Rick's Town Hoor Meeting

The governor's experiment with facebook didn't go as he planned. He was slammed so hard by comments, it obviously took him time to cherry pick through the minefield of anger that awaited him since the moment his staff released word of the Town Hoor Meeting.

He chose to answer the low-hanging fruit and only started to do so around 7:50 p.m.

Sunshine State News was the first to go ahead and admit to the world, the whole thing was a bust.

Here's what we wrote to Sunshine State news when some took exception to the "vile" and "snarky" questions.

Here's a "snarky" and "vile" question to some: Florida has risen from the bottom twelve to the top five public school departments in the nation since 2000. So in effect with all these "initiatives" aimed at "student success", aren't you in fact breaking something that was demonstrably in the process of fixing itself; a massive perversion of the refrain "If it ain't broke don't fix it?"

He didn't answer it. Here's another.

Did you throw away 24,000 jobs for HSR, and are you willing to nix the light rail project, merely because these public transportation projects conflict with future profits of Koch industries?

Here's another
Is it true you and your staff are behind an effort to take over the State Lottery and privatize it? Isn't this money supposed to be for scholarships to worthy Florida students, or do you not want Bright Futures for our kids?

Here's another

Does posting your schedule day of, charging exorbitant fees for information, running away from reporters, attending and speaking only to constituents at Tea rallies, and Lincoln Day Dinners, qualify as open government, answerable to ALL Floridians?

We need more snarky and vile questions.

It's Not About the Kids It's About the Contracts!

Confidential sources have said there's an angle to be played by the Scott people concerning teacher evaluations and the new testing.

Testing resources are expensive. All the sudden we need a new FCAT! Gasp! That old one is no good! Didn't you get the memo? Our schools are failing and the sky is falling!

The confidential source said many are wondering if there isn't a private beneficiary to all the testing, as with Neil Bush during his brother Jeb's tenure as governor and the FCAT 1.0.

FCAT 2.0. Here's the nugget of truth. In 2002, Gov. Jeb Bush's brother Neil did approach the state to produce testing materials for the state.

But Pearson won the contract.

That doesn't mean they will get the next one and there may indeed be a player in the wings waiting to benefit.

Here's a curious item that bears scrutiny.

Hastily injected Senate Bill 922, says Senator Flores will pay an outside "entity" (this is a code word for a corporation) to develop a funding formula, per student funding, county by county. Ten guesses on which counties will get the funding first? Well, since the districts are pretty much drawn up to favor republicans, I suppose we could overlay those on top of the counties and see where the money will magically go!



Also, will SB 922 employ a "contractor" that has more than a Kevin Bacon connection to Rick Scott? Our survey says yes. The appropriation is currently for $100,000 but we'll see if that doesn't go higher. It is scheduled to go into affect on July 11 of this year.

Also, the Senate Committee on education funding was just yesterday, discussing the use of computerized grading and evaluation systems for the new FCAT 2.0.

That sounds like an expensive proposition! Gosh Golly! I wonder who will get that contract?

Friends of Rick?

This is the point. All at once, in your face changes with little shells and little peas sliding all around on the playing table while they are slashing budgets to teachers.

Watch the money!

It is your right as a citizen to follow any bills sliding through this session/nightmare. Here's a page for the bill tracker. You can have updates on any bill sent to your email as often as every day or every 15 minutes.

Rick Scott is A Flaming Bag of Dogshit Liar

Oh. Do I have your attention now? Good.

He's also going to privatize the Florida State Lottery(drilldown); the next step in destroying public education in Florida. And we'll get to that. Right after we deal with your feigned "shock" (gasp) as to the title of this post.

Heavens! Egads, man. Have you no shame?

You'll notice I didn't call him a Koch Sucker. People complained about that. Yeah.

Ever so much worse, I suppose, than someone who is trying to dismantle the middle class at the behest of vast corporations. Right? I mean, ho-hum. BUT DON'T YOU DARE CALL SOMEONE A KOCH SUCKER!

The truth? People have been too nice in describing our governor and when your voice is small, you must scream loudest.

This isn't a subtle person. This isn't someone you can damn with faint praise and hope he gets the message.

This post originally was titled "Scott is a flaming bag of dog-shit" only. But, it wasn't pertinent to the cause without "liar" caboosed to it. See it there? There it is.

