Elections Matter: The Past, The Present, The Future

Elections are in the news here and there and everywhere.

To the past, a previous election from weeks ago is still making the news because it just only had gotten resolved about 50 minutes ago in real-time (I was about to write something else and blamm-o, deal got done).  I speak of the Israel election:

With just an hour to spare before a deadline, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced late Wednesday that he has succeeded in forming a coalition government.
According to Israel Radio, Netanyahu came to an agreement with the final party required for a coalition, the right-wing Jewish Home party, at 10:30 p.m. local time...
...Netanyahu had six weeks to form a government after the March 17 elections in which his Likud party won 30 seats. They beat his main rival, Zionist Union's Isaac Herzog, who won 24 seats. Netanyahu now has one week to present his coalition and Cabinet to the Knesset.
Netanyahu's government is likely to be a right-wing government with 61 seats out of a 120 seats in the Israeli parliament, the bare minimum to form a coalition.
One of his primary coalition partners, Avigdor Liberman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, announced in recent days that he was leaving the coalition and resigning his post as foreign minister, which would cut Netanyahu's coalition from a strong 67 seats to a weak 61 seats...

Coalitions matter in Israel and other nations because the proportional voting system combined with their parliamentary form of government means multiple parties spread across a finite voting populace: creating several large parties with pluralities but not majorities, and giving the smaller parties chances to form coalitions and extort prizes and favors.

This means the strength of the prime minister in a coalition majority depends entirely on how many parties he can pull together to form enough votes to avoid a government collapse.  As of now, Netanyahu is about one vote away from a defection on any key legislation into a tie vote, and two defections away from a failed vote.  I'm not entirely sure if a single failed vote would be construed as a no-confidence that could collapse the entire coalition and force a new election, but I think I've seen that happen before... a lot... with Italy's government.

Netanyahu may well be on the hardest tight-rope walk ever of his long - and questionably corrupt - prime ministerial career.  He's formed a hard-right coalition, but each party is led by a factionalist some of whom aren't entirely fond of Netanyahu on a personal level.  He has to placate some factions more than before to keep them happy... but doing so risks the possibility of outraging the rest of the nation and alienating one of the more centrist coalition members into quitting the group.

That election may be in the past, but the results of it - close and as far from a solid majority as any government would want - will haunt Netanyahu's current coaltion for the next year, if it even lasts that long.

It helps an election if the results are clear-cut and obvious.  Like the one that just happened in the Canadian province of Alberta.

The news about it since last night has sent shockwaves across Canada and even into the U.S.  Not because of the results - polling ahead of time showed the New Democratic Party was going to win over the once-controlling Tories/Progressive Conservatives - but because of the crushing decisiveness of the results and how it signaled leadership change to a region that hadn't switched hands in over 40 years:

The NDP, a party that had never won more than 16 seats, captured more than 50 to secure a majority in the 87-seat legislature.
The Wildrose party took second place and will form the official Opposition, while Prentice and his battered PCs were relegated to third.
It was a crushing defeat for the Tories, who had steered the ship of state since 1971—longer than any party anywhere in the country...
...(Outgoing leader Jim Prentice) took over a party in September that had been stung by scandals under former premier Alison Redford. Legislature members and the premier were using government planes for party business and Redford ordered that a penthouse apartment be built for herself on top of a renovated government building.
The party had also failed to build promised schools and was criticized for lavish salaries and severance payouts to political staff and government executives...

While the real causes of the switch between the conservative PC party and the more liberal-labour NDC are many, it basically breaks down to one thing: the Progressive Conservatives had been in office too long (over 40 years!), took their hold on power for granted, did little to keep the populace happy, got corrupted, and got bent.  That corrupt attitude and failure to respond to the electorate shows in the shocking fortunes of the Wildrose party - a more hard-core conservative group - that won second place.  People were so fed up with the Conservatives that they fled to the more wingnut party out of spite.

Still, this is a huge seismic shift in electoral favor.  Alberta had long been one of the more conservative provinces (not state, they ain't like up Oop North) in all of Canada.  When the Red State/Blue State divide in the United States back in 2004 created homogeneous blocks of Conservative/Liberal zones, the mapmakers of the so-called Jesusland would add Alberta as part of that Red State empire (with the Blue States and the rest of Canada labels the United States of Canada).

You have to admit, having one party in control of anything - a state or province, the nation as a whole - for more than two decades is pushing the limits of effective and responsive leadership.  Parties that stay in power calcify, get lazy, get to thinking nothing can topple them, get to thinking they know what they're doing even if they keep repeating the same mistakes.  Fresh ideas become fewer, needed reforms less likely as they butt against the status quo.  Not to say that turnover for the sake of turnover is good - that way leads to losing too many people who do know what they're doing, and disrupts any long-term fixing of problems - but if the same clowns have been in power for more than four decades, I guarantee you things have gotten sloppy and stupid.

This is still a big deal.  This is akin to a state like South Carolina - long a home of conservative ideology regardless of which party (Democrats before 1964, Republicans after 1972) ran it - suddenly voting out every Confederate flag-waver and replacing them with pro-choice civil rights advocates who all attend Unitarian services (in short, beyond impossible).  The seating went for 16 for the New Democrats all the way up to 50 out of 87 seats: about 20 percent up to 60 percent, about as solid a majority as the Republicans here in Congress controlling the House.

Alberta's election has long-term implications.  The reigning national Conservatives long counted on Alberta as their base of support: if they've lost that many voters this year, it's not likely those voters will turn around and vote for them in the national elections this autumn.  And this election has ramifications for other future elections, not just for who controls Ottawa.

It's not entirely clear if what happened in Alberta will affect the major partner of the British Commonwealth, but the United Kingdom elections that are happening tomorrow (or today depending on your time zone, a big hello to any of the UK readers I get if any) may see some voters inspired by the conservative kick-out by their Canadian cousins.

The UK Parliament is up for vote for the House of Commons, and right now the whole thing is a literal dead heat with an unlikely majority.

The three major parties - conservative Tories, socialist Labour, liberal Democrats (no relation) - are in somewhat bad shape.  The Conservatives under Cameron have had a messy, destructive five years of coalition rule: their austerity measures of social spending cuts and tax hikes on middle-income people hurt their economy.  The Liberals under Clegg made the mistake of selling their collective souls to the conservatives to become part of a coalition, and got caught defending bad conservative policies that hurt their own standing and weakened them for this cycle.  Labour is being touted as the least evil of the three now - which is telling you something - but are led by a bland figure in Miliband whose lack of charisma hurt the national campaign, while the party itself still has not recovered its reputation after the disastrous end of the Blair/Gordon years.

The likelihood of another coalition government gets scarier when you factor in the other once-smaller "third" parties that are more wingnut than the major parties.  In particular, the rise of what's known as UKIP, which was polling at a popularity percentage of 13 percent.  Try to picture it this way, America: UKIP is anti-EU (which for British politics isn't too crazy actually), anti-regulation (libertarian/Randian), anti-Arab (neocon hater wannabes), anti-immigrant (uh-oh), racist (hoo-boy)... Lemme put it another way, America: picture the Klu Klux Klan with 13 percent of the voting base and you've got an idea what the UKIP represents.

Here's the thing: if the Conservatives win just enough over Labour but not enough for its own majority, and the UKIP is sitting there with just enough seats to form a coalition... yeah, be afraid America, our best international ally just went Teabagger on us.  The irony of it may be lost in the trans-Atlantic transition...

