The Florida Progressive Coalition is looking to come up with a list of all the progressive environmental groups in Florida. What we are looking for is the name of the organization and contact information (e-mail and/or phone number). If they have a web site of some sort, that would be useful, too. We’ll be adding your responses to the wiki. Thanks.
(See also Part 1)
The Florida Progressive Coalition is looking to come up with a list of all the labor unions in Florida. What we are looking for is the name of the organization and contact information (e-mail and/or phone number). If they have a web site of some sort, that would be useful, too. We are basically trying to list all unions active in the state, although if there are any right-wing anti-worker unions out there, we don’t really care to add them to the list. We’ll be adding your responses to the wiki. Thanks.
This is the first in a series of posts to explain what we are attempting to do with the Florida Progressive Coalition. Subsequent posts will follow in the next few days.
Florida is a blue state. Yes, I know that our governor is a Republican, the legislature is controlled by Republicans, our congressional delegation is dominated by Republicans and one of our two senators is a Republican. But there are more Floridians registered as Democrats. And on the issues, there is no doubt that Floridians are significantly more liberal than conservative. I’ve posted about this before, but the evidence is quite clear. When given a chance to vote on the issues, Floridians vote in the more progressive direction almost always.
So what’s the problem? If Floridians are more progressive, then why are our politicians Republicans? There are several reasons for this, today I’ll talk about the first.
Any examination of Florida would show you that there are many hard-working, committed, knowledgeable and energetic activists. A closer look would show you that most of these activists are working independently or in small groups and doing very little to work together toward fixing Florida’s problems. And there seems to be an over-emphasis on national issues and politicians to the detriment and ignorance of what’s happening in the Sunshine State.
But national and state issues are intricately linked, especially in Florida, and any successful attempt at influencing national issues will start at the local and state level. But if our activists aren’t working together, it can’t be done.
So, part one of the Florida Progressive Coalition’s plan to improve our state and country and fight the right-wing that is attempting to destroy both is to get the groups and individuals in Florida working together. We’re working on a comprehensive list of all statewide and local organizations working to move our state in a more progressive direction. Once we complete the list, we’ll work on getting those groups in contact with each other and working together on the issues. If we are separate, we all lose on the issues, if we work together, very little we individually find important is contradictory, so we can combine our efforts and we’ll all be successful.
The first step is communication. We want each of the groups across the state to let us know what is important to them. We want them to tell us what issues they’re working on. We want them to provide us with information for our Wiki and post to our blog. No one knows more about the issues that the groups devoted to them. And we want to widen their audience and get them to be the audience for other progressive groups, too. You don’t have to be a Floridian to help us out, either. We accpet help from anyone interested in moving Florida in a more progressive direction.
You can help us out. Go to the list of Florida Progressive Organizations, take a look around, and add any groups we don’t already have listed. If all you can add is the name of the group, that helps, but if you can do more, we’re looking for contact information for each group, particularly e-mail addresses of current members and leaders. We’ll contact them. And if you are a member or leader of one of these groups, please contact us. We want your expertise and we want your ear. Whoever you are, whatever issue you think is important, we agree. Help us convince others of the same. We’re already working on it. You should be, too.
If you are interested in helping out, leave a comment or send me an e-mail at quinnelk@hotmail.com. I’ll be in touch with you as soon as possible.
I’m going to make a suggestion that most of the readers of this post should take to heart, if you are interested in blogging. Unless you are a big-time blogger, get a job with a big-time blogger or major media outlet or have some kind of national-level expertise or connections, you shouldn’t spend all your time blogging about national issues. Why not? Read on.
1. It’s been done: If you don’t fit into one of the above categories, then, in all likelihood, someone else is blogging on the same issues you are and they are probably doing it better than you can. Unless you area really good writer, then they are almost definitely doing it better than you can. The blogosphere is a crowded place and it is really crowded at the top, where there are a lot of blogs handling national issues. Sure, it is still possible to break through by blogging about national issues, but it is unlikely.
2. You’re needed elsewhere: Your country needs you to blog about state and local issues. Why? In all likelihood, there are few people covering politics in your state in an in-depth manner. You can fill that void (see below for pointers on how to do it). National elections are won at the state and local level. State and local voters are more likely to vote for candidates they can meet and talk to and more likely to vote for candidates that address state and local issues. This is where you can have an impact. If you focus your effort at the lower levels, you have a shot of influencing policy and elections.
3. You’ll have more success and fame elsewhere: I’m not sure that blogging is really the place for you if you are into success and fame, but if you are going to get these things out of blogging, then you need to do something that no one (or few others) are doing. This isn’t in the realm of national politics. Maybe international, but not national. And definitely at the state and local level. There just isn’t much being done in most states, there is no competition. There is a demand and a market, but little competition. How better to make a name for yourself.
So, how to do it? Most states have tons of bloggers, but relatively few of them blog about state and local issues. I took a quick look at the 113 blogs in Florida I’ve identified as progressive, liberal or moderate. Only 28 of them featured a top post that dealt with state or local politics and was written this year. Only 57 had any Florida politics-related posts on their front page.
