Bi-Party Crist Wont Pick Partner
Florida Governor and one-time leading Senatorial Candidate Charlie Crist is finding that coming out as bi-party is not the cakewalk that he was hoping for - his old friends feel betrayed and confused, his new friends are somewhat fickle, and his enemies are gleeful as he bends and twists to distance himself from the very party whose supporters he must approach if he is to have any chance to win.
Sunday on CNN's State of the Union, Crist declined to answer the caucus question - if elected, will he caucus with Democrats or Republicans? As he has for weeks, he evaded the question by asserting that he will "caucus with the people of Florida." Unfortunately, the people of Florida don't hand out committee assignments.
A few days ago, he tried to go both ways on healthcare. He stated that he would have voted for healthcare reform then he corrected himself and said he would not have voted for the bill. He doesn't like it - not one bit! But since it's already passed and everything, he thinks we should keep it and make it better. Of course, since he wont be sitting on any committees, his opinion may not matter all that much.
And last week in liberal Broward County, he thanked God that he was no longer a Republican then travelled to a much less progressive part of the state and bragged about being a "Jeb Bush Republican."
But even as Chain Gang Charlie repaints himself as a bi-party milquetoast with compassionate leanings who still enjoys the occasional hippie punching, Kendrick Meek and Florida Democrats are gearing up to remind voters of Crist's true preferences:
(Click to listen to wav audio file.)
This is Charlie Crist calling to set the record straight. I'm pro life, I oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants, I support traditional marriage, and I have never supported a new tax or big spending program.
The fact that Meek, a real Democrat, won the party nomination over self funding former Republican Jeff Greene will make life difficult for Crist. Democrats will use the boastful conservative's own words against him again and again and Democratic voters will continue to come home to Meek - Meek presents a clear progressive choice vs. Chain Gang Charlie's newly found wishy washy middle-of-the-roadism.
Meanwhile, Marc Rub's (Marco Rubio has had the vowels removed from the end of his name for conduct unbecoming a Hispanic, per Tampa's La Gaceta newspaper) campaign is hammering Crist as a turncoat and newly enflamed liberal. Crist wont be winning too many votes from this wing of his spurned party.
So far, Crist refuses to pick sides, but he can't win with independents only, his old party still hates him, and Democrats are warming to Meek - Meek is far and away the best candidate on the issues, and he is, in fact, just the kind of "better Democrat" that we need in DC.
Crist's approval ratings are dismal and he is a man without a party. Many observers do not see a way for him to win unless he promises to caucus with the Democrats, but just as he missed his oppurtunity to switch parties and clean Meek's clock in the Dem primary, Crist may again be waiting too long to pick sides.
Teach Your Children Hell? No!
Hillsborough County voters smote the Terry Kemple campaign a death blow on Tuesday. Despite raising more money than any other candidate in the four candidate non-partisan race, Kemple's extreme beliefs and religious agenda may have turned voters off as he barely managed a humiliating third place finish with less than twenty percent of the vote.
SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER DISTRICT 6
383 of 383 Precincts Reporting
Benjamin Fink 11.83% 12,939
April Griffin 48.37% 52,883
Sally A. Harris 20.63% 22,557
Terry Kemple 19.16% 20,953
Incumbent April Griffin garnered close to fifty percent of the vote and will face surprise second place finisher Sally Harris in a runoff in November.
Right Wing Koch Suckers Swallow Wads of Kash
Charles and David Koch are the owners of Koch Industries. They are filthy, rich, and they fund a self-serving "Kochtopus" of organizations designed to destroy progressivism - a shadowy network of Koch Suckers eagerly swallowing all the cash that the Kochs can pump out.
Rachel Maddow has been all over the Koch brothers story, but for the most part, their deliberate strategy of flying well below the radar as they hide behind their proxy advocacy organizations has worked to keep their name out of the limelight.
In a must read in this month's New Yorker, Jane Mayer illuminates some of the Koch brothers greatest hits.
They were born to a wealthy Bircher daddy - a man who made much of his fortune by selling American trade secrets to evil communists - who taught them the basic American value of shirking ones moral duty to repay one's society for having provided the resources which one blatantly exploits in order to make a killing.
Put simply, they are extremely wealthy self-serving libertarians.
Unlike George Soros, who is often villified as the evil trillionaire funder of all things vaguely leftish, the Koch brothers are very secretive about the organizations they fund, and the causes that they champion through these organizations invariably tend to line up perfectly with their personal and corporate economic interests.
All Blockquotes are from
Covert Operations - The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.
by Jane MayerOf course, Democrats give money, too. Their most prominent donor, the financier George Soros, runs a foundation, the Open Society Institute, that has spent as much as a hundred million dollars a year in America. Soros has also made generous private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including Obama’s. But Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued that Soros’s giving is transparent, and that “none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests.” The Kochs have given millions of dollars to nonprofit groups that criticize environmental regulation and support lower taxes for industry. Gus diZerega, the former friend, suggested that the Kochs’ youthful idealism about libertarianism had largely devolved into a rationale for corporate self-interest. He said of Charles, “Perhaps he has confused making money with freedom.”
Freedom rules. Regulations and laws are for losers.
"There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times."
- Charles Lewis, founder of Center for Public Integrity
Koch Industries is a vast conglomerate, the second largest privately held company in the US
...whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars...The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra... Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
And like the best of the classic American capitalists, they even steal from American Indians.
...the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs investigated their business and released a scathing report accusing Koch Oil of “a widespread and sophisticated scheme to steal crude oil from Indians and others through fraudulent mismeasuring.” The Kochs admitted that they had improperly taken thirty-one million dollars’ worth of crude oil, but said that it had been accidental. Charles Koch told committee investigators that oil measurement is “a very uncertain art.”