There's also the possibility that if Labour wins just a few seats over Conservatives but not enough to control, they'd have to see about forming a coalition with the Dems (no relation), if Clegg's party is able to hold enough seats of their own.  It's more likely Labour could form a coalition with the Scottish National Party, which is poised to clean up most of Scotland's seating in Parliament... but which Cameron claims is an "illegitimate" move, leading to an international crisis on a scale equal to Election 2000.

Part of me is wondering if the British voters paid attention to Alberta: having seen an ineffective conservative government get ousted by the voters had to have given them the same idea among the non-affiliated voters.  It's a question if it happened too soon or if it happened at exactly the right time for it to have an effect in Great Britain itself...

I mentioned before how Alberta's election can affect the national Canadian elections set for October.  The potential downturn in support for the national Conservatives does not yet translate into gains for the other major factions, but the New Democrats have to be energized by their win here to motivate turnout everywhere else - where more liberal/left-of-center voters reside.  It may yet shock the national Conservatives into moderating their message rather than react more radical (although that's unlikely: the hard-core members are too set in their ways by now).

And even though Alberta's election was only in Canada, it has an effect across the border here in the United States.  The New Dems campaigned on a strong pro-environment anti-oil platform.  The incoming leader, Rachel Notley, promised to end the aggressive push for the controversial Keystone pipeline (calling it now an American problem, not Canada's).  That she won a decisive majority in what had been a province overly reliant on the energy corporations means that the climate change argument is a winning one even in pro-oil markets.  I would think the Koch Brothers and other energy conglomerates pushing the Climate Denial are reconsidering their options.  ...Nah, the Teabagger faction here in the U.S. is too far gone...

But there are other lessons to learn here for American politics gearing up for the major 2016 Presidential elections (with key Senate races as well).  First off, the conservative message of the last forty years - deregulate, cut taxes, cut social spending, worship the rich - is not as potent as it was under the Age of Reagan.  Voters who lived for decades in a free-market, far right region like Alberta have gotten sick of it and finally tuned out.

We're about due to see the same thing here in the U.S.: the same amount of decades of massive tax cuts and diminishing social services are starting to adversely affect places like Kansas and other Red States.  Decades of unchanging political leadership like here in Florida are starting to show signs not only of corruption but also complacency and ineptitude, and worse tuning out on the needs of the local voters crying for leadership on health care and climate change.

There's an irony here because the conservative Republicans are charging headlong into the Presidential race on the belief that they are due for taking back the White House.  People are wondering why so many Far Right GOP'ers are putting their names up for consideration this primary season need to consider the myth of the Pendulum Swing: the idea (ignoring actual history) that the White House tends to swing back and forth from one party to another.  That after a two-term Presidency, the party in opposition is poised to take over the Presidency for their own two terms.

As I noted, that ignores actual history.  External factors - weak national parties leading to constant one-termers that dominated much of the mid-19th Century, Presidents dying in office leaving weak replacement Veeps in charge, ongoing national moods such as the post-Civil War "Bloody Shirt" dominance by Republicans (1861 to 1912, barring exceptions) and post-Depression dominance by Democrats between 1932 to 1968 (with Ike the exception) - have more to do with which party controls the Presidency.

What really matters is performance in the White House: if one party does well, the voting electorate will continue to back that party until things fall apart for it, much in the way 40-plus years control of Alberta fell apart for the Conservatives.  The reasons Bush the Lesser won after the Bill Clinton two-terms had more to do with Al Gore avoiding his campaign to link to the still-popular Clinton, as well as a broken voting system in Florida that threw the results into chaos.  The reason Obama won in 2008 after two terms of Bush the Lesser had a lot to do with the disasters of the Bush II administration - collapsed economy, bad wars, failed policies.  Nixon won in 1968 because LBJ's disastrous administration led to the end of the New Deal era that carried over through the FDR, Truman, and Kennedy administrations (and also through the Eisenhower Republican tenure, which is telling).

In all other cases, a popular Presidency leads to the successor candidates gaining their own terms.  Jefferson begat Madison who begat Monroe (who benefited from an era where the opposition party died away) who begat Adams... who flopped as President.  Jackson led to Van Buren... who flopped, and at this point the one-terms moved into play as the regional factions divided the nation (and the dominant Democratic party) up towards the Civil War.  The alienation of the Democrats post-war pretty much gave Republicans control of the White House from Grant to Hayes to Garfield to Arthur... and that was with Grant's administration being one of the most corrupt in political history and with Hayes honestly losing but eking out a corrupt deal due to the Republicans wielding enough political clout to pull it off.  Cleveland becomes the Democratic hiccup between Arthur (Harrison kinda shouldn't count) and McKinley, who begat Teddy on his own successful two-terms who begat Taft (broken up by Wilson due to the GOP schism between Teddy and Taft) leading to Harding and Coolidge and Hoover... at which point the Great Depression shatters Republican control for the next 40 years...

The lesson here is: successful and popular Presidency continues the control of the White House to that President's party.  It's one of the reasons why Republicans still scream about Obama being a failure when he's not, and it's one of the reasons they need to be afraid of the fact Obama is still more popular than they are.

Hell, Hillary is still more popular than the Republicans.  This is not at all like Alberta, or Israel, or the UK, where the leadership's popularity took collective hits and weakened their parties.  Israel is one bad vote away from collapse: who knows how the UK elections will go.

We need to see how the British elections hold up tomorrow... I mean today... I mean, ah damn you Greenwich Mean Time!

Cinco De Mayo: More Than One Remembrance

Today is Cinco De Mayo, kiddos!

But something else of note: today is a Tuesday, and if City of Heroes was still up and running this day would be a Tanker Tuesday.

Some background (taken from a fanpage I created ages ago on a now-defunct website):

Tankers are one of five original Archetypes for the City of Heroes MMO character designs. There's meant to be a role played by each AT, and a way of balancing these ATs out. Blasters are long-range damage dealers with little or no armor. Scrappers are close-quarters damage dealers with some armor to compensate for being in melee range. Defenders are healers and protectors with some attacks but not as powerful as Blasters. Controllers are literally crowd controllers, with some damage abilities but really their forte is Holding mobs at bay for others to wipe out. Tankers are armored front-line attackers that are shielded from head to toe, but with limited attacks.

There's not supposed to be one AT that is better than the others, but the Tankers kinda bend if not break that unwritten rule. Tankers can survive fights almost entirely on their own, if properly designed. Only Scrappers can match that, and even Scrappers don't get the higher Hit Point counts Tankers get that allow them to survive longer in battle. Certain Tankers (Fire, cough) have offensive capabilities that can rival a Blaster or Scrapper. A good Tanker can overcome the disadvantages of not having as many attack options as a Blaster or Scrapper. And an expert at playing Tankers can perform a game trick known as 'Herding', the ability to draw or 'aggro' a series of mobs together across an entire map if need be in order to kill enough of the mobs all at once. And to be perfectly honest, when confronting a high-level villain class known as Arch-Villain (AV), you NEED a Tanker there to get the job done because that Tanker is the only one with enough Hit Points and with the needed aggro control to survive the fight.

As a character build, Tankers became popular enough that entire teams were built around the Archetype.  On Champion server, the Tankers even formed an event on the first Tuesday of the month.

One month, Tanker Tuesday fell on Cinco De Mayo.  One of the main organizers, online name of The Ring, decided to throw a Cinco-themed Tanker event:

On the day of Del Dia Tanque itself, there was another large crowd of Tankers waiting at the designated spot in Kings Row. We grouped, we gathered, we danced, we waited for Ring to show up and start this gig. Ring did show, bringing along a special guest, Gen. Zaragoza himself! Sure, he was Level 1 and all, but the General had arrived to start the celebrations off with the proper style. We praised the General and then got the lineups going...

