<h3>$141,300</h3>
<h2>Median price of a home in the South Florida counties of Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade, where Zillow.com says the market has bottomed out and prices are starting to rise. The area was one of the hardest hit by the housing bubble, but Zillow says prices are up 1% over last year and are expected to rise 6% in the next.</h2>
Like all loyal Republicans, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has noted that Pres. Obama uses a teleprompter when he delivers a speech. The racist implication is that Obama, a black man, could never be so ARTICULATE on his own, and only comes off looking smart because he’s reading his lines. In fact in 2010, Jr. Sen. Full-of-Himself was quoted in the New York Times ridiculing the president as, “the most articulate and talented teleprompter reader in America.”
Is it any wonder that PoliticalWire.com noted the contrast between Rubio then — all smart-ass know-it-all less-than-original-thinker — and now. Now he is staring straight down as reads his notes, which any Toastmaster participant would recognize as a huge no-no, even for amateurs, and then totally loses it when he can’t find the last page of his speech.
Next time, Wonder Boy, do us all a favor and do as modern speakers the world over — use a frickin’ teleprompter.
What do you do when the facts don’t support your actions, which were based on extremist rhetoric and false notions? If you’re Gov. Rick Scott (GOP/Tea – Fla.) you simply change the mission.
The results are in, and drug testing of welfare recipients as a means to deny them assistance costs more than it saves and fails to shrink the welfare rolls. On the plus side, it shows that drug use is lower among welfare recipients than in the general population.
The facts have Gov. Scott and the Florida legislators who introduced the bill — which is being challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) even as it is under consideration in 25 other states — pivoting. They say their idea wasn’t so much to save taxpayer dollars, which is precisely what they claimed at the time, but to cut illegal drug use and…um…give me a second here…what sounds good? Something about children? Maybe?
“It’s not about money, it’s about the drug issue,” said Rep. Jimmie Smith, R-Lecanto, who sponsored the legislation. “It’s about using every tool we have in the toolbox to fight drugs.”
Jackie Schutz, a spokeswoman for the governor’s office, said the governor agreed: The drug welfare law is about protecting children and getting parents back to work.
So along with saving taxpayers money, fighting drugs, protecting children, and getting parents back to work, that brings the total number of things the new law isn’t accomplishing to four.
It has rightly become the subject of outrage nationwide that George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Fla., was not arrested last month after he allegedly stalked and killed a teenager, Trayvon Martin, whom Zimmerman apparently believed to be a neighborhood prowler.
Zimmerman is free because of a “Stand Your Ground” law in Florida that grants anyone who feels threatened with the right to hurt or kill anyone whom they perceive to be dangerous, regardless of whether the purportedly threatening person is armed. Trayvon Martin, for example, was carrying a package of Skittles and an iced tea.
USA Today reports that “Stand Your Ground” laws have been passed in 21 states:
When former Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) hit the side of an Orlando transit bus earlier this month, it’s doubtful he meant to give opponents in his race to represent a newly drawn Congressional district rich deposits of metaphors to mine. But boy, did he.
Critics point to a history of vehicle violations that might be considered excessive outside of Florida, where according to humorist and Florida resident Dave Barry, the state “automatically issues a driver’s license to every new arrival, including stranded whales. We have so many motorists driving into buildings down here that in some areas you’re safer standing in the middle of the street, where they’re less likely to hit you.”
Santorum famously compared consensual gay relations with “man on dog sex,” and Dozier once said that homosexuality was “something so nasty and disgusting that it makes God want to vomit.”
Now Dozier, who is Santorum’s honorary Florida chairman, has become the first prominent evangelical leader in this cycle to make an issue out of GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney’s religion. In a press release last week, Dozier — an African-American who sees no irony in the fact that he has built his career by promoting anti-gay bigotry — called on Romney “to openly renounce his racist Mormon Religion,” because of passages in the Book of Mormon that are blatantly racist:
Not since Justin Bieber’s biopic, “Never Say Never” has an autobiography been so premature. But first-term Sen. Marco Rubio isn’t letting lack of material keep him from writing a full-length, in-depth look back at his life: all 41 short years of it.
Rubio’s main accomplishment so far has been being born at the right time with genes for attractiveness steeped in his parents’ ideology as Cuban emigrant, right-wing anti-Communists.
The book, reportedly titled, “An American Son,” will acknowledge Rubio’s personal story line deficit of triumph over adversity by drawing heavily on his parents’ lives. That includes their decision to leave Cuba after the Vegas-style excesses of the Batista regime began to fade, and before Castro came to power.
It also reveals his father’s role in a plot to overthrow the Dominican Republic’s dictator, Rafael Trujillo, when the elder Rubio was 18.
But perhaps one of the most interesting tidbits to surface will be Rubio’s admission that when he was 8-years-old, his parents began practicing Mormonism.
If you noticed an avalanche of lawsuits over your decisions, would you:
a) Take a moment to consider objectively what you’ve been doing and adjust your actions going forward, or
b) Pass legislation that says you can no longer be sued.
If you’re a Florida lawmaker, you will pick option B in a heartbeat. And so, Florida’s super-majority Republican legislature, facing court challenges to ALEC-written laws, is now shielding its members from giving testimony or depositions explaining their intentions.
Republicans on the panel [committee] said the move was necessary because more and more groups – teachers, unions, and others – are filing lawsuits against the Legislature and attempting to compel lawmakers and their staff to testify about the “legislative intent” behind what they’ve passed…
In the diplomatic ranks, trained professionals toil,
To keep the peace and tamp down foreign turmoil.
But for Greek ambassador,
Trump picked an artful dodger —
The grifting, drunken blackmailer Kimberly Guilfoyle.
