It's just another week in Florida where every day dawns with a new disaster, thanks to Rick Scott. Lately we've been hit with more than our share, which makes it hard to keep up.
First, let's start with a short review on how Scott began his quest to destroy Florida, shall we?
The man who thought he was running against Obama rather than other gubernatorial candidates immediately launched his War On The President, and subsequently his War on Floridians who want health care, which he began while privately fighting against the health care act negotiations and continued long after he was elected and the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare" was passed and signed into law. He claims he's willing to comply with the law now that he has little choice, (big of him) while political hack Attorney General Pam Bondi pretends that Supreme Court decisions she once crowed about mean nothing if she loses them. (Apparently law, and her job description confuses her.)
While losing the health care battle, Scott turned away stimulus money that Florida was due to get for it's planned high speed rail project, like every other modern metropolitan area in the world, because OBAMA! The faux-fiscal Scott claimed it would cost Floridians way too much money, when in fact, after the money went elsewhere, studies showed it would have made a nice profit. Killing a plan that was years in the making also cost the state lots of jobs, which the "Jobs Governor" ignored, also because, again OBAMA! Nope. Governor Koch Scott chose to let Floridians choke on gas fumes while spending the better part of their days in gridlock, while planning to charge them for their trouble in the future by turning them into toll roads. You're welcome.
Those were just the beginning, and a warm up for the future. While the Captain of the Titanic has managed to nick a few smaller icebergs, he's still able to maintain on course aiming for the big one that says 2014 on it. He still has two years to go, and Floridians being unable to impeach him, it's anyone's guess what will be left of Florida by then.
Which brings us to November of this year when Scott and his fellow Republicans did their level best to keep people from voting in the 2012 election, because that was their only feeble chance to help defeat President Obama. Like everything else, Scott failed at this too, but not without mucking up the election process and making the pregnant, hanging, and other various chad species from the 2000 election debacle seem minor by comparison. Unfortunately for Scott and the GOP, voters were so determined to thwart a stolen election that they stayed in line for hours and voted even long after the election was called for Obama. Scott has well earned his spot on the Worst Governors In History list and Floridians showed him those polls aren’t “skewed.”
Scott immediately feigned surprise when the election proved disastrous and pretended he had no clue as to why it did. After officials finally finished counting the votes days later, Scott said he would “sit down with” his Secretary Of State “to look at how we can improve.”
That went down about as well as Scott’s implied ignorance when SOS Ken Detzner doubled down on Scott’s laughable excuse and added several of his own, which you can see here. Under the pretense that Scott will have Detzner “investigate” himself to search for the mysteries behind the voting mess, which everyone already knows to be anything BUT a mystery. It was in fact HB 1355, the 2011 election law Republicans in the legislature pushed through that paved the way for voter suppression. After Democrats and advocates didn't wait around as Scott and Detzner were "pondering" what could have possibly gone wrong, they called for a investigation by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Meanwhile, Keystone Election Cop Detzner has now "dispatched a team of experts" to Miami-Dade to "investigate" which will probably result in pointing the finger at local election officials rather than directly back at himself, Scott, and the responsible lawmakers.
You see, that's how it works here in Florida. It's a pattern.
1. The legislature takes something that's fixed, pens and passes a law to break it.
2. It breaks as expected, causing a mess that falls like dominoes.
3. Scott pretends he's shocked at the result, stomps his feet and demands to know what caused it.
4. Scott appoints a task force composed of the likely suspects to investigate themselves.
5. Investigation shows nothing went wrong, and that he and his GOP buddies are just plain awesome.
6. Taxpayers pay the price of the bad law, while also footing the bill for the "task force."
Sound familiar? Well, it should. It happened with a Scott appointed Stand Your Ground task force, which just weeks ago found little "wrong" with the law and reaffirmed it to be a great law, and "fine as it is." On that task force was the man who wrote the law, with lots of help from ALEC, Dennis Baxley. (Baxley also has his hands in the election law cookie jar, among others, as well.)
Recall also when a task force was appointed to investigate abuse, neglect and deaths in Florida's assisted living facilities in 2011? That investigation, conducted by some who were in the ALF industry themselves found that in spite of "burns, beatings and deaths" in ALF's, what was really needed was less transparency and regulation. In a quote from an advocate on the task force's findings:
“[Providers] are probably doing cartwheels right now,” said Brian Lee, a resident advocate and director of Families for Better Care.
Those are merely recent examples. Even when there's no task force involved, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to spot blatant incompetence resulting from policies and actions from Scott. He works on the behalf of business and special interests, and often appoints to key positions, and then loses, individuals who never should have gotten the job in the first place. Down here we just call that "Tuesday."
No kidding.
Today the most recent example of this? Scott's "jobs czar," the executive director of Scott's Department of Economic Opportunity was forced to resign after only eight months on the job. (The second one to resign amid contention.) The reason for the resignation of Hunting Deutsch, whose agency also distributes unemployment benefits to the jobless in Florida? Well, it seems he was himself collecting unemployment benefits for 91 weeks over a two-year period from 2009 to 2011 when he was traveling in Europe with his wife.
Like I said, it's Tuesday.
Of course, as is often the case, when controversy erupts it's often hard to find the Governor. He either won't comment, or he's not around. So today, on the day when the director of his Department of Economic Opportunity resigns, where is Scott? He's MIA on a so-called three-day "trade mission" to Colombia to bolster economic development with Latin America.
Of course. Where else would he be?
And the vicious circle continues......