Koch Industries is a huge polluter. The Kochs spend more than Exxon on Climate Science denialism.
David Koch told New York that he was unconvinced that global warming has been caused by human activity. Even if it has been, he said, the heating of the planet will be beneficial, resulting in longer growing seasons in the Northern Hemisphere. “The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because far greater land area will be available to produce food,” he said.
But mostly they don't speak for themselves - why bother when they can simply create entire organizations to speak for them?
Cato Institute
In 1977, the Kochs provided the funds to launch the nation’s first libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute. According to the Center for Public Integrity, between 1986 and 1993 the Koch family gave eleven million dollars to the institute. Today, Cato has more than a hundred full-time employees, and its experts and policy papers are widely quoted and respected by the mainstream media. It describes itself as nonpartisan, and its scholars have at times been critical of both parties. But it has consistently pushed for corporate tax cuts, reductions in social services, and laissez-faire environmental policies.
Cato is also, of course, big into Climate Change Denial and they pushed Climategate incessantly.
The Mercatus Center
The Mercatus Center at the public George Mason University is a non profit under the Kochs' control.
The Wall Street Journal has called the Mercatus Center “the most important think tank you’ve never heard of,” and noted that fourteen of the twenty-three regulations that President George W. Bush placed on a “hit list” had been suggested first by Mercatus scholars. Fink told the paper that the Kochs have “other means of fighting [their] battles,” and that the Mercatus Center does not actively promote the company’s private interests. But Thomas McGarity, a law professor at the University of Texas, who specializes in environmental issues, told me that “Koch has been constantly in trouble with the E.P.A., and Mercatus has constantly hammered on the agency.” An environmental lawyer who has clashed with the Mercatus Center called it “a means of laundering economic aims.” The lawyer explained the strategy: “You take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank,” which “hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible-seeming studies. But they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests of their funders.”
Triad Management
The Kochs were getting pretty good at screwing with the conventional wisdom. Then they took it to a whole new level.
By 1993, when Bill Clinton became President, Citizens for a Sound Economy had become a prototype for the kind of corporate-backed opposition campaigns that have proliferated during the Obama era. The group waged a successful assault on Clinton’s proposed B.T.U. tax on energy, for instance, running advertisements, staging media events, and targeting opponents. And it mobilized anti-tax rallies outside the Capitol—rallies that NPR described as “designed to strike fear into the hearts of wavering Democrats.” Dan Glickman, a former Democratic congressman from Wichita, who supported the B.T.U. tax, recalled, “I’d been in Congress eighteen years. The Kochs actually engaged against me and funded my opponent. They used a lot of resources and effort—their employees, too.” Glickman suffered a surprise defeat. “I can’t prove it, but I think I was probably their victim,” he said.
The Kochs continued to disperse their money, creating slippery organizations with generic-sounding names, and this made it difficult to ascertain the extent of their influence in Washington. In 1990, Citizens for a Sound Economy created a spinoff group, Citizens for the Environment, which called acid rain and other environmental problems “myths.” When the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigated the matter, it discovered that the spinoff group had “no citizen membership of its own.”
...Triad Management, had paid more than three million dollars for attack ads in twenty-six House races and three Senate races. More than half of the advertising money came from an obscure nonprofit group, the Economic Education Trust... Charles Lewis, of the Center for Public Integrity, described the scandal as “historic. Triad was the first time a major corporation used a cutout”—a front operation—“in a threatening way. Koch Industries was the poster child of a company run amok.”
The Bush years
During the 2000 election campaign, Koch Industries spent some nine hundred thousand dollars to support the candidacies of George W. Bush and other Republicans... The Kochs have cast themselves as deficit hawks, but, according to a study by Media Matters, their companies have benefitted from nearly a hundred million dollars in government contracts since 2000.
Their filthy lucre even taints the halls of the Smithsonian - a prominent Koch sponsored exhibit on the Koch Hall underplays the significance of climate change while compeltely ignoring the possibility that fossil fuels may be a big part of the problem.
Now they are using their Americans for Prosperity front group to sponsor "grassroots" Tea Party events and organizations.
The Republican campaign consultant said of the family’s political activities, “To call them under the radar is an understatement. They are underground!” Another former Koch adviser said, “They’re smart. This right-wing, redneck stuff works for them. They see this as a way to get things done without getting dirty themselves.” Rob Stein, a Democratic political strategist who has studied the conservative movement’s finances, said that the Kochs are “at the epicenter of the anti-Obama movement. But it’s not just about Obama. They would have done the same to Hillary Clinton. They did the same with Bill Clinton. They are out to destroy progressivism.”
Read the whole article . I left out a lot.
Editing The Constitution: Amendment 3
Note: Every 2 years, Florida voters get a chance to literally edit the state constitution, as proposed changes to the actual text of the document are placed on the ballot. This post is part of a continuing series.
Florida's 2010 Amendment 3 can be seen as a legacy of sorts of former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio. The amendment, backed by Charlie Crist, Florida Realtors, and the Florida Chamber of Commerce, could wreak havoc with municipal budgets as it seeks to slash property tax revenue by $1 billion over three years.
As proposed, Amendment 3 offers first-time buyers more equal footing with homeowners, says David Hart, vice president of legislative and governmental Affairs for the Florida Home Builders Association. The proposal calls for a first-year tax break averaging about $500 for a $200,000 home. Benefits would be phased out over five years, with the special exemption ending in year six. Total benefits on that same $200,000 home would be about $1,500.
"We support it because in the case of the additional property tax benefit to first-time buyers, it helps level the playing field with longtime homestead property owners who’ve enjoyed the benefits of Save Our Homes,” Hart said. While the organization has not taken an official vote on the measure, Hart said the group thinks it will motivate buyers and spur housing starts and construction jobs....
