Category — Florida

The Miami Herald reports on another example of unreality: Proposal to expand oversight of Florida’s pension fund is blocked

Sink said having only three elected officials oversee Florida’s pension fund is inadequate — a flaw she said was exposed in the 2007 pension fund “crisis” that led to a temporary freeze on withdrawals from a local government investment pool and resignation of the fund’s executive director.

She proposed expanding the board overseeing the $120 billion fund to include an expert in investments as well as a representative of the more than 1 million beneficiaries, mostly retired employees of state and local government, that rely on the fund’s solvency for a secure retirement.
…

Tom Gallagher, Sink’s predecessor as CFO and a 2006 Republican candidate for governor, appeared at the meeting in the unusual role of a citizen offering testimony. He vehemently opposed Sink’s proposal, saying it would politicize pension fund decisions.

“You shouldn’t be looking for someone else to blame things on,” Gallagher said. “The three of you should take the responsibility you took when you were elected.”

So, adding two people, one with expertise in the matter, and another who is directly concerned with the results, to the decision making process is “politicizing”, whereas, investing billions with an investment company whose CEO is the cousin of a governor from your party, a firm which then hired that governor when he left office, is a reasonable non-political practice?

Gallagher was one of the three people who made the decisions that resulted in the 2007 meltdown because of the investments through Lehman Brothers. He has a lot of damn gall to show up and comment on efforts to clean up the mess he helped to create. I must have missed the deep personal apology Mr. Gallagher made when he took responsibility for what happened 😈

I think it’s finally over, the Fort Walton Beach Christmas Parade. It started at 6:30 and has been going on for two hours. It ends at the town line, but they wonder through my little town.

It has to be a bit of a let down for the Choctawhatchee High School Band. On Thanksgiving they were in the Macy’s parade in New York City, and today the local parade. They are actually a very good band and get invited to a lot of large events as they have won the state competition for schools their size [5A. 6A are the largest schools] four out of the last five years.

As with all parades down here, beads and candy are thrown at the crowds. This sort of behavior was once limited to Mardi Gras, but it now has infested all the parades.

Fortunately I didn’t need to go out for anything, because even though the parade didn’t come through the town, the police re-route all of the traffic, making it impossible to escape.

The Pensacola News Journal ran this story on a local bit of insanity that has made it to the US Supreme Court: Destin homeowners take cases to court

WASHINGTON — Oceanfront landowners in Florida are pressing the Supreme Court to rule that beach replenishment projects unconstitutionally separate them from the sea.

The issue, to be argued before the court on Wednesday, began in 2003 when Stop the Beach Renourishment Inc., a group of five beachfront homeowners in Destin, protested what a replenishment project was doing to their property lines.

Officials with the state Department of Environmental Protection establish unchanging property lines for such projects — at the point where high tide peaked prior to the project — rather than allowing them to shift with the tides.

When sand was added to the beach in Destin, the high-water mark moved farther from the homes, essentially adding 75 more feet of sand between the homes and the water. The angry homeowners demanded compensation for what they said were lower property values.

If the beach isn’t replenished, their houses will cease to exist in a few years as the storm surge from hurricanes erode the beach and the tides come higher and higher.  The financial meltdown affected their property values a good deal more than sand.

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According to the Bradenton Herald: Study: Fla. tax system one of least fair

If you are a Florida resident with low to moderate income, you are paying a disproportionate amount of state and local taxes.

So says a nationwide study of state tax systems that shows Florida has the second worst tax system in the U.S. in regards to fairness.

Florida families in the lowest income group — $10,500 a year — pay an average of 13.5 percent of their income in state and local taxes as compared with families in the highest income group — $2.4 million a year — who pay an average of 2.1 percent of their incomes in taxes. Moderate income people — those making $37,400 a year — pay an average of 9 percent of their income in taxes, according to a report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy based in Washington, D.C.

The Florida sales tax, currently 6%, is designed to tax things that poor people need to buy, while exempting many things that the wealthy buy. Go to a ball game and the common people in the bleachers pay sales tax on their tickets, but not the important people in the sky boxes.

However, as Dan Gelber, Democratic candidate for attorney general, notes Florida is first in the number of public officials charged with corruption, which I’m sure annoys Alabama. [Via Hipparchia]

The Orlando Sentinel says that a Web site names Florida strangest state.