 We ran the Hess Task Force, with the ever-awesome MegaMech!

Ah, one of the best Tanker Tuesdays we ever had.

I miss City of Heroes.  I am not the only one.  The other hero-themed MMOs - DCU Online, Champions Online - just don't play well.  I guess I got spoiled on CoH.  Kinda waiting on a variety of potential replacement hero build MMOs - City of Titans is one, Valiance another - but it's shocking how there's few superhero MMOs in an age of a massive comic-book media wave of television shows and movie blockbusters.

Oh, and as for Cinco de Mayo, don't forget this:

Predicting Character: Who's On First? I Don't Know. THIRD BASE...

(update: Hello Crooks and Liars readers, thank you for following the Mike's Blog Round Up link here!  Thanks again to Batocchio for the linking.  P.S. Here's hoping the UK elections turn up for Labour...)

All I gots is a rehash of an Abbott and Costello routine.

This weekend had three separate announcements for Presidential candidates.  Two on the Republican side and one on the Democrats.

The Republican announcements were unsurprising and uninspiring.

Carly Fiorina announced Monday morning:

Fiorina, 60, pitched herself as an outsider who can bring a business mentality and global contacts to the White House -- and who is not afraid to attack the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Fiorina's minute-long video opens with her watching Clinton's announcement video and snapping it off, saying:  “Our founders never intended us to have a professional political class. They believed that citizens and leaders needed to step forward."

Ben Carson announced either Saturday or Sunday, I'm not sure which:

The announcement is the latest stop on a sudden journey to conservative superstardom. Carson, 63, burst onto the political scene in 2013 when, addressing the typically nonpartisan National Prayer Breakfast, he spoke about the dangers of political correctness, put forward the idea of a flat tax, and criticized President Obama’s health-care law. What made it stand out: He did it right beside a steely faced Obama.

We kinda knew they were coming as they had appeared earlier at an Iowa suck-up gathering, alongside a set of other potential GOP candidates.

The reason I'm not too excited - or terrified - of either candidate is that both of them have major drawbacks.  Let me copy-paste what I wrote about both candidates from that earlier report:

Ben Carson - Surgeon, maybe Maryland (I am not certain which state he will represent) (note: he's making his official announcement from his birthplace of Detroit)
Positives: Among Republicans, he's viewed as a credible anti-Obamacare critic, best-selling Christian spiritual author, anti-gay spokesperson.
Negatives: Has no elected or governing experience to speak of.  While the Constitution doesn't require such experience, any previous elective campaigning would at least provide the needed mindset and endurance to handle a rigorous national campaign.
Chances: His popularity among the Tea Party base is pretty strong...  He's the "Outsider" candidate who can claim he's not corrupt as the "Insider" candidates on the list.  It all depends on if he can find enough financial deep pockets and how he handles himself in debates.
Character Chart: He's the most difficult to pin down as he doesn't have a track record in office to measure his style.  His world-view is akin to a Far Right religious conservative, and his anti-ACA positions show a hatred for government health-care controls.  He presents himself as a Passive-Positive (he may even harbor Passive-Negative habits) but his statements and actions lean Active-Negative.

For Carson, the reasons he's even remotely viewed as a candidate is that he's a fervent Obamacare critic... and because he's Black so he can give a Republican Party that's done a piss-poor job marketing itself to minorities an excuse to pretend they're "diverse".  There's nothing else - no political resume, no track record on any number of other major policy issues - that defines himself as his own man.  As a result he's going to campaign on the base GOP platform... only further Right in order to keep the extremist wingnuts happy.  If he's got any value, he'll draw away votes from the other extremist panderer Ted Cruz...

And now Fiorina:

Carly Fiorina - CEO, California
Positives: One of a handful of women candidates who can broaden the "appeal" of the Republican platform.  Can claim executive experience as a business leader.  She's not as batsh-t crazy as the other prominent woman candidate(s) on the GOP ticket...
Negatives: No elective office or political experience.  She ran a poorly managed Senatorial campaign that ended in a bad loss.  Her track record as CEO - the only real thing she's got - isn't good (was forced out at Hewlett-Packard).
Chances: Slim.  She might run on a platform of "we need a CEO as President", but Romney tried that and didn't win over voters.
Character Chart: There's little on her political resume to confirm a style or world-view, but previous experience with CEO Presidents - Hoover, Bush the Lesser - points to either a person with uncompromising (Hoover) habits or a hands-off administrative style (Bush II).  Considering Fiorina's more aggressive management styles, she leans towards Hoover.  That puts her in the Active-Negative camp.

Like Carson, Fiorina doesn't have any electoral experience.  She's tried but lost, hard.  And like Carson, she doesn't have anything genuine to offer to the electorate other than being a woman candidate in a man-dominated party.  A party that may well run against a strong woman candidate in Hillary.

So to the Republican announcements, I say meh.

What do I say to the Democratic announcement this weekend involving Senator Bernie Sanders?

Avoiding the fanfare that several Republicans have chosen so far when announcing their candidacies, Mr. Sanders issued a statement to supporters that laid out his goals for reducing income inequality, addressing climate change and scaling back the influence of money in politics...
...Mr. Sanders’s bid is considered a long shot, but his unflinching commitment to stances popular with the left — such as opposing foreign military interventions and reining in big banks — could force Mrs. Clinton to address these issues more deeply.

Technically he's not a full party member: Sanders stands as an independent of sorts as a Socialist Democrat... and yes, Sanders openly takes to calling himself that.  He doesn't view 'Socialist' as an insult.

Sanders has been on the national stage a long time, a figure known early on as separate from other more left-leaning politicians - usually Democrats - for pushing a progressive platform fully opposed to the pro-business centrism that the Clintons represent.

Which is part of his appeal as well as a detraction.  Sanders leans far to the Left in a way (too many) Republicans lean too far Right.  In terms of his platform he pursues a blatantly socialist agenda that may sell in Europe (which is habitually socialist as a culture) but honestly doesn't go very far in America... and it's not because America is dominated by an army of Randian Objectivists.  The nation's simply not prepared for some of the agenda, such as a single-payer universal healthcare system: for God's sake, only this month after 4 years of Obamacare has that health-care reform program inched into the "favorable" polling numbers.

Sanders does appeal on specific arguments: he is openly hostile to the income inequality we've been suffering in the U.S. over the last thirty years, a popular issue among Americans; he supports a massive infrastructure program that would generate more jobs; he supports better wages for workers; he is basically the one candidate that would stir the passions of a dispirited progressive Left into paying attention to the Democratic primaries.  Per the New Yorker:

But, for all the challenges Sanders faces, his presence in the Democratic primary field is surely a plus. As I pointed out a few months ago, when he released his Economic Agenda for America, he’s a genuine economic populist, and many of his policy proposals—such as spending a trillion dollars on infrastructure investment, introducing a carbon tax, and replacing private health insurance with Medicare for all—are eminently defensible, if politically unrealistic. Most of all, he will provide a voice to those Democrats who agree with him that the U.S. political system has been bought, lock, stock, and barrel. In the televised debates and elsewhere, he will demand that the other candidates, Clinton included, respond to this indictment and say what they intend to do about it.
That alone is sufficient reason to welcome Sanders to the race. If, in addition, he manages to expand the range of policy options that can be openly discussed and forces Clinton to move from generalities to specifics, he will have performed a real public service.