Critics of Amendment 3 fear local governments and school districts would suffer the brunt of further property tax breaks under the proposal. If approved, the amendment will cost those local entities about $1 billion in lost revenue over three years, state economists estimate. The amendment is "of great concern to us because we’ve seen funding for schools go down over the last couple of years,” said Mark Pudlow of the Florida Education Association.
Even more alarming is the state’s shift from state funds to local property taxes to pay for schools and at the same time cut property tax revenue, Pudlow added. While schools would lose money from the additional homestead exemption in the proposed amendment, cities, counties and special tax districts would lose property tax revenue from both the new exemption and the 5 percent assessment cap on non-homestead properties.
Marco Rubio got where he is today by jumping on the property tax reform bandwagon back in 2007. That year, as incoming Speaker of the Florida House, Rubio gained national attention as he championed a complex tax swap package that would have increased the regressive state sales tax dramatically while completely eliminating taxes on homesteaded properties.
"I loved him. I absolutely loved him," recalled Margie Patchett, leader of a local antitax group. "I thought, 'This is not your standard politician. This is a man of vision.' "
The scene played across Florida — from Panama City to Spring Hill and Sarasota. Marco Rubio shaped anger over soaring property taxes into the defining mark of his two years as speaker.
Today, the issue has been overlooked as Rubio stands atop the race for U.S. Senate. But that period was the foundation of his success...
Some of the first calls Rubio made after declaring his candidacy for Senate were to contacts he made in 2007. Partly with their help, he won a series of straw polls that represented the beginning of the end of Crist's run as a Republican.
And while most House speakers don't get much attention beyond Tallahassee, Rubio enjoyed widespread exposure because of property taxes. National TV networks visited him in Miami and conservative leaders in Washington talked him up.
"He's the most pro-taxpayer legislative leader in the country," Grover Norquist said at the time...
Rubio's record on property taxes invites questions about his effectiveness. His ideas were big but mostly failed, even though his party controlled the Legislature. In the end, Crist prevailed with a simpler (and less substantial) property tax relief plan...
The day after the Tallahassee rally, the House passed Rubio's tax swap on a mostly party-line vote. That was as far as it would go.
Senate Republicans mocked the plan as a massive tax increase, even though it would have cut a corresponding level of property tax. Some of the richest Florida homeowners would have gotten huge breaks while critics said the poor would be disproportionately hurt by a higher sales tax.
His party controlled both chambers and the Governor's mansion, but Rubio's proposal was rejected in the end in favor of Governor Charlie Crist's plan which was placed on the ballot as Amendment 1 in 2008.
Amendment 1 was passed by the voters in 2008 and in 2009 the now Rubio-less Legislature, again prodded by Crist, jumped back onto the still circling tax reform bandwagon and placed this year's Amendment 3 on the ballot.
But let's back up a bit and take a look at Florida's tax system.
Florida has no state income tax. We rely exclusively on revenue from sales and use taxes and property taxes to fund state and local government.
Since the early 1930's, Florida has had a homestead exemption which essentially declares a certain amount of the value of one's primary home exempt from taxation as long as the homeowner is a permanent resident of the state.
In 1992, voters modified the homestead exemption with the Save Our Homes amendment which capped annual rises in property appraisal values (done for taxation) for homesteaded properties at 3 percent. This was sold as a way to help elderly residents facing increasing tax bills to stay in their homes.
The next major change was Crist's 2008 Amendment 1 which doubled the homestead exemption to $50,000 and also managed to make this homeowner only tax break even more regressive by ensuring that low valued homes would not be entirely exempt - the second half of the $50,000 exemption only applies to the value of a home between $50,000 and $75,000 - meaning that your home must be worth at least $75,000 to qualify for full exemtion. (YES - there are plenty of homes - right in my county! - worth less than $75,000 right now.)
Amendment 1 passed with high expectations amongst voters that their property taxes would be slashed for free. After all, this is how the Republican politicians had sold the measure to the people.
In actuality, homeowners enjoyed modest savings while Amendment 1 combined with falling property values to decimate municipal budgets which rely almost exclusively on property taxes for funding.
So in 2009, as cities and counties throughout the state were facing layoffs and hard budget choices, firing teachers, closing schools and libraries, cutting back on police and fire protection, the GOP Legislature and Republican Governor Crist did exactly what everyone expected them to do by placing yet another property tax relief measure on the ballot.
Amendment 3 would give a homestead exemption to first time buyers, eliminating the current waiting period. The measure would also halve the 10 percent yearly cap on appraisal values for all non-homesteaded properties, including businesses and rental properties.
Needless to say, the resulting loss of revenue (estimated at $1 billion over three years) will further cripple already weakened local budgets. If Amendment 3 passes, look forward to more municipal layoffs and cutbacks in services.
Florida constitutional amendments require a 60 percent super majority to pass, so there is a high threshold right off the bat, but Amendment 3 has some powerful backers, including the Florida Realtors, who are happy for any potential lifeline for the foundering real estate market.
Republican conservative anti-tax Governor Charlie Crist fought hard to get this measure through the Legislature in the closing days of the 2009 session. Since that time, however, we haven't heard a whole lot about Amendment 3.
Will independent left-leaning Senatorial candidate Charlie Crist continue to fight for this tax cut that many unions and other progressive organizations oppose? Do the Florida Realtors and Florida Chamber actually care enough at this point to wage a campaign in favor of this measure?
Interestingly, Florida Tax Watch, a group that often fights in favor of tax cuts, has recently withdrawn its tepid support for Amendment 3, and, in fact, for property assessment caps altogether, which could give folks like Crist plenty of cover to flip on the issue.
Now, a new constitutional amendment, Amendment 3, will appear on the ballot in November and if approved, reduce that 10 percent limitation to 5 percent, potentially crippling Florida’s economic future, the TaxWatch report says. It compares that scenario to being similar to the way that Proposition 13 has contributed to the near bankrupting of California.
