Navy Vet and Antarctic Crash Survivor will vote provisional ballot

Yep, come the primary my dad will be voting a provisional ballot if at all. His republican party is to blame.
It took two days to get my father's paperwork in order to get his voter registration card, and even now it will not come to his address in time for him to vote in the primary.
The Odyssey began yesterday. See, Dad's driving privilege had to go. When he was in the hospital from the last fall from his vehicle and confusion and so forth an FHP officer clipped up his license. It was suspended and revoked. And that's a longer story here, but, he no longer drives. We moved him from Florida's west coast to an assisted facility near us.
In the move some documentation for his life was lost, including his Social Security card which he may or may not have had.
He needed two forms of photo ID, two pieces of paper showing his new address on them. A social security card. No exceptions. This in order to get his new state ID and a new voter registration card.
Mind you, he still doesn't have a bonafide SS card, nor a voter registration card. He's been living here in this part of the state for six months. The man at the window told him the voter registration card would be coming in the mail, but it's likely not going to be there in time for the primary.
The previous day we had to go to the Social Security office with his ancient passports, and so on, to prove he was who he said he was. Final proof will only come when we return with a state ID that a SS card will release!
You remember the Ouroborus? Snake eats own tail?
The nice girl at the SS office mentioned a birth certificate. He was born in the late 1920s. That's not something he has on file just now.
Two days to get a Florida State ID card.
I strain not to tell him that it was his political party that did this. His party has caused such a ruckuss about catching all those devilishly crafty illegals trying to throw the election Obama's way, that a former Naval Aviator and World War II veteran who had even spent two weeks in the burned out hulk of his airplane following a horrific crash in Antarctica during the navy mission there in 1946, has to fight to prove he is a citizen of this country.
His party did this to him. He, of course, blames his children for the lost license thing in the first place.
So if he wants to vote in this primary election in August, he will be issued a provisional ballot, more than likely.
By the way, here's the link to the book I wrote about his plane crash. (LINK!!)

Scott's Press Flack: "There's no answer that will satisfy you"

My phone camera shot of Rick Scott

I am a good judge of character. I wanted to get a sense of the guy. So I crashed his photo op yesterday at the Hillsborough River State Park. Sat right in front of him, spoke to him, in fact.Know thy adversary. And I was in Tampa for other business anyway. It was ten minutes out of my way.

Rick Scott was doing his Bob Graham impression. You work a job for a day, to see how real people live.  There he manned a ticket counter, he cleaned up trash. He spread mulch. None of these things did I see him do. His press attaché, a young woman, tells me that these are the things he had accomplished before noon. Okay, I say.

He also went with us on a tour of the swampy wetlands.When I got there I happened to be very lucky to arrive just as a tour was leaving parking area number one. You know the deal: a hay wagon sort of affair. You sit, they drag you through the swamp, look at the palmettos, hopefully see some of the local wildlife before the governor tries to put a golf course down anywhere.

And who do I end up sitting in front of on my particularly little haywagon? The governor himself. I’m in a shirt, tie and nice slacks. He’s talking to a visitor about the fact his dad, a truck driver, used to like to drive the family everywhere.

Up close and personal Rick Scott is no monster from the black lagoon. Seems like a nice guy. I shook his hand. You learn about men from their shake. His hands don't sweat like some folks who are lying all the time.

But, the best liars always beat the machines. As Al Pacino said in Glengarry Glenross "you know who doesn't get nervous talking to the police? Criminals."

So this doesn't mean he isn't lying. Doesn't mean he isn't doing evil things. It means that what I suspected about him may be true - he is absolutely convinced what he is doing to the state, and to the citizens, is good. Maybe not good for the citizens or the state but, somewhere,on the universal balance sheet cutting programs, breaking federal election laws, preventing people from voting, privitizing everything including all prisons, making everyone of a certain socioeconomic status take a drug test, is good. Ends justify the means.

