While I appreciate the Gator sentiment in this House floor appearance by Jacksonville Congresswoman Corrine Brown, word that she is mulling a U.S. Senate bid makes me think that perhaps we might want a Senator who could actually read a simple congratulatory message.
By Dan Sullivan
PoHo contributor
Dear Attorney General Bill McCollum,
There’s no easy way to tell you this, so I think I’ll just go ahead and say it: I think we should see other people. Don’t get me wrong, you’re a great guy and all, but I’m just not so sure I can handle a serious relationship with you for governor. It’s not you, it’s me. Well, actually, it’s just you.
Cristina Silva has a great story over at Bay Buzz about how the St. Petersburg City Council has a letter queued up to go to Gov. Charlie Crist urging a veto of SB 216, a good-government bill by local Sen. Charlie Justice.
Upshot is that city officials want to keep the ability to spend your money to tell you how to vote on city referenda or other issues. They say this bill is overly broad and could result in local elected officials getting arrested, they say. It is on the St. Petersburg City Council agenda for Thursday’s meeting, so if you can go and tell them to stuff it, that might be a good idea.
Download the draft letter in .pdf format after the jump:
Bill McCollum, currently the most dangerous weasel in Florida politics, yesterday announced the endorsements of 60 state legislators. (This is, of course, a meaningless gesture. I remember having the endorsements of just about every member of the House during my work managing the 2004 Johnnie Byrd for US Senate campaign and look where that got him. A fourth-place primary finish.)
The nine West Central Florida Republicans lining up to stroke their presumptive nominee (perhaps not presumptive? Recall our earlier story about possible challenger Paula Dockery) are Sens. Victor Crist, Mike Fasano and Nancy Detert; and Reps. Ed Homan, Ed Hooper, Faye Culp, John Legg, Peter Nehr and Will Weatherford.
Yes, I know, it is a wonky issue. SB 360. Most Floridians don’t give a crap about growth management. Just get the economy going and cut my taxes to near nothing while boosting public services, parks and investments in infrastructure, they figure.
Right.
But Charlie Crist’s cowardly signing Monday of the bill that the St. Petersburg Times says sets back Florida’s growth management by 20 years. He didn’t have a public signing, opting instead for a 5 p.m. news release from his flacks. How shameful not only to do the wrong thing but to hide like a guilty 5-year-old while doing it.
How do you sign a “growth management” bill that even the wildly pro-growth Hillsborough County Commission opposes???
Signing SB 360 leaves Crist’s legacy as a popular governor who didn’t fight the tough fights and who made his decisions on a matrix of how many influential Floridians and/or voters would love him for it. On that scale, SB 360 had lots of upside (campaign contributions for his Senate campaign in 2010) and no downside (the handful of environmentalists and planners who give a crap about such things doesn’t amount to enough to elect the local dog catcher).
And this man wants to be our next U.S. senator? What a chickenshit.
Photo Credit: kwalk628 Flickr.com
By Kelly Cornelius
PoHo contributor & R-LAND activist
No ceremonial photo-op for this signing, probably because nobody wants to see the Governor bending over for special interests but in my opinion that is exactly what he did by signing SB 360. This bill guts Florida’s growth management laws (yes, we had some) and everyone but special interests and their politicians are against it.
The only good news? This should be exactly what we need to get Florida Hometown Democracy approved by the voters in 2010.
By Ben Luongo
PoHo contributor
The Marion County School Board has ruled on the Code of Student Conduct, which now requires students to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, after a meeting last week. For months, the school board debated the proposed change to the code which wouldn’t require students to stand. Veterans from the area attended the meeting to protest the proposed change arguing that not standing for the pledge is disrespectful. The only leeway in the code allows students not to stand as long as they have a note from their parents.
The school board decided to remove the “standing clause” last year after a federal court ruling did not require students to stand. However, this change was met with pressure for the past couple of months from local veterans and possible lawsuits.
Are we comfortable with requiring our students to stand?
By Jim Johnson
PoHo contributor and founder of The State of Sunshine
In case you missed it, Gov. Charlie Crist made a slight step this week that could help in his Senate race. Especially when you add it to a measure from the 2008 session.