I would need more research on Sanders' biography to develop the World-View background that Professor Barber would insist making a Character review, but for now I'd have to draw up Sanders' entry like this:

Bernie Sanders - Senator, Vermont
Positives: Has electoral experience for decades serving as a congressman and then Senator.  Has a political agenda that pushes hard Left after decades that most agendas pushed hard Right (the Age of Reagan), meaning a decent chance to shift the goal-posts of the national dialog back to the center.
Negatives: As much as the Far Far Right candidates like Cruz, Rand Paul, and Huckabee (announcing very soon) are poison to the general voting electorate, Sanders is too Far Far Left.  Half of his platform will reek too much of a Socialist agenda too many Americans still despise.  Comes from a small-population state that will not help as a base of voter support.   There is a question that as an independent (not really in the party) that he may not qualify on enough state ballots to count (his campaign is going to have to work overtime to make those ballots).
Chances: Slim.  He's determined, and has a reason to run this thing as far as possible.  But the Democratic Establishment types would be horrified if he gets the nomination: the Wall Street forces will rally like mad for the pro-business candidates like Hillary and could well swamp Sanders' campaign with too much money/power (which ironically will prove Sanders correct about the corruption of campaign money). And he may not appeal across the individual states - especially the more centrist, Red/Purple states in the South and West - he'll need to win primaries.
Character Chart: Sanders' socialist agenda is aggressively behind using the powers of the federal government to the fullest extent of the law, and that government can be used to improve the economy, improve jobs and wages, and uphold broad civil liberties.  On that, Sanders has the look of an Active-Positive (views government as an effective means of change).  However, Sanders displays many of the Active-Negative traits of being Idealistic and Uncompromising: he will not bend on the issues.  The only thing I can be certain of: he will be an Active President if elected.

I just don't see it happening for him.  It would be interesting if he makes it far into the primaries.  But if he becomes the Democratic candidate that will throw the 2016 election into pure chaos, and make the election against the Republican candidate more a campaign over -Isms as philosophical differences and less a campaign over actual effective government.  That could drive moderate voters away from a candidate like Sanders and towards an Establishment-type candidate like Jeb Bush or Scott Walker.

I'd like to think a majority of Americans are ready - after decades of the corrupt anti-tax anti-jobs anti-people self-interest agenda pushed by the Republicans - for a shift back towards the New Deal agenda of the mid-20th Century that sent America forward into a modern, working world.  But I know I don't see eye-to-eye with majority of Americans (dear God, I still can't comprehend how enough Floridians bought the snake-oil that is Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott), so I can't make an honest claim that we are ready.

The Agency of Accountability: The Time Is Now

I didn't write or say much about the killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore because at the time all I had was the same rage as before about the mindset of brutality among our law enforcement officers towards minorities.  We can repeat the names - Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, what is turning out to be tens if not hundreds more - and we can cry for justice, but time and again justice refused to hold their own accountable for their sins of excessive force and perjured ass-covering.

But at about the same time that I heard word about BridgeGate and how Chris Christie's circle of friends was getting smaller, news out of Baltimore sent shockwaves across the nation:

Six police officers were charged Friday in the death of Freddie Gray as Baltimore’s top prosecutor acted with surprising swiftness in a case that ignited protests and rioting here. She described how Gray allegedly was arrested illegally, treated callously by the officers, and suffered a severe spine injury in the back of a police van while his pleas for medical help were ignored.

Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby publicly delivered her stunning, detailed narrative of extensive police misconduct in the latest of several cases nationwide that have fueled anger over heavy-handed law enforcement tactics in low-income communities.

Unlike other moments where other cops caught on camera are facing up to the false reports and damaged lives left in their wake, this was huge because the incident itself is so recent.  Most other "official" investigations took months, went through grandiose staged grand juries that didn't peruse evidence as much as convict the victims and free the killers.

This time, Baltimore's state attorney controlling the investigation filed charges as soon as the evidence made it clear just what the cops responsible for Gray's death failed to do (and brings up questions about what they might have done):

• Walking down a street with a companion, Gray makes eye contact with a cop and shows aversion, running from the scene.  Cops give chase, leading up to Gray captured and getting injured on his leg.
• A knife is found on Gray, but it's a standard pocket-knife, not a switchblade.  It's legal.  There are no warrants or cause for arrest, yet the cops still take him in, handcuffing him and later putting him in leg irons.  He is not seated but left on the floor.
• Gray begins asking for an inhaler, having problems with breathing, but otherwise appears physically fine to eyewitnesses at his arrest.
• The police van transporting him takes 30 minutes to drive a two-minute route to the nearest station, although halfway there the van stops for paperwork reasons and because the van driver claims Gray is "irate".  Whatever happened here, the prosecutors' office investigated down to the atoms for some reason, rounding up potential eyewitnesses and finding any street cameras that documented the timeline.
• Van arrives at the station, at which point Gray is unable to talk, breathe, or move.  A medic is called, and Gray is taken to a hospital where he slips into a coma and later dies.
• Autopsy reveals that Gray had 80 percent of his spine severed.

What happened to Gray in that van is known as a "rough ride", a shockingly common practice nobody really talks about because it violates the hell out of every legal right in the book, causes excessive injuries to its victims, and is used by cops to deal with "unruly" prisoners who just happen to look at them wrong.  A rough ride - where an unbuckled prisoner would get thrown hard against something whenever the van swerved the wrong way - could have easily caused that spinal injury that killed Gray.

Just note that one part I mentioned in the previous paragraph: It's common.

It's common, apparently, for our law enforcement to act like bullies to the very people they're supposed to serve and protect.  It's common for excessive force to be used every day by the cops, whether it's pulling over guys on bicycles, or using illegal choke holds, or emptying entire clips into one unarmed black man.  It's common to use force, and then the threat of force: because once people know you're capable of it and never get called on it, they have every reason to fear your use of force, don't they...?

It's common because it was... it IS... the policy of the powerful.  To quote Ta-Nehisi Coates:

But I have a problem when you begin the clock with the violence on Tuesday. Because the fact of the matter is that the lives of black people in this city, the lives of black people in this country have been violent for a long time. Violence is how enslavement actually happened. People will think of enslavement as like a summer camp, where you just have to work, where you just go and someone gives you food and lodging, but enslavement is violence, it is torture. Torture is how it was made possible. You can’t imagine enslavement without stripping away people’s kids and putting them up for sale. And the way you did that was, you threatened people with violence. Jim Crow was enforced through violence. That was the way things that got done. You didn’t politely ask somebody not to show up and vote. You stood in front of voting booths with guns, that’s what you did. And the state backed this; it was state-backed violence.

And so the cops rarely answer for the violence they commit.  Because the state profits from it.

The other troubling thing is the crime cops commit on a regular basis for which they never answer: the constant lying about their own actions.  Oh, we know excessive force when it's used, and the cops know too, and so to make themselves look better they perjure themselves.  They lie about the reasons why they went for the gun instead of the pepper spray, they lie about why they used the pepper spray, they lie about the severity of the injuries they've caused, they lie about evidence because that planted gun and bag of drugs has to count for something to earn that conviction rate...

It happens so often the cops call it "testilying".

As far back as the Rodney King assault/arrest, I could barely accept the fact that the jury acquitted the cops of violently beating King to within an inch of his life.  What enraged me further was how the charge that they lied on their arrest reports - they reported "minor injuries" when King suffered concussion and broken bones - didn't stick.  The jury let them slide on the one thing that wasn't in argument: the fact that they lied about what they did to King.  The medical evidence clearly contradicted everything the cops claimed, and the jury still acquitted.