You combine this impression with his religious comments, the fact he didn't publicly take his lieutenant governor to task for her comments "Christianity is under attack," and you come to the conclusion, yep, committed Teavangelical.
Good people are other republican teavangelicals. Bad people need things done to them. They need to submit. Be forced into it, like summer Jesus camp, until they comply.
The wagons got stuck in the mud. So we get out and begin walking. Rick Scott is helpful. He wanted to make sure we didn't follow him into the brambles to get around a gigantic mud puddle. But, too late for me. I was right behind him fiddling with my camera phone for another shot. Now, a ranger takes us to a little stretch of mud that used to pass for a highway and says “who is responsible for our interstate road system in this country?"

I say very loudly “FDR”. I am immediately corrected by the governor. He says “No. It was Eisenhower.” Everyone agrees with him. Go figure. (I knew it was Eisenhower). But this gives me my opening.

“I guess everyone in this crowd is a republican, governor.”

He laughs. Everyone says “Yes!”

So anyway, the path is covered with water, deep-like and we have to walk to this, I don’t know, fort of some kind, to hear the cannon go off. They want to shoot a cannon off, for, whatever reason. It’s a tea-party thing. Obviously I am leaving out the fact a very real and historic fort stood where the modern replica is and I mean  no disrespect. These were details I couldn't get as I was looking for a conversational opening. I have questions, not just protestations.

And I am working up to it; when and how I am going to hit him with all these questions. I am trying to get him away from these families with kids. Because I know this is going to be embarrassing. Unpleasant and people are going to drag me away and I am going to be all over the news if I don’t handle this right. I don't want that for these families. They paid money to be here.

But, he’s using these kids and these families like human shields.  And I am sticking out like a sore thumb. Everyone else is in street clothes and me I am dressed formal and it’s 95 degrees, literally.

So we get to the fort and I am approached by his press guy, Lane Wright. He sidled up to me after the Seminole Indian (volunteer actor) gave us an excellent, moving speech and then shot off a musket.

So Lane sits down next to me and asks, very politely,  “which group are you with?” And I say I am a citizen journalist and I have some questions for the governor.  He whips out an iPhone 4 and tries to look up Rick Scott Watch and he can’t find it. I tell him to check Facebook. He gets nervous like a little kid. I mean really antsy. He gets up and walks over into the shade to do some more web searches.

He comes back an proceeds to tell me how inappropriate I am for doing this. I mean – wait; I drove onto the grounds of a state park. Paid the fee to get in, got on a haywagon and I am trying to ask the governor some questions and I am not acting appropriately.

What kind of journalist are you? A citizen journalist.

He goes to check his iPhone again for more information. Comes back; “Okay, so you’re not a serious journalist. So I can’t provide you access.” And it's like he's hissing this.

“Look man. You’ve got it all turned around backwards,” me to him. “I am a citizen of the state of Florida (special emphasis)and I have some serious questions for the governor.”

“I want to help you but I need to know what they are? I don't want you to heckle him.”

"He's standing right there. You see that television camera? I've been with him all during the walk through the woods. I could have made a real mess of things for the benefit of that camera. I'm not here to do that. I want answers," I said.

I didn't want to give up. I mean there he is, not ten feet away, all ganlgy, sort of stalking away like a great blue heron I wanted to take a picture of.

So I try to keep my voice down.

“These aren’t pleasant questions. They aren’t nice. I have a tape recorder here. I want to ask him, and he can answer. I don’t think he wants everyone around us to hear these questions either and I for one, don’t want to embarrass him in front of these families and children. They paid good money to be here just like I did.”

Really and truly. I wasn’t going to fall for that BS where they turn me into the asshole on camera. It was going to be me and him and a tape recorder. If not I could bug him during the rest of the tour. Now what's it going to be?

"You have to work with me. Give me some sort of idea of your questions.

I asked Lane to relay the following:

1. Did the governor approach Kurt Browning while he was just a candidate and before Browning's first "retirement.?"

2. How often does the governor meet with or talk to the Koch brothers?

3. What further reductions to the middle class are being planned in the form of tax breaks to corporations?

Me and Rick. I'm in the blue shirt

4. What other programs at colleges are going to be attacked the next legislative session?

5. Does he still plan to privitize all prisons in Florida?

"No answer will satisfy you," Lane said at last.

"You'll see what you can do, I suppose?"

"I'll see what I can do."

