The cameras rolled this week when Tea Party billionaire and fired CEO Rick Scott chose Florida Rep. Jennifer Carroll (R-Orange Park) as his running mate in his quest for governor. Fortunately, they also rolled a couple of weeks ago, when Carroll addressed her county RPOF chapter and stated all the reasons you should not support Rick Scott. Watch until the end, when Carroll really drives it home.
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.
Florida Gov. Charlie Crist has called a special session of the legislature to consider a constitutional ban on offshore oil drilling. Republicans are crying “foul,” citing the fact that there are already statutes that determine how close drilling can be to Florida’s shores.
“I think it’s completely unnecessary,” said Rep. Matt Hudson, R-Naples, in a view expressed by others. “There’s absolutely no reason we have to go and create a law for something that’s already unlawful.”
What Hudson is saying is that there is no need to add something to the state constitution that’s already been dealt with by statute. Kind of like adding an amendment to the Florida constitution banning same-sex marriage when there’s already a law against it. Obviously there’s no need for that, right?
Hudson didn’t think so in 2008, when he and almost every other Republican politician in Florida, including then GOP-er Gov. Crist, publicly endorsed Amendment 2, a Republican initiative to make same-sex marriage double-triple-really-really-quadriple illegal in Florida.
According to the Louisville, Ky., Courier-Journal, Paul’s board is not nationally recognized:
But that entity is not recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties, which works with the American Medical Association to approve such specialty boards.
Lori Boukas, a spokeswoman for the American Board of Medical Specialties, said her organization considers certifications to be valid only if they are done by the 24 groups that have its approval and that of the AMA.
Boukas of the American Board of Medical Specialties said its 24 member groups, including the widely recognized American Board of Ophthalmology, have stricter standards for board certification than the other groups.
The Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure does not verify doctors’ specialty training and instead directs people to the American Board of Medical Specialties to determine if a doctor is board-certified.
The American Academy of Ophthalmology recognizes board certification only by the American Board of Ophthalmology.
Shortly before the May 18 primary, Paul told the Courier-Journal that he was certified by both boards.
Lies, lies, lies. So many lies that the mind reels and the stomach lurches, trying to keep up. The lies that have been told by Christian extremists in Florida to preserve the state’s archaic and cruel law prohibiting gay adoption should shame anyone who still supports it.
Glenn Beck’s interview with former Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) was a huge embarrassment — his first indisputable failure since he misspelled “oligarch” in September.
Beck apparently went into the interview believing that Massa would finally provide evidence of the Democrats’ purported “culture of corruption” that Beck and Michelle Malkin have been flogging but can’t seem to prove. If horse-trading for votes in Congress is corrupt, then Congress has been steeping in corruption for centuries. And these same soulless right-wing propagandists were largely silent about Bush-era corruption allegations against Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and their approval of torture techniques; Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his DOJ hive of inept Christian law school grads; betrayers of national secrets Cheney, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby; convicted GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff; twice-indicted former House Minority Leader Tom DeLay; Rep. J.D. Hayworth, now running against Sen. John McCain in Arizona; and convicted Rep. Duke Cunningham, just to name a few.
But Massa was not only unforthcoming on corruption, much to Beck’s dismay, he pulled the floor out from under Beck by trumping him on the foundational hypocrisy of Beck’s ideology — hypocrisy he shares with Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity and the rest — that victimhood is a sign of weakness in liberals but a supreme virtue in themselves and their fellow travelers on the right.
Here’s Michael Scherer at Time:
Beck, who is used to controlling the gravitational force of victimhood around him, kept interrupting to point out that he was a bigger target of even greater forces than Massa. “I have two unauthorized biographies coming out against me in the spring,” Beck said at one point. Minutes later, Beck went even further. “Do you realize my family is at stake?” he said. “You’ve got a little scandal with your children in college. I’ve got one for all time now, because I am not going to resign. I’m not going to back down. I have come to a place where I believe at some point the system will destroy me.”
…But in Massa, Beck found a sort of liberal doppelgänger, a mesmerizing train wreck of a man who was impossible to undercut in the classic fashion. To many conservative allies of Beck, it probably didn’t come as too much of a surprise. In recent days, prominent Republicans like Bill Kristol had expressly warned Beck and others about coming to Massa’s defense just because he was alleging dirty tricks by the Obama White House. “We shouldn’t get into the business of being pro-Massa just because we are antihealth care,” Kristol said Monday on Fox. The ruling talk-radio king, Rush Limbaugh, spent much of Tuesday making clear that he would not be tied to Massa, after spending much of Monday praising Massa’s revelations about Democratic Party politics. “Anybody who embraces this guy is in big trouble,” Limbaugh said…
The conservative blogger Michelle Malkin called into [Beck’s radio] show to tell Beck he was making a mistake. “This guy deserves 60 minutes of our time, really?” Malkin asked.
Beck would not budge. But as those 60 minutes came to an end Tuesday afternoon, the rabble-rouser seemed to recognize that he had fallen into a trap. The Beck big top has room for only one carnival barker at a time. “I think I have wasted your time,” Beck said, staring into the camera at an audience he once spent weeks telling about fanciful FEMA prison camps. “I think this is the first time I have wasted an hour of your time.”
Here’s the audio of Beck and Malkin squabbling over the Massa interview:
It’s one thing to lie but quite another when the man who falsely accuses the president of the United States of seeking to indoctrinate school kids into liberal politics is known back home as a indoctrinator of school kids into the GOP.
That’s exactly the situation we have with Jim Greer, the chairman of the Florida GOP, according to Scott Maxwell, a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel:
There once was a political operative who loved to tell crowds he had a simple way of explaining to children the difference between Republicans and Democrats.
“Republicans get up and go to work,” he would tell his son. “Democrats get up and go down to the mailbox to get their checks.”
This man not only talked to his son about Republican values, he went into public-school classrooms and talked about them as well.
That man is Jim Greer — the same Jim Greer who, as chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, just threw a nationwide hissy fit, claiming that the classroom is no place for politics and Barack Obama’s “indoctrination.”
Maxwell called Greer to discuss this apparent hypocrisy, but as is typical of the Republican hypocrites of our era, Greer sees a big difference in his screwing around with the minds of children and what — without even having read the president’s speech, of course — he called Pres. Obama’s attempts to spread “liberal lies”:
To hear Trump talk, he’s the only one
Who’s ever stood trial for crimes he’s done.
But instead of courtroom drama,
We get Trump in his pajamas,
That’s how he earned his new nickname: Don Snoreleone.