This week, Crist signed the 2009-2010 budget for the State of Florida. Florida’s governor has line-item veto power, a tool many governors use to nix budget provisions with which they disagree. This year, Crist vetoed two items: the first veto restored state workers salaries to current levels, undoing the 2 percent pay cut passed by the Legislature.
The second veto, however, was a bit more important to Crist’s political future.
By Heidi Lux
Daily Loaf contributor
Cross-posted from the Daily Loaf blog.
I have a secret I can no longer keep. It burns my soul and pains my conscience. I had an affair. I loved a man
powerful in Florida politics, and he loved me back. I cannot reveal his name. My honor and his lawyers do not permit me. I will refer to him only as C. He currently seeks more power, and I know that rumors will begin to fly, so I submit my story publicly to save us both, and our love, from the public’s harsh scrutiny.
It all began in the winter of 2008. I was a 19-year-old USF student, wandering through my studies with no real direction, still trying to find myself among the textbooks and study halls. My life did not live up to my name – Destiny St. Clair – and my bright red hair spoke of an excitement I could not claim. I was, I must say, average in every way, certainly not the type you might soon expect to be sipping champagne on yachts with the most powerful man in the state.
I can remember the exact moment my life changed forever. Jan. 30, 2008, the day John McCain won the Florida Republican primaries. “That man is such a silver fox,” my older sister, Fate, said as we watched the announcement on TV. C. was standing at a podium behind John McCain, looking pleased as they announced the elderly senator’s victory. “How is that man even still a bachelor.”
By George Niemann
PoHo contributor and UCAN-Hillsborough activist
I got an invitation to attend a Town Hall Capital Update Meeting being hosted by District 62 Rep. Rich Glorioso in Plant City. Now some of you may be saying to yourselves, “That’s not my district, I don’t care what he has to say.”
Ah, but you should care what he has to say and here’s why.
Photo credit: amerune at Flickr.com
OR
Photo credit: Daquella Manera at Flickr.com YOU DECIDE!
By Kelly Cornelius
PoHo contributor and R-LAND activist
As if the past dirty deeds and developer-driven agendas of many of our Hillsborough County commissioners wasn’t proof enough (yes, we mean you Team Sprawl) now the Florida Legislature has shown you exactly why we need Florida Hometown Democracy (FHD). FHD is a citizen-driven initiative that would allow voters to make growth decisions instead of leaving it in the greased and dirty hands of politicians. To help make the case for FHD, there is this year’s legislative session.
Where to begin?
Dan Waite e-mailed me to tip me off to his first effort to make and post a political video, and it is a good one, explaining how Senate Bill 360 that is on Gov. Charlie Crist’s desk is a bad one.
I was on Rob Lorei’s Florida This Week last Friday and was asked to lead off discussion of Florida’s chances of getting high-speed rail. I was taken by surprise, because I had studied Barack Obama’s stimulus plan extensively, especially its engineering aspects, for a freelance piece I did for the UF Engineering College alumni magazine and didn’t remember any money being set aside for high-speed rail in Florida.
It turns out that even Obama himself mentioned Florida as a possible recipient in a recent speech. But I’m guessing that it’s more of a hope than a reality, and a South Florida Sun-Sentinel story lays out the problems with Florida being competitive for some of $8 billion set aside in stimulus dollars for a Miami-Orlando-Tampa high-speed train:
By Kelly Cornelius
PoHo contributor and R-LAND activist
A piece in the Times from Senator Mike Bennett-R who spawned SB 360 (a bill that dismantles growth management), shares his idea of smart growth as it is titled For smart Fla growth. OK, Mr. Bennett, I guess that depends on what your definition of smart is. He says in part:
The bill promotes growth in dense urban areas by removing the state required costs of transportation concurrency and the duplicative development of regional impact (DRI) process within those areas.
(Nimby translation: Developers shouldn’t have to foot the bill for more growth by having to pay for infrastructure; that is what you taxpayers are for.)