Why not? I think the main reason is that people lack the knowledge and expertise. So what you have to do is learn. Go to your state government site and read up on how government works in your state. Go to your state’s major newspapers and read articles about the state. Go to the blogs in your state — be they progressive, moderate or conservative; be they independent, sponsored by an interest group or party or set up by a major media outlet. There are a number of sites that list blogs by state, but you can blogs just by typing the name of your state or city and the word “blog.” You can’t learn it all in one day or one week, but if you reed a bit here and a bit there, you’ll eventually know more than nearly anyone else in your state. It really isn’t that hard.
What to blog about? There’s a lot:
1. State and local officials: Who are they, what do they believe, what have they done, what are they doing.
2. Republicans and conservatives: If you think the national Republicans and conservatives are nuts, you should see the state and local people.
3. Policy: What policies are being pursued in your state, what policies have recently passed, what policies need to be revisited?
4. Activism: Whose doing what in your state, how are they doing it, how can others help out?
5. Personal experience: What have you done that has impacted the state and politics and policy in your area?
6. National issues and politics: How do national issues and officials influence and affect your state and city?
7. Issues: What issues, policy-related or not, are important to you and others in your state?
8. What else?: There could be many other things that could be useful to blog about, what are they? (Leave them in comments)
I’m going to take up this challenge (I’ve already started at flaprogressives.org and my site as well as cross-posting to FLA Politics). Are you going to do it? We need you.
Whoever’s running the Federal Bureau of Prisons needs to step it up a notch. Tallahassee isn’t the type of place that needs deadly shoot-outs. If they’re hiring guards (6 of them!), who are trading drugs, alcohol and money for sex for two years, somebody in Human Resources isn’t doing their background checks too well.
Want to know the root of many of the social problems that plague Florida? Look no further than a high school graduation rate of only 58%. Thanks to a educational system that is underfunded, constantly attacked by the governor and the Republican legislature and that is burdened (by the same people) with an unweildy and inaccurate “testing” regime, we have amongst the worst education systems in the country. Personally, I can vouch for this as a teacher of college freshmen. The students I see, for the most part, are interested in learning and put forth quite a bit of effort, yet they lack the background in things like the English language (and I’m talking about the American-born students, not immigrants) and reading, writing and critical thinking skills that one needs to do well in college or to do well in life. And these are the college students. What’s happening to the 42% of our students who aren’t even graduating high school?
This is bad in every possible way. It hurts our economy — dropouts make poor workers, generally — and they get poor pay. It hurts our crime rates — droputs are more likely to commit crimes and more likely to be the victims of crimes. It hurts our health care, our taxes, our social programs, our state budget, our tourism industry, our drug abuse rates, etc. The long-term costs of having such a high rate of dropouts — all of which are borne by us taxpayers — are much higher than the costs of devoting the money to schools that would alleviate the dropout problem. Preventive solutions are always cheaper in the long run and they are always more likely to be successful.
And let’s not forget that this educational problem is racist in its outcomes. The graduation rate for African-Americans is only 42% and Hispanics 54%. Is it because these groups aren’t as smart? Of course not, it’s because they are more likely to start out in poverty and lacking in the skills one needs to succeed in school. That is a societal problem and it requires a societal solution.
Florida’s Republican government is bankrupting Florida’s future. What are you going to do about it?
Another video, one that might make a decent, low-key recruiting tool for the Florida Progressive Coalition. This one is hosted on YouTube, too, run through their not-very-good Flash transcode and compression utility, but it looks a little better than the last one because I “gamed” their transcode system a little this time:
The *big* point here is that almost anyone with a camcorder and cheap editing software can now make video editorials. I’m no great actor or speaker. If *I* can do it, so can you. I’ve been working on using AVI and the Xvid codec as my video delivery platform, and I finally have a method that gives better quality than Flash without using any more bandwidth. I’ll put out more information about this delivery system and how to use it after I make some more “test” videos to make sure everything works properly in all popular PC operating systems.
It’s a video. And as the first I posted to YouTube, it was sort of an experiment. The sound synch got messed up in their crummy trancode utility, but so it goes.
And here’s a link to how members of the House of Representatives voted on Net Neutrality. You might want to consider voting against those who voted against Net Neutrality — and even think about donating money or time to their opponenets’ campaigns.
First up, a nice analysis of a couple editorials probably culled from company press releases:
Two separate editorials from DC newspapers both oppose net neutrality efforts — and yet, both seem to be filled with outright lies or misleading half-truths. As we’ve said repeatedly, the real issue with net neutrality is that there isn’t enough competition in the broadband space. If there were real competition, network neutrality wouldn’t even be on the table for discussion. The Washington Post tries to get by this point by claiming that there is real competition in the broadband space, stating that 60% of all zip codes have four or more choices. Of course, reading that language, you can tell immediately that it’s coming from the FCC’s discredited broadband penetration numbers. The FCC counts on a per zip code basis — so if a broadband provider offers broadband to a single house in that zip code, the entire zip code is considered covered by that provider. The General Accounting Office’s own study found much, much lower broadband penetration than the FCC numbers suggest. Laying wires should represent a natural monopoly. It simply doesn’t make economic sense to lay too many identical sets of wires (it would be like building many competing, privately owned, highway systems: it’s wasteful) — which is why the government went around and granted many of these firms monopoly rights of way in the first place, with the promise of creating competition within the network, rather than between networks. more…
Also, Josh Marshall, as he is wont to do, is compiling a list of Senators who are firmly for, against, on the fence and “finger in the wind” on the matter. It just so happens that Florida’s pair are both testing the air.
