I’ve had a few phone conversations over the past few days with an old college friend who’s now an attorney in the Miami area. Back in college, he was a Republican, but he’s now utterly terrified of what new Republican Governor Rick Scott is going to do to that state. For those who haven’t followed his illustrious career, Scott is the health care executive who paid a $1.7 billion settlement after his company was found to have been defrauding the government. I can’t even begin to understand how someone like that was able to win a statewide election in any state.
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Oh, but Mr. Scott is a “tea party” Republican. That makes it OK.
He couldn’t be worse than Jeb, ya think?
@1
He could be. He says he wants to run government like a business. I guess that means he’s just going to cut out the middleman and steal from taxpayers more directly.
Floriduh is the white-collar crime capital of the country. You can start an insurance company, run it half-assed for a few years and rake in a couple hundred million, deny most if not all claims and have the State government back you up.
Then you can shut the company down, take your (investors) money and split for the Bahamas with your trophy wife and 40 foot Scarab and live happily ever after. There is no law enforcement organization in the State that will touch you, especially if you contribute to the right political campaigns. Floriduh has no real functioning justice system.
How did the campaign go? Was any emphasis placed on the man’s corruption?
I gotta agree with Deathfrogg for once. Its Florida. Whaddya want?
@4
I’d have to ask my friend how much of the Democratic messaging was focused on his fraud. I’d imagine that would’ve been something to run a commercial about. However, Scott dumped like $70 million of his own money into the campaign and flooded the airwaves with anti-Democratic ads.
Although if there’s a silver lining to Scott’s ascendancy, it’s that he did axe Florida’s stupid drug czar’s office, whose previous director I made fun of in this old Jesus General post. If I trusted that Scott would stop at only eliminating frivolous government agencies like that one, I’d be thrilled. But I doubt that will be the case. In fact, my friend was most concerned about his decision to wrap their state environmental agency into their DOT. One can quite easily imagine the problems with doing that.
“I can’t even begin to understand how someone like that was able to win a statewide election in any state.”
The same way a woman who was the leader of a racist sorority was.
Lee, I’m surprised to see that you haven’t commented on the Redmond New Year’s Eve fire.
Which is why OJ SImpson lived there.
What Rick Scott is going to do in FL is hand out the state’s Medicaid program to the fraudsters.
@8
Why are you surprised? When was the last time I wrote about a local fire? If you’re referring to the speculation about the cause, you may want to wait until the investigation is complete before you make a fool of yourself in the comments here.
@1: Definitely could be. For all that I’m not terribly fond of his brother, Jeb’s relatively moderate and was never likely to totally torpedo his state. I can’t say the same about Scott.
@ 11
why? It’s never stopped him before.
Florida has always been a rather schizophrenic state. Central Florida (including Orlando)and the Northern Panhandle was simply another southern state, with it’s resulting red-state politics. I’ve got relatives in Orlando who’ve been there since the late 1940’s, so I’m familiar with it.
But the transplanted northerners who retired to Florida in the 50’s, 60’s, and into the 70’s made the coastal communities more Democratic. It had some strange consequences – my cousins who grew up in Orlando had slight northern accents, but red-state politics.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve been there, but my understanding is that the working-class retirees no longer immigrate to spend their sunset years in Florida, being scared off by the high prices pre-2008 and the fear of crime.
But Florida has at least one policy which assures that there will always be room for white-collar scallawags who seek to avoid paying judgements for their mis-deeds. It has an unlimited homestead exemption. This means that no matter how expensive your home, it can’t be seized by creditors to pay your debts.
That’s why O.J. Simpson lives in Florida. I understand that Ken Lay was in the process of building a house there, and planned to move there before any judgements could be entered against him.
Someone once said that bankruptcy is a process of taking your wallet out of your shirt pocket and putting it in your pants pocket, shortly before handing the shirt off your back to your creditors. That’s not true for the great majority of consumer bankruptcies, but for the big guys who have a lot to lose, pre-bankruptcy planning is a big business.
Before reforms in the 1960s, the Florida State Legislature did not publish its Bills in advance. A Legislator did not have an opportunity to read the text of a Bill before he voted on it and was completely dependent on the Leadership to tell him how to vote. There were stories of the Leadership sitting down front and whispering “Good Bill” or “Bad Bill” so the others would know how they were supposed to vote..
In many regards, Florida is just another Third World Country.
@11
And it’s a close call between that story and this one for the most horrible news story of the past week.
@16 Let’s stop giving Troll stuff to get his rocks off over, huh?
Florida’s had some money-driven political kinks for a long time. A friend of mine was in the Coast Guard, stationed in Miami during the Reagan years. He and his colleagues were cobbling electronic surveillance gear together out of junk-box parts and stuff from Radio Shack to support the must-ballyhooed drug interdiction program. The Administration had a lot of money budgeted for that, but it wasn’t showing up where the rubber met the road. Between that and the money being laundered by the drug lords, the Federal Reserve Bank Branch in Miami was the only one in the country that was actually solvent. The huge amounts of illicit cash flying around, and the greed and paranoia it elicited among the general populace, made for, shall we say, interesting social dynamics.
It sounds like the tradition of the “law of the jungle” and general practice of playing fast and loose with everything have continued there to the present day.
Sounds like it’s time to play our favorite game: Florida or Germany!
I tend on the most crazy stories to guess Florida. In this case, simple corrupt thieving private sector douche bag not running the government…that’s definitively Florida.