He approached the governor, now surrounded in huddle by all his handlers. The governor looks over at me, turns back to his discussion huddle. The parents are watching us. The kids are roasting in the hot sun.

I turned around for a second to grab some water in the shade, and in that instant the governor and his entourage flat ditched the entire group in the woods near that old fort. Evaporated. I don't know where they went, or how they got there. They were gone like shadows. Truly some Jedi shit.

We hopped on the wagons again, got back on the trail, went a few yards but the truck towing the first wagon broke down. No. I am serious. It BROKE DOWN! Up comes the hood, out comes the ranger "Looks like we're walking!"
"Must be those budget cuts," I said.

Or, and this is the more sinister of the two possibilities: or, Rick Scott wanted to beat feet back to his press conference with pool reporters who were waiting at the parking lot, and he didn't want me there to pose those pesky questions to him in front of the cameras. So he told the ranger to shut off the engine in the woods, lift the hood and get us stuck there.

The great mystery that is Rick Scott continues. Was it an accident that left families, old people, tiny children to walk the quarter mile out of the woods and across a state road in the middle of the day in the 95 degree heat? Or did he intentionally do that to his fellow citizens just to avoid hard questions on camera?

What do you think?

FDLE: Case is Open on Hillsborough SOE

Second time trying to post this.

I have an open case number TM481211, from the FDLE.

In other news the governor is over at the Hillsborough River State Park today taking tickets. The urge to drive over and give him an absolute ration of shit for what he's doing and how he got his post is tugging at me.

(Whispers to self) But maybe it's a trap! Maybe that's just what they want!

Anywho, we will post an update if the urge is strong enough to drag us away from what we are already doing as I am in Tampa for other matters.

I will keep you posted.

FOX should be charged with Senior Abuse

Fox News ought to be charged with abuse of our senior citizens who seem glued to it no matter that it's bad for them. Here's what I learned from my aging parent this morning:

 1. The world is coming to pieces and the current president is destroying this country.

 2. The current president is a socialist who only listen to the likes of Van Jones.

 3. Solyndra is the worst thing that ever happened. Obama is at fault. Solyndra is actually worse than Watergate. Way worse. No room for argument.

 4. Obama hates this country. He's a dangerous man.

 5. The demoncrats would sieve through and find any objectionable tidbit in Romney's complete tax return and use this against him in a way that was underhanded and unbecoming of our political discourse. (This, I agree with.) But! But! If the shoe were on the other foot, the republicans would certainly be talking about the "issues" by now and wouldn't concern themselves with such matters. (Obviously untrue)

 "What about the birth certificate dust up?" I am directed to consider other matters
.
 6. Obama hates this country and is secretly plotting against it. His second term will include destroying this country in its entirety. "I hope I don't live to see it."

 7. The world is coming to an end.

 8. Rap music is bad, just bad.

 9. Van Jones is just an evil, evil man who still controls the White House from behind the scenes while making a shitload of money doing it.

 10. Repeat lessons one through ten.

 These are the bleak messages pumped into the minds of senior citizens all over this country. They are glued to their sets tuned on Fox watching - the destruction of the entire country, the entire world, via a socialist negro in the White (KEY WORD:WHITE, EVERYBODY WHITE!!!) House.
 If you found out your mother or father were being given doses of this on a daily basis, down at the assisted living facility by a travelling passerby who whispered such evil garbage into their ears at the day-room, you'd call the police and likely sue the assisted living facility.
And you'd win.