Luckily, they have phone numbers:
Mel Martinez:
Washington:
United States Senate
Hart 317 Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Main: (202) 224-3041
Fax: (202) 228-5171
Bill Nelson:
Washington, D.C. Office
United States Senate
716 Senate Hart Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: 202-224-5274
Fax: 202-228-2183
For my first post to say hello — and learn how to use this interface — I thought I would tell you a true life story.
It was almost thirty years ago, but I once knew Charlie Christ — Florida’s Attorney General and presumptive GOoPer candidate for governor. If you look at Charlie Christ’s bio, you will see where he boasts being “Student Body Vice President” at Florida State. He was indeed — for like a month. What he did in his tenure in that job was not particularly memorable. What is interesting is how he got that job.
When I say I “knew” Charlie Christ, that is perhaps a little strong. I was acquainted with him. The folks I knew were some very interesting friends of his. These friends gave me my first good look at who runs the Republican Party. You’ve heard of Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, the late Lee Atwater, and any number of other hacks. They’re the tip of the iceberg — the most successful of a vast number of trained Republican cadres. Those trained cadres include a very “Rovesque” individual, who back in the late seventies, was a political operator in student politics at Florida State — a popular place for these jokers to cut their political teeth. His name is Doug Guetzloe, and you can hear him in the Orlando area on WAMT 1190 weekdays between 11 and noon.
You can also use Google to read up on him, including stuff like this. If you think you will get a good dose of the kind of corrupt shenanigans we are used to from Republican hacks, you’re right. This particular link, for instance, includes an allegation that Guetzloe’s political endorsements are for sale. I obviously can’t vouch for the truth of that allegation, but it sure does sound familiar. Guetzloe has been pulling the same kind of crap for thirty years.
I met Guetzloe when I arrived at Florida State as a freshman, and was looking to get involved with student government. As it turned out, student government at Florida State was no small deal. The student senate was authorized to allocate an annual budget from student services fees. At 2 million dollars, that budget was more than chump change — and being a student senator, or Student Body.President meant that you had some genuine power. As it happens, Guetzloe was the Student Body Vice President. So when I was looking to get involved, I wound up in his office. Eventually, I won a spot on the ballot for the upcoming Student Senate elections — Basic Studies seat six. Like most of Guetzloe’s crew that election, I did not win.
Before I showed up that fall of 1977, Guetzloe was allied with a guy who is now a Democratic State Senator, named Steve Geller. Guetzloe and Geller had formed something called the “Smile Party,” a couple of years earlier — “parties” at FSU were organized on a strictly ad hoc basis. Notwithstanding Guetzloe’s College Republican credentials, the “Smile Party” could fairly be categorized as a “left of center” organization. The “right of center” would be the political party that represented the so-called “Greeks” — frat boys and their sorority sisters. We’re talking good old fashioned “elite versus rabble” politics. Guetzloe and Geller were the leaders of the “rabble.”
For reasons I was never privy to, Geller split off from Guetzloe — whose “Smile Party” was now known as the “Florida Student Party.” Geller formed the “United Seminoles Party” who put up a slate of candidates against Guetzloe’s crew — including me — and also the “Action Party” who represented the frat boys. Geller won a plurality, the Action Party held its own, and Guetzloe’s FSP was sucking gas, winning just eight seats in a roughly 50 seat senate.
Are you bored yet? Stick with me. Now it gets good. You see, Geller’s splinter party was interpreted by Guetzloe as a “stab in the back” — which Guetzloe probably deserved, but as I say, I was never privy to those events. Being the Macchiavellian GOoPer cadre that Guetzloe was, he proceded to “get even.” Here’s how he did it.
The “hegemonic faction” — Gramsci meets FSU student government — of Geller’s USP was the group that ran the “Center for Participant Education” or “CPE” as it was known. This crew was something that is almost extinct these days. These guys were hard core, “Viva Fidel” radicals. Among this coterie, for example, was a guy named Jeff Rooney, who headed something called the “Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade,” who were Stalinists — no shit. There were also Trotskyites, Maoists, Leninists and who knows what else. Geller was not of that radical stripe, but he did include them as in his successful coalition. So they became the target of Guetzloe’s wrath.
Regardless of their genuinely radical politics, the Center for Participant Education was perhaps the single most worthwhile program funded by the Student Senate. It billed itself as a “free university” — a “folk school” of sorts, where anybody at all could offer a class in any subject at all. They had all kinds of stuff, from leftwing “teach ins,” to martial arts classes, to seminars in Zen Buddhism, and yes, some rightwing stuff, too, including classes by the “Campus Crusade For Christ.” As I said, they got their funding from those Student Services fees, allocated by the Student Senate, and controlled by the — you guessed it — Student Body President. At the time, that would have been one Greg Girard, who pretty much served as Guetzloe’s “face man.” Think “Dubya and Cheney” and you’ve got the picture — though to be fair to Girard, he was not a dumbass like Dubya. On the other hand, he was malleable, and pretty much did whatever Guetzloe told him to do.