By Kelly Cornelius
PoHo contributor
photo by shioshvili flickr.com
You heard me. Hillsborough Commissioners under the threat of a teetering bond rating voted for automatic annual increases for water rates that total to 1.72 percent for FY 2010. Read the rest of this entry »
By Kelly Cornelius
PoHo contributor and R-LAND activist
Nice going-away present, Guv. According to this article, The Suntanned One sounds like he is going to sign SB 360 the ill-conceived bill that guts what little growth management we do did have. Maybe he didn’t get that opposition email from our County Commission yet, huh? Unless he switches teams last minute it sounds like we are screwed. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s the latest tweak of our enormously popular governor, from his friends across the aisle in the Florida Democratic Party. It’s the first online ad with the “Cut and Run Crist” theme that the party has been drum-beating since Crist announced his Senatorial bid last week.
2008 GOP presidential nominee John McCain, who spurned Charlie Crist in his vice presidential selection process, has endorsed the Florida governor in Crist’s bid for the U.S. Senate in 2010. The Florida Capital Bureau reports:
I’ll let his video speak for itself. Here’s the GOP entry into the CFO race, Senate President Jeff Atwater:
You may recall from this blog earlier in the year that the state was considering, to be quite blunt about it, selling the stretch of I-75 known as Alligator Alley (across the Everglades and Big Cypress Swamp) to the highest bidder, who would pay the state upfront and then collect the tolls on it for decades to come. (Technically, it was a long-term lease, but the net effect is the same.)
The plan sucked. And now, one South Florida lawmaker tells the Fort Myers News-Press, it is dead, at least for now:
Alligator Alley will remain in the hands of the state, for now. The Florida Department of Transportation received no bids to lease the 78-mile section of Interstate 75 by Monday’s deadline.
Sen. Dave Aronberg, D-Greenacres, said he hopes the state’s efforts to lease the alley are over.
“This idea was ill-conceived from the very beginning. It was sped through the process with minimal public input, and it deserves to be dead and buried forever,” said Aronberg, whose bill to bar foreign companies from leasing state roads did not pass during session.
“It was a bad deal for taxpayers, a bad deal for the state of Florida and would have set a dangerous precedent.”
Here’s the bad news:
Bill sponsor J.D. Alexander
By Kelly Cornelius
PoHo contributor & R-LAND activist
Who in the Florida Legislature voted to make water use approval easier to get and take away wetlands permitting from local officials by giving it to a five member statewide board while also eliminating any power from the public by having closed meetings? Why, everyone, that is who.
Florida’s right-wing attorney general, Bill McCollum, is set to confirm his gubernatorial bid this morning, a genuinely scary thought since he could be a fluke election away from being our next governor.
Here’s my column from the upcoming print Creative Loafing issue about how McCollum should be freaking you out by now:
By Mitch Perry
PoHo contributor
Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio
When Marco Rubio declared his candidacy for U.S. Senate earlier this month, he said his campaign wasn’t “against anyone or anything.” On the Spanish language Univision Network, however, his tone was as different as the idiom, saying he was interested in combating “the kind of American Socialism that they want to establish in the U.S.”
Last Friday night in Tampa, I asked the former House speaker, who will compete head to head against Gov. Charlie Crist for the nomination to succeed Mel Martinez in the Senate next year, what exactly did he mean by that?
photo by .res flickr.com
By Kelly Cornelius
PoHo contributor & R-LAND activist
After months of hounding from activists and even early coverage in both papers including this editorial in the Trib dated Feb 21st, 2009 the Hillsborough County Commission finally weighs in on Senate Bill 360, a bad revamp of Florida’s growth-management safeguards. This is a bill that everyone (except developers and their politicians) thinks is a bad idea. The bill’s sponsor is Mike Bennett -R of Bradentucky Bradenton. So, after two months of Legislative Session where the bill sailed through committees and was voted on twice on the floor in the House and three times in the Senate and eventually passed on the last day of Session, our commission, at the urging of Commissioner Mark Sharpe decide to discuss it. You would have thought they were being asked to consider…..gasp…… domestic partnership benefits or something considering the discussion. Some of them acted surprised or feigned ignorance about the content of the bill citing that things change minute by minute in bills in Tallahassee and while that is true the bigger truth is that the main things in the bill that everyone was screaming about, transportation concurrency and no reviews for DRIs (big ass subdivisions) have been in the bill since the beginning as noted in this Feb 20th article by Mariella Smith. Read the rest of this entry »
By Ben Luongo
PoHo contributor
Only after Charlie Crist announced his bid for the Senate was Marco Rubio’s campaign message, to use his words, “coming into focus.” After Crist announced his Senate candidacy, Rubio aired his first attack ad which linked Crist to President Barack Obama. Rubio then went on Fox News to pitch his campaign and talk about why Crist is not the man for the job.