Media Talking Heads Showing Their Cowardice

Today I was this close to getting on to speak with Ed Schultz during his radio show -uhgin!
I had waded through the part where you call, call back, then call again. Today I got through and spoke to his producer, told him I am worried about the voting machines.
He got hostile with me immediately. Well, back up. First the guy hung up on me.
"I want to talk about the voting machines. They are entirely hackable down here in Florida."
"Great," he said, and promptly hung up on me.
So I called back, waded through the busy signal, and got him again.
"Uh, yeah, so...? What happened? I was calling about the machines."
He knew who I was.
"So they're hackable, so what? What do we do?"
I said we should go to a hand counted ballot.
"That's a real smart idea," he said, indicating his feeling that this was anything but. I point out that the idea is to get it right, even if it takes three days to come up with a result.
He shifts gears, talks about how democrats have gotten elected too so, something must be working.
"Look, it's pay for play, man. And currently it's them (republicans) who pay. Not the least of which..."
"Okay okay, hold on a second," he said.
So I wait, listening to Big Ed run out the clock on the show, just like he did the last time I called in about this issue. Good thing this time it was only thirty minutes. Last time he had me wait an hour then hung up as the show ended.
But that's not all. I had called in five weeks ago when Mike Papantonio was on for Big Ed. Mike listened then said "Dave, I gotta go." Like he was afraid of the topic!
So the following week, I called him back. I did the thing, got a producer, got all the way through to Mike, who did, to his credit let me get the schpiel out at least.
Rather than address anything I had said directly Mike said he wanted to talk about this issue during Ring of Fire Radio. He even had his producer set up an interview. He called me, and we chatted. I put my case out there, and he said great, set up a time when Mike would call me to talk about the election of Rick Scott how it may have been rigged, the problems with the machines and so on which would air the following Saturday.
Naht!
The day comes and they cancelled on me. Just, like, that.
They don't want to talk about it, folks. The bigger the head gets in media, the more cowardly, meek, tame and mild they become when it comes to this issue.
I don't know if there's something that Homeland Security tells them or whether it's just too complicated. Take Ed's producer, and that hostile thing. I mean, I hadn't even said anything. I just told him what I wanted to talk about and that set him off.
No! No! No! Stick to the script! Damn you!
Maybe it's a cabal attached to advertising. I've seen this before during my own run in "conventional media". Perhaps the cabal has spoken.
Perhaps the Alex Joneses of the world are correct: all is lost. It's not just a cabal but a vast global network of banksters and fraudsters with their hands around our throats.
Okay okay. I will calm down. Here's what we know: they don't want to talk about it. They are afraid to, no matter how much they tell you they are champions of the truth, they are like kittens when it comes to this. We know media talking heads are cravenly avoiding this issue. The question is, how do we shame them into covering. Because unfortunately a talking head cares more about his or her brand, than anything else. And they will not address this issue until we threaten to taint that with shame.
If you have a better idea I am all ears.

Brevard SOE: 'That Wouldn't Have Happened Here'

Speaking with Brevard County SOE Lori Scott on July 10 was instructive.

She was at the Brevard County commissioner's meeting after I had given them the three minute speech; follow this LINK to read it.

Here are three things that struck me during our chat.

One, supervisors of elections are very scripted people. They stick to the script.

Two, you don't ever want to mention the presidential election of 2000 when Volusia County's precinct 216 voted backwards for Al Gore 16,022 times if you want an answer to "can this happen again", because they have no knowledge of this event. It never, ever, ever happened, to their knowledge, see? Nice little caveat makes it a soft-lie not a real one.

Three, it's the machines, or else. Or else democracy comes to a halt. The universe will implode! These voting machines must must must be used, no matter what. Even if they don't work. "Our hands are tied" The end. With the implied-stupidity meter on you ever rising if you continue to challenge this imperative with logic and reason, using example after example wherein the machines have blatantly failed.

As our chat kicked off I mentioned the 38,000 ballot rescanning in Tampa. And I don't know how public officials do this but, as with an alien abduction, I cannot clearly recall the transition whereby I found myself summarizing what precisely happened on Nov. 2. 2010 again to a glassy stare. I mean, I know all large county SOE's attended a secretized* meeting in Orlando two weeks ago where this event was discussed.  I know this. And yet, here I am summarizing it again. This of course is what they do: they ask you to reinvent the wheel as they conceive of a duck-out. Hers was a "training" (Tee-hee. I love that. They always say that. A "training." So many people to train or be trained from.)

Anyway, that part of the conversation over, she did tell me that if something similar were to happen in Brevard, there is a very simple process that would have alleviated the need to shuffle ballots around in the middle of the night and rescan them in a central location. In Brevard County, there would be duplicate memory cards sent out for every one optical scan voting machine. And to prevent a situation whereby one  machine could give bad code to 12 cards collecting 50 percent of the early vote in the last three days before the election, these duplicate cards would receive the vote counting software on - wait for it - different machines back at the central location. PIO Eddie Thompson also said they would be tested over the local area network BEFORE they went out.