And we complain about the communities rising up in riots after every questionable death.  Because we as a society, we Americans living outside of that poverty zone, outside of those red-lined ghettos, can turn a blind eye because we buy those lies, we take the cops' word when time and again cops have been caught lying.  Because we refuse to hold accountable those who have the law as their excuse.

But it is long overdue for cops to be held accountable (Quis custodiet...).

...But at the same time, (Mosby) added, “those officers that usurped their authority, you have to be able to hold them accountable because it does a disservice to the really hardworking police officers. So for me it’s about applying justice fairly and accurately to those with or without a badge...”

We need to do more than talk about needed reforms in our law enforcement practices.  We need action to reduce the use of excessive force down to nil.  We need a judicial system in place that can better police its own to ensure lying cops do not profit from their lies.

We need to recognize that the injustice of excessive force can no longer be tolerated.

We need to recognize that lies kill.  Lies can kill justice as much as those lies can kill our loved ones.

What Would Happen If Florida Had a Meltdown And No One Cared

That's pretty much what happened last week.

Our Florida government pretty much collapsed, with the Senate and House branches at each others' collective throats and Governor Rick "No Ethics" Scott cheering the radicals in the House towards blowing everything up... as metaphor first.  By the end of June, those radicals will be blowing everything up for reals...

And the overall response of the Florida citizenry?

We were probably too busy worrying about Jameis Winston getting drafted first overall to the Tampa Bay Bucs (I wasn't.  I was pining for Marcus Mariota).

The apathy was so palpable the Tampa Bay Times wrote about it:

But last week's legislative meltdown in Tallahassee, dramatic and dysfunctional as it was, doesn't appear to threaten the political future of Republicans who control both chambers of state government — or of anyone else in their party running for office in 2016.

Most GOP state lawmakers remain in safe, conservative-leaning districts. Democrats have only a thin bench to challenge the ones who don't. And there's little indication that many Floridians are aware that their state Legislature, an institution followed far less closely than Congress, is gridlocked.

"I always use my parents, who live in Orlando, as a measure — and it's fair to say the average Floridian isn't paying a lot of attention compared to the rest of us living in the bubble of Tallahassee," said David Hart, executive president of the Florida Chamber of Commerce.

Even the legal recourse open to us - the courts - seems unable to force the self-serving House leadership to answer to their oaths of office:

Senate Democrats sued the House, asking the court Thursday to bring representatives back to finish their work. On Friday, the Florida Supreme Court ruled the House had violated the state Constitution — but, with the midnight deadline of the regular session approaching, it was too late to call anyone back to Tallahassee.

The House HAS violated the state Constitution... but the courts said "eh, time's up" and moved on.

No accountability applied to the bastards.  No voters will turn on them because they've gerrymandered themselves into safe seats.  (where the hell are the court trials trying to break these gerrymanders under the Fair Districts amendments?)  There's only so much the media can highlight, there's only so much the courts can do to intervene.  Whatever checks and balances are in place to impose service to the law, that's all broken in this rigged game.

Serious question: What penalties can be applied here? What's the felony count on on state legislator who violates the state Constitution?  What do the Statutes say on this?

So far I'm finding nothing linking legislators to any oath of office other than an oath while filing for elections.  I need to do a little more research.

I've skipped over to the Criminal statutes - Title 46 or XLVI - to see if I can browse for anything covering misconduct of elected officials.  The only thing I'm finding relates to Bribery.  I am not seeing anything related to misconduct.  Not yet.  Other than Conspiracy or Fraudulent Practices, the Legislature apparently planned ahead and made certain there would be no repercussions for being a-holes in office.

If there are any legal experts on Florida law, please leave a comment.  If there's a law that can punish the legislators themselves for their insubordination, their refusal to do the job they were elected (and paid, damn them) to do, we need to charge them right here right now.

'Cause the next meltdown will be a doozy: failure next time means 800,000 state residents lose their health care.  And while that may wake the state, while that may make Floridians sit up and take notice that their corrupt Republican overlords are sadistic self-serving sociopaths, by then it will be too late.

In Brief: Bwhahahaha on BridgeGate

There were two criminal investigations of note reporting in today, and I want to just cover in brief the first one.  Following more than a year of digging into who was responsible for shutting down traffic at a key interstate bridge - with serious interference with business, law enforcement, and public safety, AKA BridgeGate - one of the people involved with that shutdown pled guilty:

A former ally of Gov. Chris Christie pleaded guilty Friday to helping to engineer traffic jams at the George Washington Bridge in 2013 and concocting a cover-up along with two other officials with close ties to Christie.

David Wildstein did not implicate Christie in the scheme that has cast a long shadow over the Republican governor’s White House prospects in 2016.

Wildstein, an official at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey at the time of the tie-ups, pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy...

...Before Wildstein appeared in court, Christie declined to comment Friday as he left a hotel in McLean, Virginia. Christie has insisted all along that he knew nothing about the scheme...

Considering how all three - Wildstein and the other officials - were all close to Christie and had worked with him for years, Christie's alibi of not knowing about the scheme comes across like a child's poor excuse when caught leaving toys all over the playroom.

Here's the questions about BridgeGate: Who profited from the bridge shut-down?  From whose office did most of the plans originate?  Who behaves regularly with a my-way-or-else mindset - the same mindset behind the bridge shutdown - when dealing with enemy and ally alike?  The answers keep pointing back to Chris Christie.

The entire BridgeGate scandal has the markings of the act of a bully, a behavioral trait easily applied to Christie and one he cannot avoid now.  While that bullying behavior may appeal to Christie's voting base, it's not a winning one (remember the thing Machiavelli warns against: inspiring hate is the one thing a Prince must never do).  Bullying leads to hate of the bully, and more and more people have gotten to hate Christie...

And now all it's going to take is one of the other two who haven't pled yet - Bridget Kelly who was Christie’s deputy chief of staff, and Bill Baroni who was appointed by Christie to serve at the Port Authority (in charge of the bridge) - to give up any detail at all showing Christie knew.  And Christie won't be able to bluff or bully his way out of anything again.

Update Florida: Two Things To Anger The Blood

First up, an update on Rick "No Medicaid For Florida" Scott's idea of suing the Obama administration into keeping afloat a Medicaid funding program that does not exist anymore: he went through with it, the crooked bastard:

Yesterday, the governor took this one step further, going to court to force Washington to give Florida federal funds for a program that will no longer exist. Scott wants health care money from the Obama administration to help Floridians (through LIP), but at the same time, he also doesn’t want health care money from the Obama administration to help Floridians (through the ACA).

LIP doesn't exist anymore, and doesn't need to because the ACA program provides Medicaid funding at a reduced cost to taxpayers and for better coverage.  But Scott would rather fight to the death to get LIP extended another year, all because he's horrified to take anything Obamacare-related.  He's spent his entire political career (even before he was elected Governor in 2010 he fought health care reform plans) against it: accepting any reform funding would kill his self-image and standing among the wingnut voters who flock to him.

The solution to this is simple: Rick "No Ethics" Scott needs to man up and recognize the state of Florida needs that Medicaid money, not only to balance the state's internal budgets but because IT'S THE RIGHT F-CKING THING TO DO FOR 800,000 RESIDENTS AND THEIR FAMILIES.  /headdesk

And speaking of state budgeting, back to the Florida Legislature's mini-Civil War unfurling as the Senate leadership tries to trout-slap the taste out of the House's collective mouth.  Per the Tampa Bay Times again:

...The Florida Legislature's chaotic session hit a new dysfunctional low Wednesday as an irate Senate demanded that House leaders bring lawmakers back to work or risk violating the state Constitution...

