit Santa Rosa:

TALLAHASSEE — Fighting to save the industry that has sustained them for generations, protesters in the tiny North Florida town of Sneads will gather today to rail against a Senate proposal to save $20 million by closing at least one state prison and privatizing others.

Before the state privatizes anything else, I want some proof that it saves money. I want the state to show that it has actually saved tax dollars on anything that has been privatized over a period of five years. They keep doing this and get a small savings the first year or two, but then the costs go up and the quality goes down.

Private companies need to make a profit and the government doesn’t, so I want to see proof that it is cheaper to outsource government functions. I’m getting really tired of hearing that “private industry is more efficient” without any proof to back up the statement.