Did you hear that? That's how easy it would have been for Hillsborough to avoid the glitch that tainted the actual late-tallied votes that installed Rick Scott as our governor. You simply rely on more than one machine to code the memory cards! If even this fails you send the cards out again to the sight unseal the ballots and rescan them there. Can you believe it? There was an answer all along.

You definitely don't go right for the broken machine, either. But even even even if the machines you use to code the cards screwed up? Why, you can just drive new machines or the memory cards out to the votes, avoiding the "need" to drive ballots around in the middle of the night, all Helter Skelter-like.

Imagine, as John Lennon said.

I was there with a fellow member of the Occupy Rigged Elections Facebook page and she asked what was being done about the situation in Hillsborough, and Ms. Scott said the state division of elections is handling it. And I don't know what that means.

Back to the machines themselves and whether or not they should be used.I mentioned the 2000 election and the Volusia Quantum Worm Hole event, you know, Gore -16,022.

 "I'm not familiar with that."

Volusia County is the adjacent county to Brevard.

Fine. So, I just explained it again and thus began the tail spin of the conversation. Supervisors in Florida "have their hands tied" between two vendors and only two. Dominion and ES and S. Sequoia was decertified; "let him go from us, and begin the walk of shame" sort of thing where they State Division of Elections literally kicks the vendor out of the state.

She said it went like this. Dominion bought Premier and ES and S, but a court ruled that purchase was a monopoly, (only after much machine-ware and software changed hands) so ES and S was kicked out of that sale. So Dominion and ES and S are all that remain standing in Florida to count the vote. There is no other way, I tell you! That's it, do or die. Lump it or leave it. Bad or Worse. And as Kurt Browning once said to describe the evil of two lessers, "it is, what it is."

Great.

ES and S of course, screwed up the Sarasota election in 2006. Dominion, by the corporate blood trail, is connected to virtually every other botched election in this state since 2000. Remember Dominion bought Premier, which was renamed from Diebold, which had acquired GES, which botched the 2000 election.

She spoke about the "hanging chads" in Palm Beach county, (see? see? they're chads, they hang, remember? the funny bald man with the looking glass, and the dimples, see?), but seemed to glaze over eniterly when I discussed 16,000 votes going backwards for Gore in a precinct that has less than 600 voters.
"Our hands are tied," she surmised. There are two vendors. Even though they do not do a good job and continue making our state a laughing-stock when it comes to elections we must use them.

We discussed hand-counting as The Republic of Ireland is moving toward . She said "but, who would count the votes?" As if partisanship would intrude into the accuracy. I counter with an example. Suppose one company, say a Diebold-like analog, had a CEO partisan to a former business associate running for president. Not only does  partisanship taint the result but in this case one person can destroy the opposition and install the president. (LINK)

She shifted to considerations of time. She said she has people calling her the minute they put their ballot through the machine, demanding a real-time update. Hand counting could take days and days! These people demanding immediate answers would be in fits.

"But these are minor considerations," said my friend. "We're talking about the vote, here. The idea is to get it right."

"But who would count them? Can we be sure they would do so fairly? Who would decide who counts the votes?" said Scott.

And the conversational death spiral grew ever tighter here. When you point out the absurdity of elections being literally placed in the hands of machine vendors (controlled by a handful of people who are ALL politically and corporately connected), supervisors pivot to discussion on the time it takes for a hand-count. When you say the idea is to get a correct vote count no matter how long it takes, they pivot to a discussion on potentially partisan hand-counters.

And you realize that you, a grown adult, are essentially playing a game of rock, paper, scissors with another grown adult making upwards of $90,000 a year...AND YOU'RE PAYING HER that money, for this game.

So the elections supervisor isn't a champion of fair, accurate, and non-partisan elections so much as a proponent and a catylist for swift ones, which are entirely corrupted, hacked and inaccurate. They are showmen. Ring leaders. They know this, you know this. The circus train is on the tracks anyway and the show must go on.