In the end, TaxWatch said the more stringent assessment limitations outlined in Amendment 3 would:
• Lower tax revenues for local government
• Lower municipal bond credit ratings
• Impede local governments that are hamstrung in adapting to economic conditions
• Create greater reliance on other types of taxes and an unnecessarily complicated system for taxpayers
• Reduce real estate transaction activity
• Reduce jobs and compensation for transaction facilitators
• Become an impediment to a vibrant economy
With luck, Amendment 3 will fail to garner 60 percent of the vote and will thus be disappeared, but with a title that will be the most prominent feature on its ballot line yelling "PROPERTY TAX LIMIT...," many voters may have a very hard time suppressing the anti-tax impulses which have been ingrained through years of conditioning and will vote for Amendment 3 without ever making a conscious decision to do so.
I think it's likely that Rubio will come out strong for Amendment 3 - he has no choice. Crist will flip flop, siding with Florida Tax Watch, and no one, not even the hard core Dems on Daily Kos, will care what Kendrick Meek thinks, because we really don't need a real Dem on the ballot come November as long as we have Charlie Crist to fawn over.
Stay tuned.
Teach Your Children Hell: Kemple Leads School Board Money Chase
A divorced family man who believes that teachers should have the academic freedom to bring God into the classroom but that they should never, ever, be allowed to mention the theory of contraception, is vying to fill one of the 7 positions on the Hillsborough County School Board, a group which is responsible for overseeing the 11th largest School District in the US.
District 6 candidate Terry Kemple was born to dirty fucking hippie parents and quickly fell prey to the evil secular elements of society - a society which forced him to choose to make himself a slave!
He continues...
And asks:
By the early 1980's, Kemple had evolved into a weak, drunken godless shell of a human being, but his pickled brain nonetheless made him a legend in his mind as he purposelessly motored the Northeast on boozy two-wheeled excursions, occasionally threatening his minor offspring with "a ride to Pennsylvania."
Kemple reinvented himself in the mid '80s. He was an alcoholic, divorced, separated from his daughters for 10 years. He would come by on his motorcycle to see the kids in Connecticut. He would say crazy things like, "Let's take a ride to Pennsylvania."...
In 1986, Kemple paid a visit to his oldest brother, Morry, headmaster of a Christian school in Jacksonville. He went to a tent revival on Sunday with Morry's family.
The star speaker was Tim Lee, the famous evangelist who had lost both his legs in Vietnam. Like Kemple, Lee had been rebellious, godless....
In the revival tent, Kemple felt overwhelmed. Tim Lee had lost his legs. He had lost his children. He went back that night to hear Lee tell the story again.
Kemple told brother Morry he wanted to change. Morry urged him to get started. "Find a church that preaches the Bible." Kemple lived just a few blocks from Bell Shoals Baptist Church. First thing he did was join the Bible class for singles.
First, Kemple leveraged Bible verses to convince his new church lady girlfriend to get a divorce. Then they married and Terry leveraged his shiny new Jesus-loving family-man cred to take on some of the most pressing issues of our times.
He has made the protection of children his mission. He has hosted sexual abstinence rallies for thousands of teenagers, lobbied for right-to-life laws, declared war on lap dancing. He cruises Christian Web sites. He collects evidence of God's banishment from classrooms, of pornographers' subversion of the First Amendment.
Kemple articulates an absolutist view — that homosexuals are stealing children from Christians by indoctrinating the young to gay lifestyles. He calls it the "homosexual agenda." Gay marriages pose the biggest threat of all.
Recently, Kemple has fought to give teachers the Academic Freedom to refute the Darwinist lies that are taught as "Biology," and he was a big part of the successful Florida campaign to deny the homosexuals their perverted marriage agenda item. Oh, and he wants kids to be taught abstinence only. In elementary school AND in college.
And how does that play out in the arena of sex education in public schools?
One of the things that's mentioned most frequently in the Bible is sexual immorality and how we are supposed to refrain from it. Much of the education that our kids get today... encourages them to become sexually involved at earlier and earlier ages....I'm old enough to remember when we weren't encouraged to have sex in school, and we didn't have sex.
So are you saying that schools are encouraging kids to have sex?
Yes....
So then I don't suppose you would agree with the proposed legislation called the Healthy Teens Act that would require school districts to emphasize abstinence while teaching students how to protect themselves from disease and pregnancy?
No....
So you're advocating abstinence only sex education for college students?
Why not? We need to turn that group around and give them some inducement not to be sexually active.
I'm not actually old enough to remember when we didn't have sex. If I ever do get that old, I hope that someone will shoot me.
The District 6 race is crowded, but only the top 2 vote getters in the 4-way non-partisan primary will advance to the November ballot. Incumbent April Griffin, backed by unions and other progressive groups, should be favored, but Kemple's church connections are proving to be lucrative.
Challenger Terry Kemple jumped to an early lead in campaign contributions, reporting $16,100 in April compared to $3,024 for incumbent April Griffin.
Griffin, 41, of Temple Terrace, is seeking her second term on the board and said she will report about $16,000 in contributions by the next deadline. Her donors include Iron Workers Local 397, the Hillsborough County Agricultural PAC, and retired principal Manuel Duran.
...Kemple, 63, of Brandon, president of the Christian-based Community Issues Council, said he has benefitted from the generosity of friends at church and in the community.
Kemple expects to report a total of $27,000 in contributions by the July 23 deadline.
Fifty-three of Kemple's 63 contributions are for $100 or more, and 20 are for $500 or more.
He received $300 from Orlando personal injury attorney John Stemberger, president of the conservative Florida Family Policy Council, whose interests tend to attract campaign money and votes, political analysts say.