...Senate President Andy Gardiner, R-Orlando, said the House "trick" of shutting down Tuesday could violate a provision in the Constitution that says: "Neither house shall adjourn for more than 72 consecutive hours except pursuant to a concurrent resolution" signed by the two chambers. The session is scheduled to end by midnight Friday.

"You adjourned the Florida House of Representatives in contravention of express provisions of the Florida Constitution," Gardiner wrote in a letter to Crisafulli, R-Merritt Island. "I respectfully request that you reconvene your chamber to finish the important work of the people of Florida."

After the letter was read and senators gave Gardiner a standing ovation, he told them: "This new trick that they did is not part of the negotiating tools. It's wrong, not just for the Senate, but it's wrong for the state of Florida, to essentially say that one chamber is not relevant..."

"...I understand that you are angry that the House concluded our business," Crisafulli wrote (back). "I told you that the House could not pass Obamacare expansion. It's not something that I can force them to pass … This is a matter of the House exercising its constitutional duty to represent those who elected us..."

The problem with your position, Crisafulli, is that there was more on the table to deal with than just the Obamacare funding.  You refused to deal with other budgeting matters.  You left the Senate hanging without resolution to matters covering water policy, state prison reforms, utilities oversight, and even funding for the Far Right's pet project of charter schools.  The House abandoned any effort to work out a budget, and basically flipped off the Senate on the way out the door (the Times article makes it clear most of the House Republicans are pissing on their Senate colleagues over this).  You basically quit out from doing your jobs, and kudos to the State Senate if they decide to charge you ass-clowns in the House of violating your constitutional duties/oaths of office.

...Wait, did I just praise Republicans in the state Senate?!  (rushes off to the bathtub to scourge self)

Florida: Where State Republicans Won't Do Their F-cking Jobs

It just keeps getting worse.  Per the Tampa Bay Times' headline:

Florida House abruptly adjourns session early, saying impasse is insurmountable

Bullsh-t.  It's not insurmountable.  YOU ALL WERE JUST TOO DAMNED SCARED AND LAZY TO DO YOUR DAMN JOB.

This is all about the Florida House Republicans - as noted last time I ranted about the f-ckers, which was less than a week ago -  unwilling to resolve the Medicaid funding gap that's due to open up in June.  Rather than even pretend to care about the matter - which they don't - the House leadership just up and sent everyone home for an early vacation.

Florida's Legislature collapsed into chaos Tuesday as the House unilaterally ended the annual session with more than three days left, leaving dozens of major bills dead and escalating tensions between the House and Senate over their health care stalemate...

...House Speaker Steve Crisafulli, R-Merritt Island, gaveled the legislative session to a close at 1:15 p.m. Tuesday. "We didn't get everything we wanted, and we won't get everything that we hoped, but we have done all that we can do for this session," he said. He then told House members to go home "until the Senate decides they are ready to negotiate."

It marked the first time in Florida's modern history that one chamber shut down and went home on a different day than the other in a regular session. Adjournment records go back only to 1971...

The departure not only left the Medicaid matter unsettled, the House refused to consider other matters as well, effectively abdicating ANY accountability for what they're supposed to do up in Tallahassee.

The House's early exit left unfinished major policy bills that would have rewritten the state's water policy, decided how to spend money from the Amendment 1 environmental measure, increased economic and educational options for people with special needs, reformed the state prison system, revised ethics rules at the Public Service Commission and provided financial benefits to charter schools.

Lazy, unfocused, undedicated...  these bastards do not deserve to draw a paycheck from the taxpayers.

So of course this all means that the Florida Legislature has to call back a special session, which means more money wasted, more time wasted, more political posturing to the base.  It's sick and it's wrong.

The presiding officers of each chamber must now agree to come back in special session in order to complete the state budget — the only bill they are required to pass each year by the June 30 deadline — or Gov. Rick Scott could order them back together.

Given that Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott is openly opposed to the Senate's proposal to go ahead and switch over from the old LIP Medicaid funding to the new ACA "Obamacare" Medicaid funding, I doubt Scott would feel the need to give that order.

Of course, this could all be just political posturing on the part of the Republicans.  There is every likelihood the state leadership is aware they've got few options here, and have to make the switch-over to the ACA Medicaid funding to keep the whole state budget afloat.  This may all be an elaborate kabuki dance, where they'll fidget and postpone all the way up to the June 30 deadline, giving themselves political cover with their wingnut Teabagger base by railing against the dreaded Obamacare directives, and then "reluctantly" play ball with the federal government and take the ACA money.  That way they can claim they were "forced" to submit to EVUL OBAMA and placate that voting base from primarying against them in 2016.

Then again, this might not be a ruse.  We are at the state level of government: where the political players are more partisan and pandering than they would be at the federal level where more attention is paid to what elected officials do (considering how wingnut the Congressional Republicans can get, that's how bad the state Republicans are).  The elected leaders in the state House are a little too sincere, a little too eager to twist the knife in on the whole "killing Obamacare" agenda.  And with a sitting governor in Scott who's proven a few too many times to suck up to the partisan crowd - especially as he's eyeing a Senate run to prolong his political career - there is every likelihood that the state government will let LIP expire without getting replacing ACA funds.

In that scenario, 800,000 Floridians will suddenly lose Medicaid health care funding.  We're talking poor elderly, we're talking poor families with sick kids.  We are talking about nursing homes and assisted living housing losing funds to keep their residents fed and cared for.  We are talking about enough people here in state that everyone will know at least one person suffering because of this.  This will be a level of pain no one will be able to ignore.

And in that scenario, I would not at all be surprised to see the House Republicans and Rick "No Ethics" Scott eagerly point the finger of blame at their Senate colleagues for THEIR not compromising to Scott's plan (of talking the feds into continuing the LIP program for one more year, as though that solves anything).  None of us should be surprised when Scott accuses Obama as being responsible for Scott's refusal to do the right thing for a massive number of Florida residents.

This is the modern Republican Party on full display here.  This is not a party that wants to govern, or make decisions, or do the hard things that need doing.  This is a political party obsessed with "winning", whatever the hell that is, either winning the election cycle or winning the photo op news cycles.

This is what we get Floridians, when enough of you buy into the Republicans' snake-oil con jobs, when enough of you refuse to show up to vote for Democrats who would at least TRY to pass legislation and do their jobs.

We're At the Point Where Obama Truly Has No F-cks To Give

It used to be conventional wisdom that a President entering the last two years of a second term will suffer as a Lame Duck.

Two points: because his leadership begins to suffer as he ends up having few chips to trade with Congress to get things done; and because a fresh round of Presidential candidates rise up - sometimes even within his own party - either to dismiss or deny his efforts at meaningful legacy bills during those years.  Reagan seemed to suffer from it, as had Eisenhower and Bush the Lesser.

But that's not always the case.  In each of those Presidencies, a lot had to do with the failures of those administrations coming back to haunt each one (Eisenhower's failures in foreign policy, Reagan's corrupt administration collapsing under the scandal of Iran/Contra, Bush the Lesser's inept rule and bad wars).  Effective Presidents entering this phase can still craft out legislation and effective policy changes at will, even with an opposing Congress: Clinton had success during his last two years even with the Lewinsky impeachment vote, and now it's looking like Obama might with opening relations with Cuba and Iran.