Here is her video launch:
Having another guv from the Tampa Bay area (Alex Sink and her hubby, former gov candidate Bill McBride, still have a large lakefront home out in Thonotosassa in eastern Hillsborough) wouldn’t be a bad thing. Last one was Bob Martinez in the 1980s. And today, Sink, a former banker turned Florida’s chief financial officer, made it official that she will seek (and get) the Democratic nomination for governor in 2010 as Charlie Crist flees the mansion.
The Palm Beach Post has her full statement:
By Lorna Bracewell
PoHo contributor
eQuality Giving, an online community that provides strategic advice for philanthropists interested in legal equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer Americans, has ranked all 50 states according to the number of Equality Goals each has achieved. On this States of Equality list, Florida ranks an embarrassing 37th with a score of 1.5 out of a possible 6 points barely beating out Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and other shining beacons of progressivism.
What hurt the Sunshine State’s score?
From the nascent Draft Jeb! movement. We can only hope the movement is limited to the folks in this photo, but knowing the state’s electorate the way I do, I doubt it.
“Some politicians support trillions in reckless spending…” is one of the attack lines from the Marco Rubio campaign as it launches a full spread of phaser and photon torpedoes (yes, we’re staying with the Star Trek theme until the movie drops below $10m a week at the box office) at Charlie Crist just minutes after the governor declared his candidacy for the U.S. Senate.
The ad, predictably, ties Crist at the hip with President Barack Obama.
Charlie Crist went the Obama route (more ammo for the ultra-wingers??) and announced his 2010 U.S. Senate campaign via Twitter and e-mail.
From Twitter at 0910 hrs.:
After thoughtful consideration with my wife Carole, I have decided to run for the U.S. Senate.
Many people expect an announcement that Florida Gov. Charlie Crist will say he’s running for the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, when the governor is set to announce his political future. To be sure, an open Senate seat does not come along very often … but this could be a major problem for Republicans.
From the Associated Press:
Legislative negotiators agreed on what Gov. Charlie Crist called a “great” deal to expand gambling at Seminole Indian casinos Wednesday, some six hours after their talks were on the brink of collapse.
Both sides made concessions. The House accepted a broader gaming expansion than many of its members wanted. The Senate agreed to less than it had been pushing for.
The agreement has the potential to generate millions of dollars for state coffers that have been shrinking due the faltering economy.
From March on Politics:
Negotiations between the state House and Senate over how much to expand gambling in Florida appear to be at an impasse, despite pressure from Gov. Charlie Crist for the two sides to reach an agreement.
As he did yesterday, Crist took the unusual step of showing up for a meeting of the negotiators that just concluded, a way of demonstrating his concern and pushing the two sides to reach an agreement. Also attending were tribal leaders and their representatives.
But he can’t have been encouraged with what he saw: The top House negotiator, state Rep. Bill Galvano, R-Bradenton, accusing the Senate of “going backward” in the negotiations and then stalking out of the room as the meeting adjourned, with a closing comment that suggested there might be no more meetings.
A 360 of flip-flops … get it? (photo: Katy Warner/flickr.com)
By Kelly Cornelius
PoHo contributor & R-LAND activist
Well, my earlier post on who voted in support of SB 360 (a gutting of growth management laws) caused quite a stir, and as Wayne already reported and corrected on that post, State Sen. Victor Crist actually changed his last vote on the growth management bill from yes to no. I do apologize that I did not find that change online before submitting that post. I spoke with Crist himself Tuesday afternoon regarding the issue. He wanted to make sure I understood the process so I will share his explanation with you as well. Read the rest of this entry »