Other top Kemple contributors include Bart Azzarelli of Dallas 1 Construction and Development in Thonotosassa; Mary Ott Wood of Plant City, president of Florida West Coast Credit Union; and 411 Communications of Tampa, a consulting firm whose clients have included Attorney General Bill McCollum and former U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez.
Griffin and Kemple will probably advance to the next round to face each other in November when Kemple's experience as an organizer combined with his notoriety and fundraising prowess among the local fundamentalist crowd could be enough to propel him to victory in a race that is off of most voters' radars.
He certainly has a fundraising advantage right now, and he seems to be going out of his way to appear reasonable to low knowledge voters - his official website is useless if you want to know anything about him. Luckily, some person has put together something a little more informative than the official Terry Kemple site.
But more important than making fun of him is supporting incumbent April Griffin.
The other side has been very successful in organizing to win local down ballot races such as this one for School Board. They know how important these positions really are, and they are praying to win.
Spread the word about Terry Kemple: make sure voters in November know who they they are voting for and what their candidate stands for. Kemple's fundamentalist machine is going to turn out for him. We have to turn out voters for April Griffin.
Support April Griffin for Hillsborough County School Board District 6.
And click through to this site to learn a lot more about Terry Kemple.
Editing The Constitution – Developing News
Note: The Florida Constitution series of posts is officially veering slightly off course with this post on developing news. However, upcoming posts on all the individual amendments are still planned. Stay tuned.
In Florida we saw major developments this week regarding constitutional amendments on this year's ballot. A gubernatorial candidate has sued to block the disbursement of funds under Florida's constitutional public financing system. Meanwhile, a judge kicked a misleading legislative initiative off the ballot while arguments were being made in court regarding two other amendments. Finally, a special legislative session has been scheduled to add an amendment to the ballot to ban oil drilling off of Florida's coasts.
Public Financing Challenged
Florida's sickly public campaign finance system is on its least legs, with a legislative amendment on November's ballot expected to deliver the final blow and end all public campaign financing in Florida.
In 1998, voters enshrined into the constitution a bare bones public financing system for some statewide offices. Unfortunately, despite the will of the voters, the system never gained much legislative support and now the Legislature is tired of spending perfectly good public money to help candidates compete when it’s stunningly obvious to everyone that raising private cash from corporations and wealthy influence peddlers or just outright buying the election for oneself is teh shit.
Unfortunately, the program that Jeb Bush referred to as “welfare for politicians” is probably doomed. The system is so broken and full of loopholes that it does little to help underfunded candidates compete, and the tide of special interest and corporate money has been rising in Florida just like elsewhere despite the public system.
There is absolutely no uprising in opposition to this bill, and with even public campaign financing stalwarts like Common Cause singing the death knell of the current system, this may be the last year for public financing in Florida.
But a funny thing happened on the way to amending the constitution: Self-funded and now front-running gubernatorial wannabuy Rick Scott has decided that even the moribund and half-hearted system that is currently in place is too much to bear during this election cycle and he wants it all gone. Now.
The provision lets traditional candidates such as McCollum get tax dollars to subsidize their campaigns when they are being vastly outspent by independently wealthy candidates like Scott.
Scott must agree to limit his campaign expenditures to $24.9-million in the primary or else the state will give McCollum $1 for every dollar Scott spends over the cap. As Scott inches ever closer to that total, his lawsuit argues that the cap is a violation of his First Amendment rights because it restricts his free speech by benefiting his opponents' speech.
"The (U.S.) Supreme Court has concluded that a Legislature cannot enact laws that provide benefits to a candidate's opponents triggered by the candidate's exercise of the right to use funds for campaign speech," the suit says.
"The Supreme Court has also consistently concluded that restrictions on a candidate's ability to spend his own funds, or funds raised from others, cannot be justified either by the government's interest in reducing corruption or … equalizing the relative financial resources of candidates."
Scott sued the Secretary of State, a state agency, and the case has political implications beyond the lawsuit itself. It literally could put McCollum, the state's chief legal officer, on the defensive, because the attorney general routinely represents state agencies in court.
The legal action also highlights how McCollum is seeking help from taxpayers to fortify his campaign at a time when he is calling for fiscal austerity, budget cuts and a two-year freeze on local property tax increases on the campaign trail.
Scott wants an expedited hearing and a court injunction to block McCollum and the leading Democratic candidate for governor, Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, from getting state matching money. The checks are scheduled to start flowing July 23.
That last bit is really important. Scott may or may not be able to stay under the cap that automatically triggers state matching funds, but he's more concerned with having to spend his personal funds to offset the state money that many candidates, including Democratic gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink, will get in a couple of weeks.
Scott told reporters he planned to limit his overall spending to keep from handing McCollum the matching money. "I believe we'll be within that limit," he said – though he also said he'd raise money for a so-called 527 group whose spending won't count against the cap.
But another part of the law gives public money directly to candidates, based on the number of Floridians who gave $250 or less since last September. For gubernatorial candidates, there's a two-for-one match of the first $150,000 in those contributions and a dollar-for-dollar match above that until the spending cap is reached. In 2006, candidate Charlie Crist collected more than $3.3 million in public funds.
That's the money set to be distributed on July 23 regardless of any caps, and all the eligible campaigns are counting on it. Rick Scott wont benefit from these funds and wants the possible lifeline yanked from both McCollum and Sink.
Amendment 7 Fail
If you've been following my still in progress series on Florida's Constitutional Amendments this week, you may have noticed that we haven't yet touched on the dueling redistricting amendments including the legislative initiative dubbed Amendment 7.
You read right: dueling amendments. 3 ballot positions. At dawn. Tuesday, November 2 2010.