In this case, Guetzloe told Girard to “freeze” the funding for CPE — an act of political retribution, plain and simple. Then he set out to replace CPE’s Board of Directors with his own hacks. He even put together an “astroturf” organization to go around and drum up support for this high handed exercise in “payback” for Geller’s betrayal. Oh yeah, he used everything in the current GOoPer playbook — which is where he learned it, and shows you just how long these jokers have been refining their hardball politics. I was actually the “point man” for the “astroturf” organization — something I mildly regret, but not too much. After all, this experience is how I learned so much about how these bastards operate.
CPE being an extraordinarily popular program, with hundreds of classes, and thousands of satisfied customers, this little exercise in applied Macchiavelli went over like a turd in a punch bowl. The Board of Directors was not replaced, and eventually, with the intervention of one of the University’s vice presidents, their funding was restored. As for Girard and Guetzloe, they actually faced a petition for recall — which successfully gathered enough signatures. In fact, it gathered enough votes to turn these two out of office — except of course for one last maneuver. Greg Girard resigned, and Guetzloe took over as Student Body President. Since Girard was no longer President, and Guetzloe no longer Vice President, there was no recall election that applied to the right people in the right offices — or at least, that was the argument that slowed the wheels down enough for Guetzloe to walk out of office on his feet. Before he left, Guetzloe appointed a Vice President to take over the office he had just vacated on his way up — if “up” is the right word.
That appointed Vice President was Charlie Christ.
A key procedural vote provided a huge victory June 8 for those who oppose estate tax repeal.
The vote on a motion to proceed with consideration of estate tax repeal, which required 60 Senators to agree, failed 57-41.
Florida’s Bill Nelson was one of the renegade Democrats who voted for the motion to proceed. He is a longtime proponent of abolishing the tax.
The vote today affirms that the Senate will not pass full repeal of the estate tax. However, those seeking to make changes to the estate tax are expected to continue to work on proposals short of full repeal that could be brought up later this year. So the debate will continue …
See an earlier 13th juror previous post about the estate tax here.
Some background you should know: Eighteen families – including the owners of Wal-Mart – that stand to save $71.6 billion in taxes are financing lobbying efforts to repeal the estate tax. Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy said the families perpetrated a fraud on ordinary Americans by saying the levy constitutes an unfair “death tax.” Only about 0.25 percent of Americans who die this year will leave an estate large enough to be taxed, the groups said.
Read the Seattle Post-Intelligencer report here. (Thanks to What’s Wrong with Orlando Politics for the link.)
In Florida, fewer than 2% of the people who died in 2004 were subject to the estate tax. Check out the Citizens for Tax Justice analysis of IRS data, broken down by state, here.
Cross-posted from the 13th juror.
This is a bad idea, particularly since the Bush family is going to need some revisionist history down the road to teach people that Jeb wasn’t a moron and George W. wasn’t the worst president in history:
And just last week, in an unprecedented move, the president’s brother approved a law barring revisionist history in Florida public schools. “The history of the United States shall be taught as genuine history and shall not follow the revisionist or postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth,” declares Florida’s Education Omnibus Bill, signed by Gov. Jeb Bush. “American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed.”
Now, I don’t truthfully see how this can pass First Amendment muster, since it violates the right to free speech. That being said, it is a dumb, ignorant thing to do. Speaking as a professional historian (and echoing the article), history doesn’t work this way. There is no simple “genuine” history that is “factual” and not “constructed.” There is no historical event, not even one from yesterday, wherein we know for 100% what happened. Everyone who ever lived and recorded something had biases or made mistakes or lied, etc. Everyone constructs “facts” to support their own biases and ideology and religion, etc. Who is to say what the simple objective facts are? That being said, we can study what happened in the past — from varying accounts, documents, photos, video, etc. — and come to a conclusion about what is most likely to be true. Now don’t confuse me with a postmodernist — I’m certainly not — I do believe that an objective truth is out there and we can discover a lot of it, but there just isn’t a way to get 100% of the information on a particular event, person, or historical movement. It just can’t be done. So how do we figure out which version of history is the right one? Is it only the one Jeb and the Republicans approve of? Fuck that. I’m a teacher in Florida and there is absolutely no way I’m obeying this law under any circumstances.
The whole thing is a straw man anyway, since I’ve yet to meet any history teachers who believe that postmodernism is correct. If it were, there would be no point in studying anything, so one wouldn’t do it (except maybe in literature and art).
…then don’t run. This is a much, much more important issue than gay marriage bans or flag burning. It goes to the very heart of our country. If we can’t trust our elections, then nothing else matters.
The latest sign that Republicans have an election-year strategy to shut down voter registration drives comes from Ohio. As the state gears up for a very competitive election season this fall, its secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell, has put in place “emergency” regulations that could hit voter registration workers with criminal penalties for perfectly legitimate registration practices. The rules are so draconian they could shut down registration drives in Ohio.
