Month: August 2011

What Was in Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s Conveniently Deleted Emails?

Trish
ScottsLips
Scott's lips are sealed

From the moment Floridians heard that the penalties for Gov. Rick Scott (Tea/GOP) “losing” emails sent to and from his transition team ranged from a $500 fine to IMPEACHMENT (yeah, baby!), the story grabbed our attention in the way a big, juicy, limping mouse claims the attention of a cat on a diet.

Now Florida Democrats are starting to have fun with that mouse, launching the Rick Scott Email Recovery Fund to help track down the missing missives.

Here’s what happened. Scott, as is his wont, privatized communication handling during the two months after he bought the election and before he was inaugurated. During this time, he was assembling his cabinet and staff, and determining his administration’s agenda. Almost of these emails concerning the public’s business were deleted in mid-January, immediately after Scott took office.

That’s the short version. The long version has us smelling a rat.

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GOP Florida Sen. Rubio: Social Security ‘Weakened Us As a People’

Jon Ponder

art-assault-floridaPart of the series, Assault on Florida.Via Digby:

RUBIO: These programs actually weakened us as a people. You see, almost forever, it was institutions in society that assumed the role of taking care of one another. If someone was sick in your family, you took care of them. If a neighbor met misfortune, you took care of them. You saved for your retirement and your future because you had to. We took these things upon ourselves in our communities, our families, and our homes, and our churches and our synagogues. But all that changed when the government began to assume those responsibilities. All of a sudden, for an increasing number of people in our nation, it was no longer necessary to worry about saving for security because that was the government’s job.

Diby’s take:

Isn’t that nice? If only we could go back to the days of Ward and June Cleaver when everyone took care of each other and didn’t need things like money or health insurance when they got old and sick and couldn’t work. Back in the good old days everyone took care of the poor and there was no suffering or pain. It was one big happy family. Except, of course, that’s just crap.

Think Progress reports:

[P]rior to Medicare’s enactment in 1965, “about one-half of America’s seniors did not have hospital insurance,” “more than one in four elderly were estimated to go without medical care due to cost concerns,” and one in three seniors were living in poverty. Today, nearly all seniors have access to affordable health care and only about 14 percent of seniors are below the poverty line.

Study: Tea Party Is Least Popular Group

Jon Ponder
Source: RMS/MSNBC, via David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam
Source: David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam via RMS/MSNBC

Over the past week or so, there has been considerable coverage of the results of new study on the tea party that tracked the rise of the “movement” from 2006.

The tea party is really nothing more than the same racist social conservatives who have been seeking dominion over American politics since the Reagan era.

The first news that came out of the study, which was introduced by its authors — David E. Campbell, an associate professor of political science at Notre Dame, and Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, who are also the co-authors of the book, “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us” — in a New York Times’ piece titled, “Crashing the Tea Party,” was that they found yet more evidence that the most durable myth about the phenomenon — that it is a grassroots uprising of what Profs. Campbell and Putnam called “nonpartisan political neophytes” — is patently false.

To the contrary, their research underscored what many observers have long-suspected — that the tea party is really nothing more than the same racist social conservatives who have been seeking dominion over American politics since the Reagan era.

But there was another finding from the study that is even more damning of the fake grassroots tea party phenomenon — a factor that makes the tea party’s total domination over Republican Party leaders in Congress even more puzzling:

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Big Government? Let’s Talk Reagan

Trish

35,000

Number less of non-military federal employees under Pres. Obama, compared to Pres. Reagan. Obama, like every Democratic president starting with Jimmy Carter, has cut federal employees, while every Republican, starting with Reagan, has increased them. When Reagan employed 2,875,000 non-military employees in 1980, the American population was 226.5 million. Obama employs 2,840,000 serving a national population of 330 million.