Amendment 7 is a legislative initiative designed to undo the 2 citizen initiatives amendments 5 and 6 that immediately precede it on the ballot.
All three amendments deal with redistricting. Amendments 5 and 6 reached the ballot via petition and include language that the Florida Supreme Court has already signed off on. These amendments aim to bring a little fairness and sanity to the process of drawing political districts.
Our present system permits politicians to choose their voters instead of voters having a fair chance to choose their representatives. Legislators use sophisticated computers, voter registration data and past election returns to predict how particular voters will vote in the future. Then they choose which voters are most likely to vote for them and their party and place just enough of those voters in "safe" districts -- ones they are sure they can win. Those in charge also pack large numbers of unfavorable voters in into a few districts so the unfriendly voters will have a chance to win in fewer districts.
Each district is rigged to accomplish a particular result. Districts are set up to be either Democratic or Republican and opposing party candidates do not have a chance. Only 7% of Florida’s legislative elections are really competitive. Voters do not have a real choice in selecting their representatives because the elections are rigged before they even start.
The Republican led Florida Legislature, known for neither fairness nor sanity, but being pretty good at dirty tricks designed to thwart the will of the people, threw together Amendment 7 which is deceptively designed to sound benign while ripping the guts out of the Fair Districts initiatives.
Luckily for the people, the fairly insane dirty tricksters that slapped Amendment 7 together are not very good at actually writing amendments that conform to the law which states that each initiative must cover only a single subject and that it must contain a clear ballot summary.
A judge on Thursday struck down the Legislature's proposed constitutional amendment concerning political districts because, he said, it is too confusing for voters to understand.
Amendment 7 was drafted by the Republican-led Legislature in response to two other proposed amendments that a liberal-leaning citizens group placed on the ballot to make it tougher for lawmakers to draw political districts that favor a political party or an incumbent.
But the Legislature's proposal -- which lawmakers said would ``clarify'' the amendments of the Fair Districts Florida group -- created far more confusion, Tallahassee Circuit Judge James Shelfer said in a ruling from the bench.
``I can hardly think that the average voter going in the voting booth would be able to make an informed decision,'' Shelfer said. ``It took me three days -- in reading all of these cases, reading all of these briefings, hearing all of your arguments -- to get a handle on what this amendment did and its effect on the existing laws and the Constitution.''
A written ruling by Shelfer is expecting in the next few days. The case will likely be appealed to the state Supreme Court.
One paragraph from Amendment 7 stood out as being particularly complicated. It says ``the state shall take into consideration the ability of racial and language minorities to participate in the political process and elect candidates of their choice, and communities of common interest other than political parties may be respected and promoted, both without subordination to any other provision of this article.''
In a word, Amendment 7 was ``gobbledygook,'' said Ron Meyer, an attorney who argued against the Legislature's plan on behalf of the NAACP, which supported the Fair Districts proposals.
Plaintiffs say they will appeal and try to get Amendment 7 back on the ballot. Meanwhile, a challenge to Amendments 5 and 6 brought by lawmakers, including a Democrat, who fear running in Fair Districts is getting under way.
Attorneys for the Legislature, losers in their effort to protect their proposed amendment in court earlier in the day, were back later Thursday before a different judge, arguing that the other two amendments also should come off . They argued that the Supreme Court’s OK of the amendments for the ballot – which must precede any citizen-backed initiative going to the voters – was merely advisory and didn’t take into account any factual arguments over what the amendment might do.
But the Florida Department of State, joined by FairDistricts.org and former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, who intervened in the case, argued that there has never been a case where a circuit court has overruled the Supreme Court's consent to place a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot.
And in another twist, rumors are flying that a deal is in the works between the GOP Legislature (unfair and unsane) and No Party Charlie Crist (late to the party, but recently out of the closet as an open supporter of Fair Districts) to put an amended Amendment 7 back on the ballot in exchange for allowing Crist's drilling amendment a spot.
Oil Drilling Amendment?
No Party Governor and Senate Candidate Chrlie Crist first raised the possibility of a special session to consider placing an amendment on the ballot to ban drilling off of Florida's coasts in May. Now he has exercised his constitutional powers and called the Legislature into session specifically to consider his proposal.
Crist, who is running as an independent candidate for the U.S. Senate, took the unusual step of invoking his power as governor to unilaterally call lawmakers into a four-day special session on July 20-23.
Normally, governors call special sessions after reaching an agreement with legislative leaders on the agenda. But facing an Aug. 4 deadline to get the amendment on November ballot, Crist decided to act on his own after being ignored by House leaders.
And now the political calculations begin on who will win or lose if lawmakers reject or accept the governor's ultimatum. The outcome of the session could impact fall elections, ranging from the Senate race to the governor and Cabinet races to the legislative races.
The measure needs to pass both houses with 60 percent to earn a spot on the ballot, and although many Republicans hate the idea of a constitutional ban, right now, with the Gulf turning into a cesspool, not too many politicians are willing to commit to voting against it.
House leaders are generally cool to adding a proposed constitutional amendment banning drilling to the ballot. They point out that Florida law already bans drilling in state waters. They call the governor's move a political stunt.
``It's not productive to talk about re-banning something that's already illegal,'' said Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Republican from Fort Walton Beach.
But lawmakers also know that banning drilling is a political slam-dunk in an election year with images of oiled pelicans, tar balls and empty beachfront hotels on voters' minds.
``I congratulate the governor for at least giving the members a chance to vote on it before Election Day,'' said Sen. Dennis Jones, a Seminole Republican who supports Crist's independent bid for the U.S. Senate. ``That way, the general public will have a sense of where their representative stands.''
A ``no'' vote poses a political risk to Republicans whose districts include sugar-white sand on the Panhandle, fragile estuaries on the Nature Coast or South Florida beaches vulnerable to the loop current.
