Category — Florida

I mentioned the last minute filing of a Democrat for the special election to fill the state house position that was vacated by the incumbent’s legal problems. Well, Jan Fernald is actually running. I got a call from her phone bank today, the first time I have received a live person political call since I’ve been back in Florida. The Republicans just use robo-calling.

On top of that, I had the TV on while I was working at my Mother’s in hopes of news, and I heard an ad from Allen Boyd, the Blue Dog who represents the neighboring Florida District 2. Allen was trumpeting his vote for the Health Insurance Law. If you click to his official web site, you will see he’s also doing it there. He obviously doesn’t think it’s a negative.

Things are definitely getting strange.

Money magazine has a cheery little article on FHA’s Florida fiasco:

Until the recent downturn, condos generally performed better than the housing market as a whole, agency officials said. Now, however, 28% of the FHA condo loans in Florida are seriously delinquent. In Broward County alone, four in 10 condo owners are behind in their payments.

One reason was the condo building boom earlier in the past decade. Speculators joined homeowners in snapping up luxury apartments in new developments, driving prices sky-high. But when the market collapsed, these investors were among the first to bail out, dragging the entire development down with them.

They are throwing around numbers like 1 in 5 mortgages are in trouble, which coincides with the real 20% unemployment rate in the state. These aren’t the risky mortgages, these are FHA conventional mortgages that were investigated and required proof before they were granted.

A significant portion of the problem in South Florida was caused by the prices being pushed to absurd levels by speculation, gambling, not by demand for housing. This is what happens when housing stops being about sheltering people, and becomes an “investment”.

People can take their “green shoots” BS and use it to fertilize their survival garden.

The Pensacola News Journal says: Florida’s unemployment rate hit a record 12.2 percent in February and likely tops 20 percent when “discouraged workers” who opt for part-time jobs and those who have given up hope of finding work are counted.

The Miami Herald tells us that Floridians’ personal income fell by 2.7 percent from 2008 to 2009, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis said Friday.

Housing and growth are the consistent engines for Florida’s economy, and we are losing residents while having a glut of housing. They don’t know for sure how bad the housing glut is because lenders are keeping some portion of their foreclosures off the market in hopes that prices will go back up. It isn’t going to happen until people have jobs.

The state and local governments are being forced to lay people off, because they can’t “run a deficit” and the GOP refuses to support the Federal stimulus needed to jump start the economy.

The state legislature is messing around with school prayer, and probably new places to hold gun battles. I’m waiting for the bill that makes it legal to shoot people who protest against organized prayer at school functions and authorizes a new license plate to support it. 😈

You would have thought that with all of the rocks that have been turned over in the local political scene lately, and all of the “evil doers” discovered among the political class, as well as the rise of the “Tea Party Movement”, there would have been some changes made by voters.

You would be wrong. The local Republicans selected Matt Gaetz, the son of the current state senator for the area, Don Gaetz. He was the choice of the good ol’ boy network and they awarded him with an obscene amount of money.

The election will be in April, when three-quarters of the current legislative session is over, and there will have to be another election in the Fall. This is absurd and has cost the county a lot of money for these special elections.

We should just select someone at random from the jury pool. It would be a lot cheaper and the individual couldn’t get much worse than what we’ve had in the past.

The same Florida Senate that is advocating cutting the salaries of state employees [who haven’t had a raise in four years, BTW] is pushing to give raises to their staff!

How stupid are these people? They expect those who work for the people of Florida to absorb the inflation of the last four years, and then have their pay cut, but those who work for the part-time legislators deserve a more money‽

It’s at times like these that you see the reason we have term-limited our legislators. The state would be better off if we selected the legislature at random from the jury pool.

The Florida House is just as incompetent: House panel passes proposal for insurance to rise without approval

TALLAHASSEE — A proposal to allow property-insurance companies to raise home-owners rates without regulatory approval passed a House committee Wednesday and was amended to include much of an insurance industry wish list.