This morning the Orlando Sentinel tried this "damning with faint praise" thing. It was more like "damning with faint concern and perplexed objectivity" as the author "tried to get a handle" on where in old Jesus, did Scott come up with the figure of 30,000 new jobs by spending $77 million on dredging the port of Miami?

You'll note 30,000 is a nice round figure that , with Machiavellian coincidence, eclipses the number 24,000; the expected jobs he shewed from the state in rejecting $2.4 billion in rail money.

The author strained to believe the governor, in a tortured dance that bespoke of an editor breathing down his neck "balance, balance, balance."

Fuck it. Rick Scott is a flaming bag of dog-shit liar - with his pants down!

Are you not entertained?



Moving on to lotto. If the governor and his minions get their way, the next move will be to take over the Florida State Lottery, a veritable cash cow. Notice he never mentions the lotto, that I could find, in his state budget proposal.

Surely, run it like a business would mean cutting off chunks of the system and feeding those to greedy interests who could then pay for negative ads aimed at his future enemies. AND.....AND! it would serve the purpose of crippling the Bright Futures Program.

Let's review how serious this problem is: the utter destruction of the public education system is the end result. This is their touchdown dance, if you will.

Imagine the worst soccer parents on the planet. You know the ones I mean: those who think that by putting Johnny or Ginny into a competitive program, then screaming at the refs, then paying hundreds of dollars per season, that all this furious activity should force YOUR child into under performing on a level playing field, when matched against their little darling. And when that doesn't happen! They lose their damn minds, as you have noticed!

These people do not want a level playing field. EVER! Do you hear me? EVER!!



FOX spews this morning - and I only caught a glimpse of it - had Steve Dooshy and Brian Kilmeade running this game; that it is only "fair" that people should "have a choice" when it comes to education. Read: pay for play.

If your kid wants a top-notch education, then, by all that is Holy, by all that is Jesus, and so on, it should be a sliding scale based on YOUR current economic conditions; which for many of us, have been considerably reduced by the same crowd of Jesus thumping greed demons who are screaming for this system.

NO LEVEL PLAYING FIELD....EVER!!

You watch. As soon as Rickster gets back from Panama - likely where he is busy hand over fisting; cutting his Plutocrat ante-in deals - discussions will suspiciously commence concerning a strange need for "improving the efficiency of the Florida State Lottery."

Someone, some traitorous villain, who pitches himself as a "friend to education", someone with a bright smile and a wavy crine of hair will propose the measure on the senate floor.

I wonder who that could be?

Thoughts on St. Paddy's Day

Or call it, Rick Scott in another age.

What I have been doing is some research on a book I have been writing when I came across an old poem dedicated to a rack renter landlord in Ireland in the 1890 time frame.

When the family and I went to Ireland in 2007 we visited an old manor home called Portumna Castle in east Galway. Inside were some paintings of the family members that ran the estate. Finding them interesting I snapped a pic of each of the portraits, really not knowing why.

I researched them this morning, I discovered I was staring into the face of one of the worst rack renters in Irish history and who perhaps had a hand in the removal of one of my ancestors from County Galway.

I give you Hubert George de Burgh, 2nd Marques, 14th Earl of Clanricarde. There he is.

The reason he's here is simple: even as we speak people are being evicted from their homes. Different from many foreclosures, these are folks whose banks are using robo-signatures and other illegal methods to speed the illegal foreclosure process. So too, the very people who teach our young are being muscled, and administrated out of their positions.

Where in Clanricarde's day, a land agent used a battering ram against the side of the house, for renters who couldn't make the extortionate payments of their landlords; today we have robosigned documents ousting people from their upside down mortgages just when they almost get rightside up.

I think bankers, financiers and elected officials need to tread very carefully around the boiling kettle of public distaste all of this mess has engendered within the American public. While corporate media has many of us like lemmings following the party of the tea, the people who have been and are being boosted from their homes ILLEGALLY are waking up to who is really at fault for all this - bankers and Wall Street thugs - and to the fact that much of this was done in a DELIBERATE EFFORT which is on-going TO DESTROY THE MIDDLE CLASS.

We have to combine what has happened with the outrage of the oil spill to understand THAT ALL OF THIS IS INTENTIONAL and some of the very same people claiming to be outraged at an alleged scheme for a communist take-over and being paid under the table to ship even the bad jobs to China.

This poem from the past could just as easily be a warning from our future.

