The long list of people to turn down a chance to be Scott’s Lieutenant Governor include state Sen. Paula Dockery, former Lt. Gov. (under Jeb Bush) Toni Jennings, University of North Florida Pres. John Delaney, and state Reps. Mike Weinstein and Juan Zapata. It got to the point earlier in the week that Florida politicos were tweeting in jest, “Deeply honored but must turn down Scott running mate offer. Would take too much time from family.”
As Scott finds the field of Number Twos narrowing, persistent rumors point to his selection of state Rep. Jennifer Carroll (R-Orange Park). Like Scott, Carroll has had more than her share of ethics questions during her years of pubic service.
She has trouble stating her net worth on financial disclosures, an issue which first came to light when Carroll sought to qualify for contracts awarded to small and emerging minority and female-owned businesses. According to Jacksonville’s Folio Weekly:
Carroll’s explanations…of her true net worth only add confusion to a story about Carroll’s finances [and] the financial disclosure forms that Carroll filed with the Florida Commission on Ethics between 2002-2005. During that period, Carroll’s net worth jumped all over the place, from $23 million in 2004 to $202 million in 2005. Carroll explained to Folio Weekly then that she had made an error in 2005, and she did amend her state report for 2005, to reflect a net worth of $2.02 million.
Despite that correction, Carroll’s 2006 answers about her fluctuations in fortune and her actual net worth don’t correspond with what she reported to the city that same year as she sought [the special] certification.
Whether Carroll used “representative’s privilege” to get out of a traffic ticket is also a persistent question. But no matter. Ethics, after all, are not Scott’s concern. The billionaire tea bagger spent a reported $50 million of his own money to beat McCollum with an ad campaign that saturated Florida airwaves. Scott was also a main funder of the ugly “astroturf” resistance to health care reform, exemplified during the summer of 2009 at town hall meetings where red-faced, white-haired white people waved signs printed by Scott’s Conservatives for Patient Rights, and shouted slogans dreamed up by Dick Armey about socialism in the faces of their elected representatives.
So Carroll, whose lackluster record as a representative includes no major legislation and a 100 percent voting rating from the pro-growth, anti-environment Florida Chamber of Commerce, seems like a perfect pick. She was the first Republican African American woman elected to the Florida legislature, is a former Navy jet mechanic, a rightwing abstinence-only Christian, and will offset Scott’s lily-mortician-whiteness. Stay tuned for an announcement soon.
In other words, Carroll is a rw nut. Based on something I read a couple days ago, in the primary election, Kendrick Meek suffered in Florida’s rural areas because the tea party is particularly strong in these parts of the state. I’m not quite so sure that having Carroll on the ticket will help Scott significantly in the general election because, if Meek’s race worked against him in the rural areas of Florida, I wouldn’t rule it out as a very important factor in whether people are willing to vote for Scott if he adds Carroll to he ticket.
I’m wondering how all those super religious kook southerners who love to quote the Bible will vote in November. Jesus dined with tax collectors and sinners, and pardoned them all, even the town prostitute, but He was especially harsh with the elders, Pharisees, called them HYPOCRITES, likened them to whitened sepulchres nice and clean on the outside but inside full of decay and dead mens’ bones. Seems like the Republicans have a good team, the candidate, accused by the party elders themselves of corruption When bilking the government and the poor, the corporation he led was fined over one billion dollars, and this woman “a former jet mechanic” how did she amass over 2 million dollars, did she inherit that money? I’d be curious to know. Will they be obliged to file statements before the elections?
How can these political hacks make such a 180 degree reversal? There is no honor among politicians and thieves