Not surprising when the Orlando Sentinel hosts FloriDUH and the St. Petersburg Times hosts Bizarre Florida, both of which feature the odd news from around the Sunshine State.

It warms my civic pride that a plurality of the stories come from my area. I defy you to find another area with drive by spelling corrections to hate signs.

You may have read about the assault in Tampa, a Marine Reservist attacked a Greek Orthodox priest claiming he thought the priest was a Muslim terrorist.

Sorry, but if you can’t recognize a Greek Orthodox priest after living in Tampa for more than a week, you aren’t quite as bright as mildew.

The Greeks were first drawn to Tarpon Springs, North of Tampa, at the end of the 19^th century to dive for sponges in the Gulf of Mexico, and enough of them went down to Tampa that the government of Greece has a consulate in the city. The governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, is a Greek-American from Tampa. It is rather difficult to miss the Greek festival in the city. Actually, even in cities as small as Fort Walton Beach, there is a Greek Orthodox church.

This guy is trying to convince law enforcement that he seriously thought that Muslim terrorists would dress up like Lawrence of Arabia so everyone would realize who they were. Bruce’s claims are ludicrous:

The man yelled “Allahu Akbar,” Arabic for “God is great,” the same words some witnesses said the Fort Hood shooting suspect uttered last week.

“That’s what they tell you right before they blow you up,” police say Bruce told them.

Having known a few Muslims I can tell you that they use “Allahu Akbar” the same way Christians use “Jesus Christ” – the meaning depends on the context, and whether the exhaust manifold was hot or cold when the wrench slipped…

For years in this area people were lax about hurricane preparation and that has led to some very dangerous moments when storms have struck. People have refused to evacuate from known danger areas when it was safe to to do so, and then expected to be rescued when the storm was exactly as warned, and was tearing their house apart.

Even though Ida has turned out to be a lot less dangerous than first thought, local governments moved to minimize the risks. The Pensacola News Journal covered closures in the West in Panhandle braces for Ida, and the Northwest Florida Daily News covers the East in Businesses, schools, bases close for Ida.

I can guarantee that officials will be receiving flak from people who will feel that all of the closures were unnecessary for Ida. These are the same people who will call to be rescued after they lose their roof and the wind is gusting over 100 mph.

I would also remind locals that if your area is subject to flooding, this is going to be a rain event, if nothing else, and you can expect the local rivers and creeks to rise. Depending on how slowly it moves, we can have severe flooding in the North County.

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies. Groucho Marx

Like good little stenographers, the Pensacola News Journal printed Florida’s Senate Temp’s newsletter. Unfortunately, Temp Lemieux felt compelled to do something so his name would appear on the records of the Senate. He has decided that Medicare fraud is totally out of control according to his unsourced [LeMieux Targets Health Care Fraud estimates?] statistics, so he wants to create a new bureaucrat, “Chief Health Care Fraud Prevention Office – a person within the Department of Health and Human Services whose sole job will be to prevent fraud”.

Real slowly – Fraud is a crime. Crimes are dealt with by the Department of Justice, not the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS is the victim in Medicare fraud. Victims don’t investigate and prosecute crimes as they tend not to be impartial.

If he wants to do something he could push to increase funding for the fraud unit at the US Attorney’s Miami office, as, for some reason, there is an awful lot of Medicare fraud in South Florida. In addition to pursuing existing Medicare fraud cases, the unit is also involved in investigating and prosecuting Charlie Crist’s political donors list, so they are busy and could use the help.

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The same winning team of teabaggers and nine-twelvers that provided the recent entertainment in the 23^rd Congressional district of New York are talking about helping out in the Florida Senate race.

Kendrick Meek would have a very hard slog in the general election against Charlie Crist, so if the TB/9-12 whackos can take Charlie out, Florida might have two Senators who call themselves Democrats.

You have to admit that getting a Democrat elected for the the first time in the area’s history, a history that goes back to the founding of the United States, an area that has voted solid Republican since the Republican Party was founded from the remnants of the Whigs, is quite an accomplishment. After doing that, electing a Democrat to the Senate in Florida should be easy. 😈

Update: Republican Party officials are now saying they won’t be supporting candidates in primaries with any money. While the GOP is hurting in the fund-raising area, I don’t think it is a coincidence that they announced this the day after the mess in NY.