In particular, Obama seems freed from the obligations of "playing nice" with an opposition party of the Republicans that obstructed him from Day One.  In the past few months, ever since he dissed Congress during his SOTU, Obama has basically been slapping the taste out of the Republicans' mouths.

Obama, as the saying now goes, has zero f-cks left to give.

Leading to this moment at the White House Correspondents' Dinner:

Yup.  Zero f-cks.

Makes me think of the cool memes we got when he started his Presidency...

Two Crazy Flavors Of Florida, One To Make You Laugh, One To Make You Cry

"Don't all the nuts roll downhill to Florida?"
- from the X-Files episode Agua Mala.

One of the things I've tracked since the beginning of this blog has been the crazy nature of my adopted home state Florida.

I haven't been the only one who noticed.  Since even before the population boom of the 1980s that brought busloads of shifting populations, Florida has been one of the crazier states out of the United States in our past 230-year history.  Florida, thanks to a mad land-scam craze in the 1920s, may have been one of the causes of the Great Depression.  Florida, source of early political conflict when it was a Spanish-held territory in the early 1800s.  Florida, just say "hanging chad" and watch half the nation cry.

FloridaMan and FloridaWoman have Twitter accounts.

TV Tropes documents the atrocities.  FARK has an entire tag devoted to Florida- the only state so honored - as a source of all the crazy stories they report.

There's a popular GIF people like to show whenever they talk about Florida:

Okay, so that's the setup to this blog article.  A couple of things happened recently that highlight how psychotic Floridians can be.

First, the story that sent half the Internet into fits of giggles.  A self-described "Floridian-American" woman filed a law suit against a Georgia judge that pretty much violated every rule of legal etiquette and crossed every line.  Per Raw Story:

... (the) sovereign citizen submitted a nine-page, profanity-laced tirade against a judge who dismissed a lawsuit she filed on behalf of her husband and son.

Tamah Jada Clark alleges that her civil rights were violated when she was arrested nearly five years ago in an armed plot to break her baby’s father out of prison.

“F*ck this court and everything it stands for,” Clark titled her April 20 filing.

“Look here, old man, when I told you I AM Justice – I meant it,” Clark notified U.S. District Court Judge Willis B. Hunt. “It took me about 1 month to study the history of the world and to learn the history and inner workings American jurisprudence, literally. I was born to do this here. Don’t you know that your FBI and CIA have been trying to recruit me since grade school? Lol. But they’re unscrupulous losers like you, so it won’t be happening.”

There aren't a lot of legal briefs that include an LOL.  There aren't a lot of legal briefs that openly insult a sitting judge.

The thing about audacity is that even in the craziest, scariest moments like this you gotta respect the willingness of the crazy person to tap-dance over the Line That Dare Not Be Crossed.

The entire brief deserves reading, much thanks to Gawker for posting screen-captures (shown here are two of the pages with some of the most no-f*cks-given epic insults you will see in your life):

"Just for the record: you are a hoe. This court is a hoe. And I will backhand you both, should you continue to waste my time." - Tamah Jada Clark's submission for quote of the year.

In all honesty, Ms. Clark is in a sh-tload of trouble.  Someone up the chain of the judicial system is going to consider her rant troubling as she mentions her gun-ownership and willingness to get violent to those she views as "hoes".  At the least, this rant falls into Contempt and defamation towards a sitting judge that could well lead to jail time.

Still, the rant itself crosses the line into a warped kind of brilliance.  It's every conspiracy nut's arrogant self-worth elevated to Everest-level heights.  Read how Clark insists she's "much too intelligent" and that the FBI and CIA have been trying to recruit her since grade school.  That she's able to read all of world history in one hour, and how she knows a complex legal system that even half our law students can barely grasp.  That she's the Most Important and Powerful Person In the World... who was easily captured running around Georgia during a half-baked prison break scheme.  /headdesk

Second, the story that outraged much of the nation.  A group of drunken fraternity brothers - so far confirmed as being from my alma mater University of Florida - were caught insulting and spitting on war veterans, as well as stealing a veteran's flag and pissing on it:

A University of Florida fraternity already on conduct probation is under investigation after being accused of disrespecting a group of disabled military veterans by spitting on them and stealing their flags at a Panama City Beach resort last weekend...

...Fraternity members from the UF and Emory University chapters of Zeta Beta Tau holding their spring formals at the Laketown Wharf Resort in Panama City Beach disrupted the Warrior Beach Retreat Friday night, witnesses said...

One letter to UF's President Fuchs described students spitting on veterans, throwing beer bottles over a balcony, ripping flags off their cars and urinating on an American flag.

“These guys were getting out of control,” Cope said. “I was just in tears. This was supposed to be a safe place.”

Cope also said the students had to have known they were insulting veterans from the Warrior Beach Retreat because these veterans were wearing caps and T-shirts.

“They knew who they were and were just getting a kick out of it,” she said. “It is heartbreaking as a mom with a son who sacrificed so much for their freedom.”

About 60 veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan attended the retreat, which has been held twice a year for the last six years, Cope said...

The last I ever heard about anybody spitting on war vets was from legends about the Vietnam War, something that hippies did back in the 1960s and 1970s (although the stories themselves remain apocryphal).

The problem with fraternities reach far across the nation, not just here in Florida, but this particular assault on men and women makes me reflect on the darker, dangerous aspect of the Florida Crazy.  The drunken, violent aspect.  There is nothing audacious or funny about what those fraternity men (not frat boys, which implies youthful indiscretions rather than adult criminal misdeeds) did at that hotel.  Nothing about what they did was forgivable.

Florida Problem #947: We're Led By Crooks and Crazies

Back to the brewing disaster that is Republican leadership in the state of Florida.  To wit, the fight over the state budget over Medicaid funding.  To the Tampa Bay Times coverage:

Blaming the federal government for Florida's financial woes, Gov. Rick Scott on Tuesday said he was prepared to call Florida lawmakers back for a special session to complete the budget — and even encourage them to pass a bare-bones budget if necessary...
"...If (lawmakers) fail to cut taxes in this legislative session, it is clear that cutting taxes by more than $1 billion will become the top priority for next year's legislative session when there is no longer any uncertainty around health care funding, which is already over 40 percent of our state's $77 billion budget..."
...The statement came as the Senate and House convened rare meetings — one in the open and the other out of the public eye — but showed no signs of ending the budget showdown that has crippled the legislative session.
During a closed-door meeting, House Speaker Steve Crisafulli, R-Merritt Island, could be heard encouraging the Republican caucus to hold firm in its opposition to Medicaid expansion, one of the key sticking points of the session...
...Senate President Andy Gardiner, meanwhile, received a standing ovation from the entire Senate — and applause from lobbyists and activists in the audience — when he said the Senate would continue its fight for expanded coverage.
One of Gardiner's top lieutenants, Senate budget chief Tom Lee, called out the House and Scott for failing to discuss the issue in a public meeting.
"I do not think that the House or the governor wants this blood on their hands when this cart goes into the ditch because people will not come to the table and have an honest political discussion about legitimate differences we have over health care funding..."

There's Rick "Never My Fault The State I Run Is Broken" Scott blaming the federal government for something he as governor is supposed to do himself.  Then again, what did you expect from a guy who never took responsibility for his healthcare company committing massive acts of Medicare fraud?

So why the crisis?  Why the split between what's usually been a unified state Republican den of thieves?