Mr. Blackwell, who also happens to be the Republican candidate for governor this year, has a history of this sort of behavior. In 2004, he instructed county boards of elections to reject any registrations on paper of less than 80-pound stock — about the thickness of a postcard. His order was almost certainly illegal, and he retracted it after he came under intense criticism. It was, however, in place long enough to get some registrations tossed out.
This year, Mr. Blackwell’s office has issued rules and materials that appear to require that paid registration workers, and perhaps even volunteers, personally take the forms they collect to an election office. Organizations that run registration drives generally have the people who register voters bring the forms back to supervisors, who can then review them for errors. Under Mr. Blackwell’s edict, everyone involved could be committing a crime. Mr. Blackwell’s rules also appear to prohibit people who register voters from sending the forms in by mail. That rule itself may violate federal elections law.
Mr. Blackwell’s rules are interpretations of a law the Republican-controlled Ohio Legislature passed recently. Another of the nation’s most famous swing states, Florida, has been the scene of similar consternation and confusion since it recently enacted a law that is so harsh that the Florida League of Women Voters announced that it was stopping all voter registration efforts for the first time in 67 years.
Florida’s Legislature, like Ohio’s, is controlled by Republicans. Throughout American history both parties have shown a willingness to try to use election law to get results they might otherwise not win at the polls. But right now it is clearly the Republicans who believe they have an interest in keeping the voter base small. Mr. Blackwell and other politicians who insist on making it harder to vote never say, of course, that they are worried that get-out-the-vote drives will bring too many poor and minority voters into the system. They say that they want to reduce fraud. However, there is virtually no evidence that registration drives are leading to fraud at the polls.
Note that last line — “virtually no evidence” — the fraud line is bullshit just like almost everything else conservatives say is bullshit. It’s a lie to cover their asses so they can stop Democratic voters from voting. Pure and simple. Illegal, immoral and un-American. That’s the Republican Party for you.
If you are interested in the issue of growth management (particularly in Florida), you should check out the new blog How Shall We Grow? which doesn’t just blog about the issue, the organization behind it is getting out into the community and doing something about it.
Planting Liberally has a great idea:
If you live in a major metropolitan area, chances are that there’s a large transient population – students, young professionals, living-out-of-a-hotel consultants, etc. This population is a significant challenge to local political organizations: they’re not likely to be interested in local politics, they’re probably too busy getting settled to get involved in politics, and even if they do join your group, they’re likely to leave town in the not-too-distant future.
Local political groups and affiliated organizations can turn this challenge into an opportunity by writing guides to their city from a liberal perspective. Such a guide will not only welcome newcomers to the city, but will have many tangible benefits for the groups who put it together.
There is more, go read.
I think this can only benefit Florida — from cultural diverstiy to elections, it is good:
For more than a decade, Puerto Ricans have slowly moved from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt. And nowhere is the change more noticeable than in Florida, which has supplanted New Jersey as the No. 2 state for mainland Puerto Ricans, behind New York. The number of Puerto Ricans in Florida was estimated at 656,300 in 2004, the latest year available, up 165 percent since 1990.
We don’t have to worry about working on the governor’s race, it’s already been decided by a higher power:
The Rev. O’Neal Dozier said that before the dream he did not know Crist, nor had Crist made known his plans to run for governor.
“The Lord Jesus spoke to me and he said ‘There’s something I want you to know,’” said Dozier, pastor of the Worldwide Christian Center in Pompano Beach. “‘Charlie Crist will be the next governor of the state of Florida.’”
Since then, Dozier has spent time with Crist and talked with him at length about policy. He told the group that Crist would be uncompromising in his Christian faith.
The scariest thing about this is that Crist actually met with this insane person to “discuss” policy.
In a way, you have to admire Katherine Harris. She’s tenacious to a fault, which is a quality that I am sure is admirable in most circumstances. As a matter of fact, I’m really glad she is such a scrappy fighter because it pretty much guarantees that Bill Nelson will win re-election to the Senate from Florida. The Republicans who are so desperate to find someone else to run against him have pretty much run out of options.
House Speaker Allan Bense rejected the high-level push from the White House, the governor and their political network Wednesday and decided not to enter the U.S. Senate race, leaving U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris the lone Republican.And he handed his party a mess to mend.
Bense told Gov. Jeb Bush and others Wednesday that he preferred to head home to Panama City rather than seek the Republican nomination to challenge U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson in November — despite warnings this week from Bush that Harris “can’t win” and pledges from Bush-family backers to send Bense money and support.
“It was a great time to do some soul-searching and figure out what I’m going to do when I grow up, but I decided that the U.S. Senate was not something I could do right now,” said Bense.
Bush said he was disappointed and agreed to support Harris, but suggested she still may not be the nominee. “I’m going to support the Republican nominee, if she is the nominee,” Bush said. “Sure. If there’s no one else filing, she will get the support of all God-fearing Republicans.”
Republicans have little time left before Friday’s filing deadline to find a challenger to Harris or get behind her campaign.
Some Republicans say Harris’ campaign, already wracked with trouble, now becomes more vulnerable after the public spectacle of Bush and others courting someone to run against her.