In Florida it is better to say that elections supervisors aren't so much trained on doing their jobs as inculcated; brought into a cult of tightly controlled elections supervisors who are all told by the Florida Division of Elections to swallow the lie that "this is the only way." A cult that was formerly run by Sec. of State Kurt Browning and is now run by Sec. of State Ken Detzner. SOEs go to parties, trainings and secretized* meetings and week long gatherings, very much like the one St. Augustine where Phylis Busansky died. They are wined, dined, and chatted to about how to handle the public's whiny questions. In Florida, we have this curious arrangement whereby the state's election supervisor, also known as the Secretary of State, isn't even voted into office, himself. He's appointed by the governor. And this is where it gets creepy, today.

Browning, it has surfaced in recent news articles, has ties to a Koch PAC that actually raised money to defeat Barack Obama in 2008 WHILE BROWNING WAS SECRETARY OF STATE? Yes.. (LINK HERE)

Detzner is completely dialed into the Bush machine as former interm secretary of state under Gov. Jeb Bush (LINK). And the Busch machine as well; as, we all know by now, Detzner was a beer lobbyist. (LINK).

What are the odds things change anytime soon without a major uprising of some sort? Practically nill. As I have said before, hundreds of times, things have to get a whole lot more uncomfortable for our public officials. The Secretary of State, the Division of Elections, are essentially a closed loop protecting a hacked vote in this state. A closed loop with close associations with the Bush machine, and the Koch machine.

Do you think for one moment, the 2012 presidential election won't be a hack job? Does this mean we don't vote? No. We vote. But we must participate in the exit polling and we must watch for anything suspicious. We must also note our surroundings at the polls. How many people on line are there with you? How many machines seem available? How is overflow handled? Are people made to stand in the rain? What is the average wait time?

Get answers to these questions.

*Secretizing (n) the process whereby public officials don't legally prevent citizen oversight, but practically do so by pretending not to know something, e.g. such as, the location of a secretized meeting that members of the public, should, by rights, be permitted to attend. This is accomplished by instructing those answering telephones to "unknow" the time, date, location of a secretized meeting of large county elections supervisors, purely by way of example.

Not Good For Us

(This is an accidentally deleted Post I managed to recover)