Its supporters say the proposal would attract more insurance capital to the state and increase options for consumers. A less-ambitious version passed last year was vetoed by Gov. Charlie Crist, who says he’s still against it.
…

“I fear that you oppose this bill because you have a lack of faith in that free-market system,” said Rep. Ritch Workman, a Melbourne Republican. “A private business will eventually learn when they have charged too much. From the consumer perspective, there are people that would like very much to spend more to get more.”

Mr. Workman wouldn’t know a free market if he fell in it. This is a total waste of time because the insurance companies don’t want to take any risks, and there are risks associated with insuring property in an area that has hurricanes. Mr. Workman is apparently too ignorant to know that risk is the regulator of a market in the absence of actual government imposed rules, and corporations are specifically created to limit risk.

This bill requires people to pay more to get basic insurance, and then pay again for an attorney to actually get the insurance company to pay them what is owed. The only thing that insurance companies pay for are legislators to avoid having to provide what they agree to in their policies.

The Florida Senate has teed up another sound-bite-for-re-election bill: Florida senate wants balanced federal budget.

If the US government actually had a balanced budget, the state of Florida would be in total meltdown. The only way they achieved a balanced budget last year was with the stimulus money from the Feds, and if the Feds can’t run deficits every minor recession will be a nightmare for state governments.

If the IQs get much lower they are going to be required to water the Florida legislature. They provide their own fertilizer.

Backstabbing, that is.

These are Florida state senators, and they have an idea: Senate bill would tie teachers’ pay to students’ performance

Florida Senate Bill 6 is not popular among local teachers, to say the least.

The education reform bill would eliminate existing teacher contracts and replace them with contracts that base more than 50 percent of a teacher’s wages on student achievement.

Only the contracts for Wall Street bankers are safe from government meddling. Contracts negotiated by workers are ignored at will. Let’s see, there couldn’t possibly be a problem tying half of a teacher’s pay to student achievement. I mean, students certainly wouldn’t use that to manipulate teachers, and teachers wouldn’t feel pressure to get creative with the FCAT… No reason to worry at all about all of the A average students coming out of Florida schools unable to read.

This should really help to find teachers to work in the poorer schools in the state. 😈

You could come down and get rowdy, and drink yourself stupid, or you could take advantage of an opportunity to make some money while helping the environment.

The state is just opened an invasive species hunt in the Everglades from today until to April 17.

For a $26 permit you get to take all of the Burmese, Indian, and African rock pythons, green anacondas, and Nile monitor lizards you can find. Local tanners pay between $5 to $10 per foot for the skins, so a single green anaconda could bring in up to $200 [or more in a few cases].

Just think, you could be supplying the leather for Paris Hilton’s next pair of Pradas.

Sure, some of the these reptiles can kill and eat you, but that’s why the state wants them gone.

The Local Puppy Trainer reports that a Democrat enters District 4 state House race

A Democrat has thrown her hat and a monkey wrench into the ring in the special election for the District 4 state House.

Navarre resident Jan Fernald paid her qualifying fee Friday to join the five Republican men campaigning for the job. Friday was the last day to qualify to run.

Because she is a Democrat, Fernald’s entry in the race closes the March 23 primary and extends the special election calendar to April 13, when a general election will be held.

Because of the way the district boundaries were created after the 2000 Census, the party primaries have become the de facto election in many areas of Florida, including the Panhandle. As a result of a lot of pressure the election law was changed so that if the primary will determine the seat, the primary is open, i.e. everyone can vote in it.

That happened in one election cycle following the introduction of the law. After that, magically someone appears to run for the office, so the primary can be closed. I have never heard of Ms Fernald, and so I don’t want anyone to assume that I’m saying that this is anything other than a coincidence that she should decide to run at the last possible date. It’s just another one of those strange coincidences that seems to occur in the Florida electoral system… in every election.

I don’t think so. As predictable as buzzards returning to Hinckley, Ohio, the
Florida House speaker promises no new taxes. He also promised no fee increases. This must mean they have found a new things to call fees.

