Your Tax Dollars At Work...Against You
I recently wrote about the farce that is Rick Scott's newest bait and switch "tax cut" campaign swing that requires Floridians to be deaf, blind, and stupid in order to buy into it.
Basically, he would have you believe that saving around $43 a year on cellphone bills and such, added to the $25 some of you may have saved on his last gimmick cutting auto tag fees, somehow makes up for everything else he's done to you, like blocking your access to health care, letting big utility companies charge you for imaginary power plants they'll never build, allowing developers and Big Sugar destroy the environment around you and polluting the little water we have left, and letting you foot the bill for countless lawsuits that have sprung up largely due to his hostile takeover of the state at your expense while ignoring Sunshine Laws and any other laws he doesn't care for.
When you do the actual math (also not a strong suit for Scott) that so-called tax cut savings really doesn't exist. As a matter of fact, since I wrote this the other day, Scott found yet another thing to waste your tax dollars on, and even overlooking the money spent, every Floridian should be more than alarmed at why it was spent this way.
Unsurprisingly, I wasn't the only blogger who addressed his tax cut nonsense. Daniel Tilson did as well, and for his trouble, he got a visit from Rick Scott's latest politicized wing of Florida's government: The Florida Department of Law Enforcement. You know, the one where he fired the head who refused to politicize the department, and replaced him with someone who said he would never, ever do that, no sir. I believe his exact words were that he was not hired to be "the governor's boy."
Well, here's what not being "the governor's boy" looks like in reality:
Tilson thought Scott's two-day roll-out of a tax cut calculator in the Capitol last week was so fanciful, he likened it to the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour, a song that contains the lyric: "They're coming to take you away, coming to take you away." The laughing suddenly stopped when a special agent from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's Miami office knocked on the door of Tilson's house in Boca Raton last week to ask him some questions...
..."On March 27, an FDLE analyst from our Fort Myers region came across the blog post, 'Coming to take you away, take you away ... #Rick Scott.' The analyst passed the information on to her supervisor, who forwarded it to FDLE's Miami region. The Miami region asked an FDLE special agent to speak with Mr. Tilson to determine whether the post was merely referending a song or something more."
Swearingen later acknowledged the FDLE may have overreacted (you think?) and questions posed to Rick Scott about the incident received about the same treatment as all other questions he's asked:
Did somebody in Scott's office tip off FDLE to the post and demand that Tilson be investigated?
Scott's office initially wouldn't say. "I would refer you to FDLE," Scott spokeswoman Jackie Schutz said. In a second conversation, she said: "Absolutely not."
Just trust Gov. Orwell, he absolutely would never, ever send the FDLE knocking on the door of a critic. Just as he would never, ever suspend an employee without pay and refer him to a mental health professional for saying "climate change."
For a man who claimed to hate big government, while loving freedom and free speech, I'm not sure how he squares a visit from the FDLE to a blogger's home for the crime of using humor to point out facts, nor all but sending a critic to the funny farm for merely writing the phrase "climate change" down in notes from a meeting.
So you can add the cost of a Big Brother visit from the FDLE to your expenses when you use Scott's tax cut calculator.
Beyond that, you can also ask yourself if you want law enforcement to spend their time and your money going after real criminals rather than potentially intimidating critics of Rick Scott's. Because if that's how the FDLE rolls now, that bill is going to be astronomical.
More to the point, this illustrates just how dangerous it is to politicize law enforcement, which is how Bailygate started in the first place, because the man Scott fired for not doing so recognized that fact.
Every Floridian should be outraged that Scott keeps getting away with this kind of thing, and if they don't stand up and say so, it will only get worse. Scott's given no apologies for quashing people's rights so far, and if you think he won't get bolder in the next few years, you're not paying attention.