Most of those lawmakers said they would vote for a ban or are leaning toward it.
Developing.
Editing the Constitution: Amendment 1
Note: This week Over the next week or two I'll spend several days and diaries discussing the constitutional amendment process in Florida as well as the specific amendments that are on the November ballot this year. The first part of the series is here.
On Monday we learned how the Florida constitution can be amended and that the amendment process usually takes the form of a citizen initiative or a Legislative initiative.
Today, we'll look at one of the Legislative initiatives on the ballot this year. Amendment One has been introduced by the Legislature to do away with Florida's public campaign finance system.
As we learned yesterday, Florida's constitution is constantly morphing as new amendments are passed by voters and edited into the original text. We also saw some examples of the Legislature introducing amendments specifically to undo earlier, often progressive changes mandated by voters.
This year's Amendment One is just such an animal. In 1998, voters enshrined into the constitution a bare bones public financing system for some statewide offices. Unfortunately, despite the will of the voters, the system never gained much legislative support and now the Legislature is tired of spending perfectly good public money to help candidates compete when it's stunningly obvious to everyone that raising private cash from corporations and wealthy influence peddlers or just outright buying the election for oneself is teh shit.
Unfortunately, the program that Jeb Bush referred to as "welfare for politicians" is probably doomed. The system is so broken and full of loopholes that it does little to help underfunded candidates compete, and the tide of special interest and corporate money has been rising in Florida just like elsewhere despite the public system.
There is absolutely no uprising in opposition to this bill, and with even public campaign financing stalwarts like Common Cause singing the death knell of the current system, this may be the last year for public financing in Florida.
“The campaign finance law really has become so messed up, the question is whether we should even try to save it,” said Ben Wilcox, a board member with Common Cause Florida, which has long supported the state public finance system.
“The system has been so manipulated, it doesn’t look much like it was intended to look,” he added.
...
since its earliest days, the public finance system has been gamed by lawmakers, its supporters say.The most dramatic move came five years ago, when the Republican-controlled Legislature nearly tripled spending limits for those running for governor -- raising the spending roof to where this year, candidates can spend as much as $24.9 million and still qualify for taxpayer money.
Spending limits for Cabinet candidates also were raised fivefold that year, from $2 million.
The spending caps were bumped skyward in 2005 in anticipation of a freespending battle in the governor’s race – beginning with a costly GOP primary between now-Gov. Charlie Crist and rival Tom Gallagher.
Eventually, Crist pocketed more than $3.3 million in public funds, while also spending $20 million in the governor’s race. He also drew at least that much financial support from the Florida Republican Party.
Party backing didn’t count toward the spending cap. And having the party cover campaign expenses and air television ads was among the first means candidates used to sidestep spending limits.
The rise of 527 groups in this year’s Republican primary has further blurred the role of spending limits. Such shadowy organizations, named for the section of the IRS code that governs them, can raise and spend unlimited amounts to influence an election – usually through TV ads aimed at tearing down an opponent.
Ironically, Republican Gubernatorial candidate and House Impeachment Manager Bill McCollum, an ardent opponent of public campaign financing, may be one of the last politicians to ever benefit from the system, as his floundering campaign is about to receive a gift in the form of matching contributions from the state. He needs every penny he can scrape together - his self-financing opponent has unlimited funds.
I'm certainly not going to shed any tears for McCollum, but it's apparent that whether Amendment 1 passes or not that the financing system in Florida is already really broken. McCollum's opponent Rick Scott is attempting to buy the GOP Governor's race, and Jeff Greene is trying to do the same in the Democratic Senate primary, and both of them may prevail due solely to the vast amounts of cash they are spending.
Amendment 1 aims to tear down the last vestiges of a crippled and broken down system. Public financing has been defanged and declawed and essentially left for dead for years. November's vote will be the public execution.
Editing the Constitution
Florida's constitution is truly an evolving document. Every two years, amendments are proposed and and those that pass muster with Florida voters are edited into the text of the original document rather than just being tacked on at the end.
The current version of our state constitution is full of seamless and not so seamless examples of good, bad and meh amendments that have been incorporated into the constitution over the years. Pregnant pigs, pregnant minors, a minimum wage and fishing nets are just a few of the subjects addressed in the constitution thanks to the amendment process.
There are five ways to put amendments to the Florida constitution on the ballot, but three are rarely used: two seperate commissions that meet every twenty years, and the Constitutional Convention process which must be initiated by the voters.
The two other methods, the legislative and citizen initiative processes, are fairly common and typically produce a bunch of measures for voters to consider every couple of years.
The citizen initiative is a petition gathering process and can sometimes result in popular measures that are maddeningly progressive in the eyes of our conservative GOP Legislature.
The Legislative initiative is typically crafted with the help of lobbyists in back rooms and can be designed with ulterior motives in mind.
Sometimes, especially in the past few cycles, the Legislature has been known to respond to successful citizen initiatives with amendments that aim to change or cancel out completely the citizens' efforts.
In 2000, Two years after Jeb Bush was elected Governor, citizens proposed and passed a High Speed Rail amendment, enshrining the forward thinking concept into the constitution and legally locking the Legislature and Governor into action.
But Bush and the GOP dominated Legislature failed to fund the rail project as they placed their own anti-rail amendment in the ballot in 2004 and they managed to convince the voters to cancel out the previous measure.
Similarly, class size is still being debated. Citizens passed an amendment in 2002 mandating specific teacher to student ratios in public schools. The Legislature has been trying to get it watered down for years, and this year another Legislative initiative is on the ballot which aims to change the way heads are counted in the classrooms, thus weakening the original amendment.
So the pattern is becoming clear: first, the citizens propose an amendment which passes with majority support. Then the politicians respond by seeking to water down or completely do away with the citizen mandate. But just undoing amendments wasn't enough for the Legislature.