...With just 10 days left before the 60-day session is scheduled to end, the House and Senate remain at odds over how to handle a potential $1.3 billion hole in the state health care budget.
Its source: the federal government's plan to end the Low Income Pool, a program that helps hospitals cover the costs of treating uninsured and Medicaid patients.
If the program expires on June 30, as it is scheduled to do under an agreement with the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), it could result in an $86 million budget cut for Tampa General Hospital and a $200 million budget cut for Jackson Health System in Miami. Children's hospitals throughout the state stand to lose $117 million.
State health officials have formally petitioned the federal government to continue the program and presented a Senate plan to distribute the funds more evenly than in the past. But it remains unclear how the Legislature would provide support to hospitals if the funding fell through.

The LIP program was a Bush the Lesser era law that helped finance Medicaid-style block grants.  When Obama oversaw the passage of the ACA "Obamacare" program, LIP still co-existed as an alternative.  Especially after the Supreme Court ruling that eventually protected Obamacare but changed the mandatory Medicaid funding to an optional plan.  However, this year Obama's administration said it would phase out LIP - which they're not required to continue - in favor of the Obamacare funding.

This created an ideological choking point for the Republicans.  On one hand, Republicans realize that any loss of federal funding on this scale is a huge hit to their annual budgets that they cannot hide without raising taxes (suicide with their anti-government wingnut base) or slashing other vital programs too deep (suicide with the rest of the state including a lot of businesses that rely on state aid).  On the other hand, Republicans hate Obama to the point that ANYthing Obamacare is toxic to them, even when it works.

Hence the split.  Scott campaigned in 2010 and 2014 to the Far Right in opposition to Obamacare.  The state House is filled with a lot of gerrymander-safe wingnuts who can hide from the general public and play to their base without retribution.  The state Senate doesn't have that luxury: fewer in number and higher-profile - they're usually the ones who run for congressional seats later in their careers - these are the ones fully aware of the human costs if Medicaid funding disappears and 800,000 Floridians are suddenly sh-t out of luck.

That 800,000 covers kids, families, elderly... hospitals and nursing homes rely on Medicaid funding to keep the doors open.  We're a major retiree state with a lot of those retirees thinking the Republicans are serving them.  What do you think will happen when most of them find by June that the Republicans are the ones that screwed them instead?  Despite Scott's efforts to pin this on Obama, it's up to HIM and the Florida legislature to work things out.  The Republicans can easily come up with an alternative means of accepting the Medicaid funding without calling it dreaded "Obamacare": other states have done so.  But Scott won't even budge on that one compromise.

Let's see what Johathan Cohn at the Huff Po says about this:

...Conservatives have plenty of genuine, intellectually honest reservations about the changes that came with Obamacare. They don't like the new government spending and regulation, for example. In some cases, conservatives object to the whole notion of government-sponsored insurance.

But the Florida dispute demonstrates that differences over policy can't, on their own, explain the fervor now on display. The law and its enactment have tapped into something deeper and more primal -- about what the law represents, or, perhaps, the president who signed it...

...But Florida's budget situation is about to change, in ways that make opposition more difficult for these officials to justify. Like many states, Florida hospitals have access to some special federal grants designed to offset the losses that they take when they provide discounted or free care to the poor. These grants date back to a Bush-era program, enacted before the Affordable Care Act was around to give those same people insurance. The federal government has discretion over when to make those grants and, last year, the Obama administration made clear it would not be renewing Florida's beyond 2015, now that the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid money is there for the taking.

Republican leaders in the state Senate understood the implications. They'd have a big hole in the budget to fill unless they came up with some other way to finance health care for the poor. Among the first things to go would be a tax cut that Republicans cherish. "It really puts everything at risk," Andy Gardiner, leader of the Senate Republicans, told The Washington Post's Greg Sargent, who's been following the story closely. "It jeopardizes the tax cuts, it jeopardizes increases in education funding, it jeopardizes our priorities."

Rather than give up on those, Senate Republicans passed a bill to expand Medicaid, albeit with a few conservative modifications. (The merits of those modifications, and what they'd do to Medicaid, are subjects for another day.) It's precisely the strategy that Republican officials in Arkansas and Michigan, among other states, have used. But Florida House Republicans, who met behind closed doors on Tuesday, aren't budging. And neither, it seems, is Scott. Instead, he's decided to sue the federal government -- on the theory that, by refusing to extend the special grant for hospitals, the Obama administration is engaged in unconstitutional coercion of a state.

Gardiner has called Scott's decision "difficult to understand." It's even more difficult to understand given the math.

A few years ago, the Kaiser Family Foundation published an analysis by researchers at the Urban Institute. It projected the cost of expanding Medicaid in each state and then broke down the implications for state budgets. The numbers for Florida were striking. Over 10 years, the researchers found, making Medicaid available to all low-income people would cost about $71 billion above and beyond what the state's Medicaid program would otherwise cost.

That's a lot of money, for sure. But roughly $66 billion of the total, the researchers found, would come from the federal government. That would leave Florida taxpayers on the hook for the remaining $5 billion, with at least some of that money coming back to them in the form of reduced spending on other programs.

To put it another way, expanding Medicaid in Florida would likely require a net investment by state taxpayers that, over the course of a decade, would work out to less than a half-billion dollars a year. That's without accounting for any additional growth and tax revenues that the huge infusion of federal dollars might provide. That's also without accounting for the more than $1 billion a year in that, without expanding Medicaid, Florida would probably have to scrounge up in order to help hospitals defray the cost of charity care.

In short, if the numbers were lopsided in favor of expanding Medicaid before, they are even more lopsided now. And it's not as if anybody is arguing seriously that those grants are a superior way of financing care for the poor. If anything, the opposite is true -- and it's one reason the editorial page of the Tampa Bay Times called Scott's position "indefensible." Other editorial pages, civic organizations, and business groups across the state have made similar statements.

In response, Scott has said he's just looking out for state finances, because the federal government might someday pull back on its Medicaid commitment and leave state government responsible for financing a much larger Medicaid program. But as another Kaiser report has noted, the federal matching rate for Medicaid has remained remarkably stable over time -- except for rare changes that, on balance, meant the feds were paying more.

Of course, conservative fervor to block or repeal the Affordable Care Act has always seemed a bit disconnected from reality, given that the law consists almost entirely of pieces that existed, without such fuss, long before Obamacare came along. The lone exception is the "individual mandate," the requirement that people carry insurance or pay a fee. And that's an idea that plenty of conservatives tolerated -- and some even supported -- less than a decade ago. In fact, it was a conservative expert at the Heritage Foundation who many historians credit with the idea.

No, the level of hostility to Obamacare makes very little sense -- unless it's about something beyond the policy particulars. It could be the fact that Democrats finally accomplished something big, for the first time in several decades, thereby expanding the welfare state at a time when conservatives thought they were on their way to shrinking it. Or it could be the idea that, on net, the Affordable Care Act transfers resources away from richer, whiter people to poorer, darker people. Or it could be the fact that "Obamacare" contains the word "Obama," whose legitimacy as president at least some conservatives just can't accept...

There's the reason why Florida is screwed: the dominant state party - Republicans - hates Obama.  And it's an irrational hate, based on a fictional persona pumped up by wingnuts and Fox Not News.

If we get to June and there's no Medicaid funding, it's an irrational hate that's gonna get a lot of Floridians killed.  And that won't be the fault of Obama: it will be the fault of a governor and state-level Republican Party that can't swallow its pride and recognize that government can work if you know what you're doing.

Off-Topic: Summer Movie 2015 Mayhem

Technically it's started with the April blockbuster releases, but it really doesn't count until my birthday, so there.

All that's missing is the Star Wars movie, all because THAT one is coming out in December and not the summer... :(

So here's the Star Wars trailer as well.

I'm pumped.