I don’t think so, and neither does he.

The Orlando Sentinel is concerned about Alan’s future:

“I can tell you, I don’t think it plays very well at all,” said Darren Vierday, a Democratic strategist who worked on Grayson’s 2008 campaign. “Moderates will look at it and probably be turned off by it.”

So far, no established Republican has stepped forward to challenge Grayson, who is worth more than $31 million and is likely to tap his own fortune for his 2010 re-election run. A transplanted Miami developer; attorney Todd Long; and two Tea Party activists have declared to run.

“If this [approach to politics] was doing me harm, wouldn’t you see someone jump into this race who has won an election?” asked Grayson, who said he shared leadership qualities with Patrick Henry of the American Revolution.

“I draw the line in the same place where Patrick Henry drew the line — give me liberty or give me death,” Grayson said. “It’s what leadership is all about. It’s articulating the things that everyone believes but no one is saying.”

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The Food and Drug Administration says Gulf of Mexico Oysters Unsafe. That’s true because the incident of Vibrio vulnificus in Gulf waters is higher than ever, due to the water being warmer than ever. The old saying about not eating oysters in months without an “R” is based on the need of Vibrio for warm water.

When you add in the pollution caused by the reduced outflow into the Gulf, the result of lower rainfalls in some areas, and higher water use upstream, the problems increase. Oysters filter the water for their food, so anything in the water will be in the oysters. We aren’t having more red tide blooms every year because the Gulf is healthy. I certainly wouldn’t recommend anyone eat raw oysters other than during the Fall and Winter months.

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CNN has the latest from Florida’s best-known Congresscritter: Rep. Grayson calls Cheney a vampire

NEW YORK (CNN)– Controversial freshman Rep. Alan Grayson, who has become famous for attacking the Republicans’ health care plan, went on the attack again Friday night, calling former Vice President Dick Cheney a vampire for his recent criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of the war in Afghanistan.

Well, that would explain the pallor and the new crypt dungeon basement under Blair House that Dick had built.

You have to wonder where Grayson gets those 1930s ties that he wears, and he really should apologize to Neanderthals for comparing them to Republicans.

The search is still on to find someone to run against Grayson, despite all of the huffing and puffing the FGOP does.

The Northwest Florida Daily News is my local puppy trainer. It is/was part of the now bankrupt Freedom Communications media empire started in Orange County, California to be sure that as many people as possible got a dose of libertarian opinion. The Cato Institute has supplied a lot of editorials to the paper over the years.

Today I read two of their opinion writers and was somewhat taken aback by the hard dose of reality they wrote about.

First there was Del Stone who wrote about Fox News in: Be wary of the ‘fair and balanced’ shtick. Mr. Stone tells of seeing a newscast from Fox News while he was waiting to get his car serviced. He was not a happy camper with what he saw.

Mr. Stone did not believe the news was presented in a “fair and balanced” manner, and went on to point out that there had to be a separation between the news and opinion, noting that columns in the Daily News are clearly labeled as such with the author’s name prominently displayed, and that the news should be an unbiased presentation of the facts.

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The politics blog at the Orlando Sentinel covers the latest source of Republican outrage over Rep. Grayson: apparently he gave out the URI of a web site he had created on the floor of the House, and horror of horrors – it has a link to Grayson’s campaign web site!!!!

The FEC has already passed on the site because Grayson paid for it out of his own checking account, not with campaign cash, but as soon as they figure out what ethics rules have been violated, the Republicans are going to file a complaint, and the Democrats have to immediately condemn Grayson for something.

The web site, Names of the Dead, was set up to record the names of people who have died as a result of a lack of access to health care. It has links to Grayson’s campaign web site, his House web site, his YouTube speeches, the text of HR 3200, and the study that provided the number who die every year because of a lack of access to health care.

I hate to break it to the Republicans, but mentioning the name of a web site on the floor of the House is not exactly an effective path to getting a lot of hits. The link at the Orlando Sentinel will probably generate more traffic. If the Republicans hadn’t had a hissy fit, no one would know it existed.

Update: Congresscritter Grayson has had them remove the link to the campaign web site from the page.