Between class size and high speed rail and some other mandates from the voters, including language protecting pregnant pigs from the worst abuses of corporate farming, the Governor and Legislature, as well as the powerful business interests that backed them, were starting to feel a little lack of control. So in 2006, as well as pushing amendments to undo the amendments they didn't like, they managed to get a super majority requirement amendment into the constitution.
That's right: stung by repeated voter demands to address important issues, Florida's leaders talked the voters into making it harder for the voters to speak out. From now on, all amendments to the Florida constitution would require a sixty percent majority to pass.
Which pretty much brings us up to date. As things currently stand, voters this year will have three citizen sponsored initiatives and six legislative initiatives to vote on, several of which are designed to dilute or cancel current or past citizen efforts.
All of which is fodder for several more posts this week. Stay tuned.
Happy 4th! You Have 21 Days Left to Fix Your Voter Status
Florida voters face a July 26 registration deadline for primary races. A new website from the Florida Division of Elections allows us to check on our status quickly and easily:
ACTION: Check your voter registration status right now. (Florida Voters only)
Voter roll purges and database cleanups can wipe people off the rolls wrongly. It's important to check your status before the July 26 registration deadline for primary races so that you can fix any problems.
Florida is a closed primary state, so a voter must be registered as a Dem or Republican by July 26 to participate in a party's primary - Independent voters cannot vote for primary candidates in most cases. The one situation in which a party primary is thrown open is when all of the candidates in a race are of the same party and therefore the primry will determine the winner of the general. But that very rarely happens.
Anyway, register by July 26 for the primary and by October 4 for the general election this year.
Absentee / Vote by mail
A few years ago, with paperless touchscreen machines the norm in Florida, voting absentee was the preferred method for those who were concerned about a paper trail. But the paper trail problem was fixed when Florida mandated a scanned paper system for all ballots cast.
That's good news and that means that you can vote early in person with a paper trail and not have to worry about your absentee ballot being disqualified or lost in the mail. Now if you still prefer to vote absentee, you can request ballots for the upcoming elections via this link, and you don't have to be out of the country or anything on election day - you can use absentee voting as a convenient vote by mail system if you like - but early voting is how I roll.
Early voting in Florida begins 15 days before the election and ends the second day before the election. County Elections Supervisors are required to have their offices open for early voting and may optionally utilize libraries and city halls as additional early voting sites.
Voters may vote in person by casting a ballot prior to election day. The voter will use the same type of voting equipment that is used at the polls on election day. Early voting begins 15 days before an election and ends on the 2nd day before an election. During this period, early voting is conducted 8 hours per day on each weekday and for 8 hours in the aggregate for each weekend. Supervisors of Elections designate early voting sites 30 days prior to an election. Early voting will be offered in the main or branch office of the Supervisor of Elections. They may also designate any city hall or public library geographically located so that all voters in the county will have an equal opportunity to cast a vote. Contact your Supervisor of Elections for dates, times and locations in your county.
When you sign in at an Early Voting location, your custom ballot based on your precinct will be printed for you, you will fill in the bubbles - like on a multiple choice test - with your voting preferences, and your ballot will be scanned with the results saved for future tabulation. Best of all, your ballot is securely stored for use in a real paper recount should one become necessary.
You can find your early voting locations at this link (PDF) or at your local County Elections site.
And, of course, you can still vote the traditional way on Tuesday, August 24 in person at your precinct. However, if you experience any problems or snafus, you will be up against a hard deadline to get things straightened out, and your vote may not count in the end. And if you've already voted early, you can spend the traditional election day getting out the vote for your favorite candidates.
Check your status.
Vote Early.
Volunteer - with Florida Dems or your favorite candidate.
No Longer Beating a Dead Horse
I give up - there's really no reason to rally behind the only real Democrat in the Democratic primary race. No Party Charlie Crist is with us on everything except what he's not with us on and that's good enough for me, so the primary is officially moot.
Look, I will always like Kendrick - he's such a nice guy! But his campaign is teh suck. It lacks visibility and support, and Meek is not a gifted orator, and he's not as cool and popular as Charlie, so it's over. I can not vote for Kendrick. I am going to invite Crist into my life.
Some say we need work hard to elect better Democrats. Balderdash. I used to be in that camp, but I have seen the light - a halo, actually, just behind Crist's head.
I don't care if we have a real Democrat on the general election ballot in November. I don't need a chance to vote for a candidate who stands for my values.
I am going to vote for Charlie Crist come hell or oily water. What could possibly go wrong?
To this point, Charlie Crist has been nimbly avoiding the literal gusher of indictments and arrests and trials and IRS audits and FBI investigations and lavish credit card spending sprees and, well, just about everything bad that's been happening to the Florida GOP. So I'm betting that none of those scandals will touch him, and I'm absolutely certain that no new bombshell revelation will pop up that might affect his general election chances.
In fact, I have such faith in Crist that I'm betting everything I have.
Of course, I'm not worried that after the Democratic primary Crist will realize that I now have no leverage over him - that I've already placed my bet and that I will have no recourse were he to kick me in the face. I don't need a plan 'B'. I'm positive that Crist is different. He wont hurt me. Honest.
And by backing Crist now I can absolutely guarantee that Marco Rubio will not win the election.
After all, there's no way that anything that no one could have predicted could possibly have come to pass by the time I cast my ballot for Charlie Crist in November.
So I see no reason to even pay any attention to the Democratic primary much less back a candidate just because his values line up nicely with mine and the rich carpetbagger he's running against is a real schmuck. This would be a waste of my valuable time and it really does not matter one iota who the Democratic nominee is because I am going to vote for Charlie Crist.
What could possibly go wrong?
Kendrick Meek could really use our help, but none of us like him anymore, so just don't bother.