You can almost hear Jeb and the rest of the party cringing as the Harris campaign shoulders on in spite of the gaffes, blunders, a massive exodus of staff, and now a link to the same defense contractor who bribed Randy “Duke” Cunningham, the Republican congressman from California who is now the bitch of Cellblock D.
Harris, in a statement, tried to steer clear of continued doubts about her candidacy and said she was focused on beating Nelson, whom she again branded as a “liberal.” But at the same time, Harris said she would be an “independent voice,” giving at least a hint that she was prepared to forge ahead without the blessing of top Republicans.“Former Sen. Zell Miller [of Georgia] once said, it’s not what team you’re on that is important, it’s what side you’re on that matters,” Harris’ statement said. “I couldn’t agree more, and plan to cast every vote as a United States senator with the philosophy that I will always be on the side of Floridians and our nation, first and foremost.”
Yeah…quoting Zell Miller, the man who once challenged Chris Matthews to a duel on live TV, pretty much guarantees her the vote of the moderate and independent voters that make up the bulk of the undecideds in Florida.
In a related campaign note, Jeb’s big brother is pushing his sibling to go into the family business. Frankly, if the standard set by his brother is any guide, Jeb couldn’t do any worse as president, and in objective terms, Jeb has not been a disaster as governor of Florida, which means he didn’t blow up anything. (That’s not to say I would ever, ever vote for him in any other race.) If he is the smart one in the family, he’ll retire to Star Island and live off the generous FRS pension I’m paying into.
As for Ms. Harris, I hope she keeps on bravely. As the immortal Leo McGarry once said, “If you’re going to hit the wall, do it running full-speed.”
Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.
It used to be that racists in America were open and obvious about their feelings. From slavery to lynching, there was little fear of openly admitting that you hated black people — or worse — beating, raping or killing them. For the most part that has changed.
Racism hasn’t changed much, at least not in the percentage of people who are racist. I’m sure it has declined some — particularly if you go back far enough in history — but no major change in the quantity, even if the quality has changed. Nowdays, people just hide it until they are in the right country. Like the time back in 1993 or 1994 when I was filling in as a bartender at my aunt’s country bar and some large white patron proceeded to tell me that “niggers” were the root of everything that was wrong in our country. And that’s no exaggeration, he literally said “everything.” And when I didn’t openly agree, he nearly ripped my head off.
Luckily, guys like that are few and far between these days. But racists have found ways to continue their racism in less obvious ways. Take two recent cases from Florida. First up is the horribly sad tale of Martin Lee Anderson.
Anderson was a 14-year-old boy who was arrested for joyriding in his grandmother’s car. He was sentenced to time in a Florida “boot camp” for juvenile offenders. On his first day at the camp, he was forced to do extensive physical training. He then collapsed. As many as eight adult guards, almost all of them white, then proceeded to assault the 14-year-old in attempts to get him to resume exercise, despite the fact that he was clearly unable to do so and was offering no resistance. At one point, the guards covered his mouth and forced him to inhale ammonia. It was this last trick that killed Anderson. All of this was captured on video and it is clear that there was no legitimate reason — or sanity — involved in this beating. Whether or not the guards were racist is left for speculation. (If you want to see some explicit racism, read the comment thread for the video).
The next step was a quick autopsy done by a white doctor who was so incompetent that in an earlier autopsy, he signed off on a report that discussed damage to a girls’ “testes.” This hack — again who may or may not be racist, we don’t know — claimed that Anderson died from natural causes due to sickle cell trait. Soon after Anderson’s burial, sickle cell experts who heard of the story started saying that the autopsy result was fictional and not a legitimate possibility. Recently, a new autopsy has shown that it was clearly the ammonia that lead to Anderson’s death.
So we have a situation where a young black boy died at the hands of a ridiculous number of (mostly white) guards abusing him and a botched autopsy that almost seems like a cover-up. But the case was clearly shown to be the cause of the actions of the guards and we have it on tape, yet we have nobody arrested. Not one guard has so far even begun to be held accountable for his actions. Why not? If Governor Jeb Bush’s daughter had been the person killed in the boot camp — and she has done things as illegal or worse than Anderson — would this be the case? What if she had been beaten to death by black guards?
Another case from Florida has more national implications for the racism that still exists in our country. The equally sad case of Ali Gilmore. Ali is an attractive 30-year-old woman who disappeared earlier this year while she was four months pregnant. Why does that sound familiar? Not because you’ve heard about it, but because it’s basically the exact same storyline as Laci Peterson. Yet you probably know all about Peterson and have never heard of Gilmore. What’s the difference? They were both young. They were both attractive. They were both pregnant. They both disappeared mysteriously. So why the different media treatment? Peterson dominated the national news for months and it was nearly impossible for anyone who read the newspapers or watched TV not to hear about the case. Gilmore’s disappearance got local coverage and a little bit of regional coverage. You probably already guessed the reason why. Yep, Gilmore was black.
We are inundated by the cable networks with tales of missing white women — stories that, while they are tragic, do not affect anyone other than those who know the missing person, those who harmed that person and the community from which they came. But black women disappear, too, and we never hear about that. For that matter, men disappear, too, and we don’t hear about them, either. And this kind of racism isn’t just a few guards or a doctor or something like that, it is nearly an entire media industry and, by extension, the viewers and readers of that media.