They used the stimulus money that all good Florida Republican Congresscritters voted against to plug some of the gaping holes in this year’s budget, and that money is gone, so the new budget will be even deeper in the red.

The state depends on the sales tax and property taxes to fund government. They have cut the property tax at the same time the assessed valuation of property is in the tank, and sales tax revenue has fallen over the cliff. There is a real possibility that the population of the state has fallen for the first time anyone can remember, so the census will probably reduce Federal payments.

The state lost millions in its money market fund when Lehman Brothers crashed and burned, and they have been raiding other funds to cover the shortfalls cause by their ill-advised tax policies. All of their fiscal incompetence is going to be on display in this budget and the “free market fairy” is not going to wave a wand and make it better.

One of the first things on the Florida legislature’s agenda is to put off the automatic increase in the unemployment insurance premium that kicked in when the unemployment rate went above 10%. Since they don’t ever want to be accused of raising taxes, the Republicans insert “triggers” into bills, automatic increases that don’t require a vote. Being Republicans, they never imagined that the trigger would actually be pulled.

They have the trigger backwards, but they will never understand why. Republicans have never understood the concept of storing up during good times, so you have the resources you need during bad times. If there is extra revenue in a year, they either spend it or cut another tax. They don’t understand that the fiscally conservative thing to do would be to put it in the “rainy day fund”, so that when hard times hit, they don’t have to make drastic cuts or increase “fees”.

Everyone is probably familiar with the fable, attributed to Aesop, of The Ant and the Grasshopper. Republicans claim to be “Ants”, but that’s absurd on its face. Ants are social creatures who work for the good of their community, while Grasshoppers are only concerned with themselves. Ants are concerned with the future, while Grasshoppers can’t see beyond the current quarter. Ants go about the business of life, while Grasshoppers jump around and make a lot noise. Ants build societies, while Grasshoppers build nothing.

But the US keeps putting on farces.

From the St. Petersburg Times: Suspect in downtown St. Petersburg evacuation is light, flaky and buttery

Dozens of people were evacuated. A street corner was shut down. The bomb squad was called.

More than two hours later, police discovered what the bag contained: a croissant.

The comments were interesting though:

– Dick and Liz Cheney held a new conference to credit the Bush administration policies for keeping us safe from terrorist baked goods. They allege that if we keep following the current administration, we’ll be a nation continually on the defense from attacking bagels and pastries.

– Somewhere Osama Bin Laden is laughing at us all. This dude has us all so scared that we see an abandoned croissant and call the bomb squad. If that doesn’t say the terrorists have won, I don’t know what does.

– Police suspect the French resistance group… Pièce de résistance is responsible.

So far no one has attempted “Hey, it was crescent-shaped, so it was a Muslim plot to test our security.”

Today is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in March. It means that for the next sixty days the residents of the state of Florida have to live in fear of the newest atrocities to be visited on them by the legislature.

This rookie team [term limited, so no one has more than 8 years of experience] of creative writing rejects actually has only one job, the creation of the budget for the next year. Nonetheless, they manage to create havoc in the lives of ordinary people, usually by finding some new location where shooting each other is perfectly legal and reasonable.

As two-thirds of both house are Republicans [they can’t write, but they had some people who were very creative drawing election districts], the minority party in the state, they won’t be raising taxes. No, all of the horrendous increases in costs to the average person will be due to doubling “fees”. Taxes become fees just before the Republicans increase them. For example, the road maintenance tax became a special assessment fee when the county decided to pave the road, instead of just smoothing out the red clay after every rain.

We have major problems in the state and a group of people who are committed to not doing any of the things that might actually fix them, so the result will be a piece of fiction that isn’t just not ready for off-Broadway, it isn’t ready for off the Azores out in the middle of the Atlantic.

Eat your heart out Bulwer-Lytton, the Florida Legislature has been producing the worse fiction in the English language for over a century.