It isn't communist to notice the following. It's not even socialist. It's just being observant.
You notice these days they call you socialist for being observant.
If everything the governor and the republican legislature were trying to do to us was good for us - as they allege - then why do these things always damage us in the end?
Let the term 'us' algebraically stand for those of the middle and struggling economic classes. Also known as "the rest of us." Or, if you like, if you don't mind being labeled 'socialist' by those who throw that word at anyone and everything they have a problem with, the "99 percent."
In the next three months, the state could be receiving millions in federal funding in order to begin the process of complying with the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
This money would enable many souls to qualify for medicaid who wouldn't be covered by it, normally. You've seen more of these folks lately, the wandering homeless, and jobless souls? Wounded by the elements and circumstance?
When they enter the hospital they are "free riders". And we pay the tab anyway.
But, the governor in his infinite anti-wisdom, has decided that this money which would more adequately, more efficiently do the job of covering such people, isn't good for Floridians. It should go elsewhere even though we Floridians put some of that money into the pot in the first place.
Millions of people who have lost their healthcare coverage through this process called "downsizing". this is who we are talking about. They don't deserve the help. Because that wouldn't be good for us.
About this time last year, the governor, in another fit of "wisdom" decided that high speed rail and as many as 30,000 immediate jobs, wasn't good for us either. Nor were some $2 billion in funds to begin the shovel-ready project.
The jobs weren't good for us. The rail wasn't good for us. The reduced traffic on I-4 wasn't good for us. The ability of commuters to get into Tampa and Orlando and take positions they might not otherwise be able to take, well, as you know, none of this was good for us.
He told us, as well, that Citizens, the state-backed insurance company designed to keep costs low for those of us dealing with this business of revolving door insurance carriers for our homes, that wasn't good for s either. Though he has yet to destroy this, the governor is working on it, of that we can be sure.
Last year he also told us that the Fair District Amendments to the state constitution that 63 percent of the voters had ratified weren't good for us. He fought that, using our money if you recall. Fought it hard. And lost was his cause, along with our money as well.
He also has said that early voting isn't good for us. He and then secretary of state Kurt Browning and others managed to get early voting time chopped in half. They managed to effectively eliminate the last Sunday of early voting prior to the election, because that's not good for us either.
Shall I continue?
Not good for us is having a workable amount of time to register others to vote and turn the paperwork in. They managed to get that shortened to just 48 hours. Go over, and get fined. Though this has been recently overturned, the damage, some say, has already been done to voter registration drives.
Teachers aren't good for us. Their tenure has to go. Teachers who have more than five years in the business are dead weight. Toss them. Their salaries and benefits have to be reduced.
Professor tenure isn't good for us. Archaeology, anthropology, journalism, theater, political science; these aren't good for us. Gut these programs. No good. Colleges should cast these aside.
He and others within the legislature effectively shut off funding to some universities. Now he plays the innocent, claims to be on the students side when he lambastes them for considering to raise their tuition. Something he and others in the legislature enabled when they ruled universities could raise tuition. Effectively raising tuition. Because that's good for our kids. Raise tuition, skate the blame, shut off funding to the university, reduce the bright futures scholarships, eliminate the prepaid college programs.
Apparently a university education within reach of all Florida citizens, isn't good for us.
Good for us? What is good for us, according to this governor. What can we look forward to?
Drug testing. That's good for us. He likes that. With the state's unemployment rate still above eight percent he retains his hard-on for everyone temporarily demoralized by poverty and unemployment to be drug tested. Because that's good. Yeah.
Charter schools. Revamp education. Public schools will now be private. And we will all be segregated as to economic status and perhaps even one day - oh, please, please please Baby Jesus? - religion and race!
That's good for us, yeah.
Private prisons! Yeah. Let's open up the state to Gulag, Inc. have the profit motive drive incarcerations.  Never mind that these corporate prisons are proving to be dangerous to corrections officers and the public at large in that profit dictates fewer guards per inmate ratios.
Hey if you are unfortunate enough to be arrested for something minor, you can look forward to sexual assault by some seriously dangerous felons, who have all, also, been sexually assaulted. Just the way we do things here.
This is good for us.
Back to the issue of healthcare. You can see that what is "good for us" really has nothing to do with our governor's positions, decisions and what he ends up doing to us. He's an idealogue some have said; a stubborn adherent to a political ethos, despite a conflicting reality.
Yes. This is true. But there's more to it, isn't there.
He's among a group of governors who have been engaged in such demonstrations of cruelty to their states. A group who have connection in their affiliation with the Koch brothers of Wichita Kansas, and the ALEC conferences.
They are here to make a point, a statement, to take a stance; mostly against the middle class. To stand up for big business, no matter who gets hurt.
They tell us they are only interested in "what's good for Floridians" or whatever state it is, they represent.
They lie of course. They're goddamned liars.
And they don't deserve to be in power.

Counties Watch out for the Hillsborough Hack

Here's what I am going say tomorrow at the Brevard County Commission if the creek don't rise and the damn don't break.

Good morning commissioners. I am here today to ask you to do three things. 1. watch out during the general election for a hacked vote or rigged election. 2. Get rid of the Dominion voting machines  3. Demand that the state draft laws to either standardize the process of "rescanning ballots" or outlaw the process entirely.

During my research into the election of Rick Scott for my book Rick Scott: Enemy of the State I came across the botched election in Hillsborough County in which 38,000 early voted ballots - representing more than 50 percent of the last three days of early voting, all in heavily democratic areas - were 'rescanned' because an alleged technical glitch failed to tally those votes at the time they were voted by the public, on Nov. 2, 2010.

A rescanning is not a recount. A "rescanning" is when, for whatever reason, sinister or otherwise, the elections officers and workers (NOT THE VOTERS) actually impact the vote total by hand feeding ballots back through optical scan voting machines. That is to say officials vote the ballots, not the voters. In Hillsborough's case 10 miles of ballots, all in a period of four to six hours, emergency conditions, press and the public caught flatfooted. This with no chain of custody to speak of as ballots were driven around in the middle of the night by elections workers in at least one occasion in personal vehicles.