We talk about how much we have progressed on race issues in this country, but we’ve really just driven racism into hiding. Is that progress?
This is really wrong:
Every single incumbent lawmaker has been re-elected since term limits went into effect.
Regardless of which party you are a member of, Democracy cannot work when this happens. Term limits are a joke. Districts in Florida are a joke. Representative democracy in Florida is a joke.
This morning I called Congressman Cliff Stearns. I wanted to urge him to vote against the Communications, Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement (COPE) Act. The call was simple, took less than two minutes, and will hopefully be effective.
What is the COPE Act?
The COPE Act was proposed by lobbyists for Verizon, AT&T and other network holders. The Act would end Net neutrality and allow the infrastructure holders to charge at both ends of the pipeline. The upshot is, content providers with large cash supplies would get their data delivered more quickly than data from other sites–like this one. It is a blow to the freedom of information, and a blow to activist voices everywhere.
What can I do?
Visit Save the Internet’s Map and find out where your congressperson stands on the issue. Currently, our Representatives break down as follows:
Cliff Stearns: Against Net Neutrality
Michael Bilirakis: Against Net Neutrality
Jim Davis: Undecided on Net Neutrality
Call them. Chances are, you’ll speak to a staffer, like I did. The staffer I spoke with didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. However, she took my statement and my name and address so Congressman Stearns could get back to me on the issue.
What do I say?
There’s a pretty simple formula here:
Please call. Please visit Save The Internet. Make sure you give our future voices a fighting chance on the Web.
Florida Politics has a simple, but important, post today. The upshot is that despite a climate that clearly favors Democrats, Republicans are not only expected to win in Florida, if money is any measure, they will certainly win. Some important quotes:
Despite that, the Democrats determined to take back the governor’s mansion are sucking wind financially compared with Crist, who has raised $8.8-million, and Gallagher, who has raised $6.6-million.
(Digging deeper, we find that is in comparison to Davis $2.27 and Smith $1.9. Money isn’t an exact predictor, but it is highly correlated with electoral victory).
On top of that, an awful lot of veteran Democratic donors quietly describe the gubernatorial contest as a foregone conclusion: Gov. Charlie Crist. Many of them are not so horrified by that prospect.
…
Such longtime Democratic money-machine trial lawyers as Gary Pajcic of Jacksonville, John Morgan of Orlando, Fred Levin of Pensacola of Steve Yerrid of Tampa are helping raise money for Crist (and in some cases Democrat Rod Smith, too).
…
Red-state syndrome is starting to take hold of Democrats who saw their hopes crushed in 2002 and 2004. Even the occasional poll showing virtually unknown Democratic gubernatorial candidates within striking distance or better of the well-known Republican contenders can’t stop it.
…
“There’s a gut feeling a lot of people have that this is just a Republican state,” lamented Screven Watson, a longtime Democratic strategist advising Rod Smith. “I don’t agree with that, but a lot of your business community believes that.”
This is the problem. Florida is not a Red State. Yes, we have a whole lot of Republicans in office. But many of those Republicans have had to be dishonest about their real agenda to get into office. They have to claim to be moderates or “compassionate conservatives” to get into office. The people in Florida are clearly much more liberal than the politicians.
Why?
I think Robin Miller (in a comment at The Buzz) hits the nail on the head:
I’d say the Democratic Party in FL is severely broken.
I tried — really I did — to volunteer a little, but it was a mess. A lawyer was put “in charge” and treated me like I was his servant, at his beck and call. I have a full-time job and he doesn’t, so it was an impossible situation.
Davis?
The only contact I’ve ever had from him was an email invite to a “meet the candidate” thing, minimum donation $250.
That’s a lot for a workingman. Guess I’m not rich enough to support Mr. Davis. $100, maybe. $50, for sure. But $250… we’ll leave that for the know-it-all lawyer.
Bottom line: There’s about 0 room in the Florida Democratic Party for those of us who work for a living.
Even our local “party chief,” a City Councilman who is both a lawyer *and* a preacher, has a reputation for not returning constituent calls. I know he sure doen’t return mine. I will vote for almost any living being, Republican or not, against him.
Maybe Davis and Smith are “more substantive” than Crist or Gallagher, but at $250 a pop to find out I’ll never know.
We need a different Democratic Party than the existing one, which seems to have lost touch with those of us who should be its natural base.
Oh, well.
I don’t think this has to be an “Oh Well” situation. This is something that some of us have already discussed and proposed solutions for (see our April goals), notably Ray Seaman and Mike from FLA Politics. (And yes, I did contact Robin to invite him to join us. Maybe he’ll be at the meeting Wednesday).
There is hope, of course.
“There is something happening out there. Maybe the governor’s race is the last place where it will take hold, but it’s only April,” said Mitchell Berger, a top Democratic fundraiser helping Davis. “People don’t understand that the underlying polling data is very favorable to a Democratic gubernatorial victory this year. That has not yet penetrated the donor community.”
Maybe this should be our top priority this year, making sure that this message gets out to the people that need to hear it. Davis/Smith don’t have to outraise their Republican counterparts, but they do have to be competitive and, as of yet, they aren’t.