By “Brigid”, reply to Hubert George de Burgh-Canning 2^nd Marques and 14^th Earl of Clanricarde

Portumna County Galway, Ireland

Circa 1890

So you say we are cunning, ungrateful

Our cabin doors kept on the latch

Show nothing but squalor within them

While money we’ve hid in the thatch.

That we smile in the face of “his honor”

And blessings invoke on his track

While we mutter a curse as he leaves us

And shake the clenched fist at his back.

But you don’t give a hint, my Lord Marquis

That we dared not to own those few pounds

Or show signs of comfort around us

For fear of your sharp scented hounds.

For fear of your spies and informers

On the watch to report to their lords

If their serfs had coin in their pockets

Or a decent meal on the boards.

And you hint not , at times not long vanished

When ye chased us to woods and the caves

Where we wailed over the corpse of our freedom

A poor stricken nation of slaves.

We are cunning, aye we needed cunning

When our lives were scarce held as right

And plundered unarmed and unlettered

T’was our last weapon left for the fight.

It was men such as you taught us cunning

As up these old tales we must rip

When for Limerick’s trust they repaid us

With pitch-cap and gallows and whip.

When we dared not stand upright and fearless

As men should on their own native sod

Nor dared the faith of their fathers

Save in secret to worship our god.

Can it be your Lordship in College

Never heard a text all should know

Coming straight from the lips of our savior

Men should only reap as they sow?

Why the words of our poor hunted teachers

That ever kept school by the hedge

Could tell that if fathers eat sour things

Their children’s teeth will be on edge.

And when savage things scattered the cockle

Through our lands years early to late

Till it choked the wheat of good feeling

You must now reap a harvest of hate.

Then your Lordship says “nothing would please them”

Though you take but the corn and the wine

And leave us with freehanded bounty

The husks in the trough with the swine.

Oh specimen peer of our rulers

Great the anger with which you give breath

But no doubt we are very ungrateful

For rack rents, evictions and death.

For fevered ones homeless at Christmas

Cast out by the snowy ditch side

While my lord draws his ermine around him

And scoffs at their rags in his pride.

Ah my lords, up to this it was your day

Our bent necks were held in your thrall

For you were soft ease and rich plenty

For us were the labor and gall.

But today we feel life in our members

Good blood each vein flows apace

Tis not the clenched fist to your back now

But sturdy demand to your face.

Cling not to your old rules they are broken

Old customs have rotted away

Ireland must be at length for the Irish

No more in strange lands shall you squander.

What this land our labor has sown

As of old fell the horse and the rider

You are now overthrown

*Hubert George was an absentee landlord who scarcely set foot in his Irish estate, using a number of land agents to evict 243 tenant farmers, and their families, between 1890 and 1893, for as little as 5 pounds sterling owed in arrears. He was condemned by fellow members of the English Parliament for his cruelty to his tenants.

You Must Read the Orlando Sentinel Article This Morning!!

Orlando Sentinel has an excellent article this morning concerning something we have been wondering, but were too disheartened to file a timely Freedom of Information Act request: what are those 91 extra employees he hired actually doing? How much are they being paid?

Apparently they are doing nothing, and they are being paid rather handsomely for it.

From the article.

"The legislative affairs office of the Department of Environmental Protection e-mailed Hanson on Dec. 30 that "we have not yet heard from Matt Vail for our deputy legislative affairs position. Can we go ahead and try to reach him? Still expecting he will be here to start on next Tuesday?" Records show Vail started the $48,000 job a week after Scott was sworn in.

Likewise, Karen Zeiler, deputy secretary of the Agency for Health Care Administration, told Hanson she hadn't heard from Virginia Haworth, a 22-year-old campaign worker from Panama City, who was supposed to go to work there. Haworth was eventually hired to a $38,000 a year job in the governor's office."

This was just a tidbit. The article will likely make you so damn mad your eyeballs will melt and drip from your sockets.

More to come.

Stan Goes After the Jack Nicklaus Golf Trail HB 1239

Rick Scott and two members of the legislature tried to pull a fast one. Stan was livid and produced a hasty set of videos on the subject. He posted to us, and we posted to facebook on Jack Nicklaus's fan page in a chorus which just may have shut down the project.
Here's the good the bad and the ugly of Stan's take on the idea of putting golf courses inside our state parks.

1.Unnamed dead golf course. One of hundreds in Florida


2 The Majors/Palm Bay


3 Open Land/Palm Bay


4.The Habitat Golf Course


5. Sebastian River Buffer Preserve State Park

Stan Says Here's what I think of your Golf Course plan!