The process called "rescanning" has no basis in Florida election law. There is no proper or legal way to conduct a rescanning. It is an outlaw process. Its a punt, a bootleg play by incompetent or dishonest machines and or supervisors. You will sometimes hear it referred to by the media - either deliberately or through blind ignorance - as a recount. It is not.

Because there is no law for a rescanning, it is the perfect opportunity for a swap out of the ballots - a stack  ballots previously voted for the desired result, for those actually voted by the electorate.

It is my belief this is what happened to much of the early vote in Hillsborough County, wherein a 38,000 vote differential going toward Rick Scott over Alex Sink may have buoyed Scott over a legally mandated recount.  Those deciding votes came late in the election, after midnight. They came as Hillsborough workers (not voters) as elections staff themselves hand fed the ballots into machines, hand over fist.

 I am furnishing you with those calculations I mentioned on page one. As we know a vote resulting in less than half a percent difference between two top candidates results in a mandatory recount. We see how nicely the figure of 38,000 brings the two candidates to within 0.44 percent difference. The odds of this seemingly random number coming from a "glitch", are heavily stacked against. Recounts happen. They are part of democracy which isn't always cut and dry. To even avoid them through manipulation is rigging an entire election.

Hillsborough's rescanning was blamed on one machine. Page 2 of your handout. It took nearly eight months for me to get this document, during which time the story morphed, there was much foot dragging, dishonesty and refusal on the part of the Hillsborough's office of SOE. I had to go through the county commission. Seven seemingly honest if willfully reluctant officials such as yourselves. To my knowledge only one of seven commissioners, Mark Sharpe,  participated in getting me any cooperation.

If this was a machine error, if one machine can put into taint the result which decided who would be our governor, we have a problem! The machines are unreliable. And they should be removed. I don't say that because of just this one case but a previous case in Hillsborough in which 70,000 ballots were rescanned during the 2008 general election, as well as many others through history these same machines.

Dominion voting is a Canadian company which controls the vote in 32 of 67 counties in this state.

The company is the corporate bucket into which fell, by virtue of acquisitions, all the garbage hardware and software,  by companies such as GES, Premier, Diebold, ESS, which have been fouling elections in this state since the year 2000. GES which counted votes backwards for Al Gore 16,022 times in Volusia County, was bought by Diebold, which changed its name to Premier which was then acquired by Dominion in 2010. Dominion also acquired ES and S which in 2006 recorded a record 18,000 no votes in the congressional race in Sarasota County resulting in the election of Vern Buchanan by just  369 vote margin. A court later ruled Christine Jennings had actually been the voters' choice.

Our elections here are a joke. The world knows this. These machines are the reason.

Either one of two possibilities exist. 1. The flaws in these machines are too great to be used in Florida. 2. These machines are being used to steal our votes. Either of these two mean we should remove them and go with another vendor or make all preparations for a hand count of all elections. We are always just 2 years away from an election. So "It's too late or expensive to change" is not a valid excuse. One person can only do so much damage in a hand-counted election. Using these machines, one or two people can rig the entire thing; can install a president. That's too much power in too few hands.

We can't vote these machines out of office like we can with a SOE. We can't impeach them. But you can close the purse strings on these machines, which continue to miserably fail us. Only you can. So do it. Get rid of them. Get rid of Dominion voting.

If we must continue to use these machines or ones like them through other vendors, there must be laws on the books for how to handle these "rescannings". It should never been a rush job. Press should be invited. A full canvassing board with the correct officers must always be present. Citizen observers included. Take a day to handle a rescanning as you would with a recount. Delay the process, get all eyes on it the way a recount should be handled. And then get it right.

If the ballots are to be voted by SOEs - who are voted in by party - then there must always be official chain of custody procedures. These loopholes WILL be exploited in this coming general election somewhere in this state. Mark my words. All county commissioners should be on hand to witness this election.

If you see something, you must report it. Don't let our county be used to steal the election with a glitch, or a rescanning as the excuse. If the state is to be made a laughing stock again during a national election don't let Brevard be a part of that.

You all swore a solemn oath to preserve protect and defend the constitution of this country, and this state. Please do so.

Thank you.