These are all fixable problems. And they are all problems that we can fix. Organization is one of the keys to electoral success and, for whatever reason, Democrats and progressives have been very unorganized for the last decade or so. Let’s change that, regardless of who resists and regardless of who thinks we can’t do it. I’m going to do it. The question is, how many of you are going to help me.
Even a year after her death, Terri Schiavo is still alive in Florida politics.
The Republicans never mention the severely brain-damaged woman whose plight provoked a national debate over death and dying.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Davis and state Sen. Rod Smith repeatedly invoke Schiavo’s name as a rallying cry against government intrusion into family decisions. Both fought Republican attempts to stop her husband from removing life support after 14 years.
Jockeying for the conservative mantle that appeals to Republican primary voters, state Attorney General Charlie Crist and Florida Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher consistently tout their pro-life views on abortion, but not their end-of-life beliefs. That is nothing new for Crist, who avoided the politically divisive fray last year. But Gallagher, who staunchly defended the efforts of Schiavo’s parents to prolong her life, has not said a word about her during the campaign.
[...]
One year later, Davis and Smith recall Schiavo in nearly every campaign stop. Davis brought her up last week after reporters asked him about South Dakota’s new abortion restrictions.
“I believe politicians should stay out of the difficult, personal decisions about life and death that Floridians and their families face every day,” he said during the conference call. “It was wrong when our state leaders played politics with the tragic life of Terri Schiavo, and it’s still wrong.”
It would seem that by bringing up the Schiavo case in “nearly every campaign stop,” it makes it a little hard for Davis and Smith to criticize the Republicans for “playing politics with the tragic life of Terri Schiavo.” Anyway…
Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof
The St. Petersburg Times had an interesting article about the campaign of Katherine Harris over the weekend:
As Katherine Harris’ rocky Senate campaign takes an increasingly evangelical Christian bent, her remaining top campaign staffers are preparing to jump ship.
Colleagues say Harris’ closest confidante lately appears to be spiritual adviser Dale Burroughs, founder of the Biblical Heritage Institute in Bradenton.
“Dr. Dale,” as she is known among campaign staffers, describes herself as a licensed clinical pastoral counselor who counsels in behavior temperament, career, crisis and disaster, among other things.
Burroughs has been advising Harris for years, but lately has had a more prominent role as Harris stopped listening to other campaign advisers. Burroughs said she has little role in the campaign beyond helping reach out to religious voters and is merely a Bible study partner and close friend.
Friends and advisers say Harris has been deeply religious all her life, but religion recently has become a central part of her campaign. Campaign staffers warily describe Harris as leading a “Christian crusade.”
“It was always part of the background, but it was never an integral part of the campaign. It never engulfed her,” said former campaign manager Jim Dornan, who quit the campaign in November but keeps in touch with staffers. “She’s grasping for a pillar she thinks this campaign can be raised on.”
Her top campaign advisers, having failed to persuade Harris to drop her struggling campaign against Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson, are preparing to leave. Those include Ed Rollins, a highly regarded GOP strategist and her top campaign adviser; Adam Goodman, her longtime Tampa-based media consultant; and campaign manager Jamie Miller. Harris has been aggressively campaigning for support among religious conservatives, hitting large churches and headlining a “Reclaiming America for Christ” conference in Broward County last weekend. She told hundreds of attendees she was “doing God’s work” with her campaign.
Harris also hinted at her increased emphasis on her Christian faith when she talked to ABC’s Nightline last week about spending $10-million of her own money to jump-start her Senate campaign.
“I am willing to take this widow’s mite, this pearl of great price, and put everything on the line. No matter how much you have, are you willing to take what you have and sell it all for a great price,” Harris said in the transcript provided by ABC News.
The widow’s mite refers to a New Testament parable about a poor woman giving what little money she had to the temple.
Burroughs, a former staffer with Campus Crusade for Christ, said that in the last month Harris has been deeply moved by the Bill Bright book The Joy of Supernatural Thinking – Believing in God for the Impossible. The book explains that “it’s not you trying to do something but God working through you. … What we all see as impossible, God sees as possible,” Burroughs said.
It’s not enough that she has just about every reliable Republican in the state running away from her as quickly as they can without making it look like a stampede, but it’s also sending a very strange message to voters who are not evangelical — say, for example, Roman Catholic or Jewish — and right there you’re talking about a lot of people in South Florida. It’s also pretty clear from history that when candidates for a national office such as senator start lining up with that crowd that they don’t tend to get very far: remember how far Pat Robertson got in 1988?
While anything is possible in the next seven months and I wouldn’t advise the Nelson campaign to rest easy, they can at least not worry about putting up any negative ads about Katherine Harris. She seems to have that taken care of all by herself.
A drive to change the way that districts are drawn up in Florida was declared unconstitutional and thrown of the ballot for 2006. This is a blow for Democracy as Akula says. Florida has one of the worst set of district lines in the nation — no incumbent lost in 2004. This will not be the end of the issue, though, and hopefully this will be on the 2008 ballot, although that may be bad timing, since it appears that a anti-gay marriage amendment will be on the ballot and winger turnout may be high. This is one of those times that the state party will need some help from the national party.
