The wild card in the race for the Republican nomination to U.S. Senate is the endorsement of Jeb Bush. To get a read on whether he's leaning toward Charlie Crist or Marco Rubio, I consulted a source who -- in exchange for his or her candor -- we will simply call a high-ranking Bush associate. My sense is that this source speaks for a great many Floridians who have fond memories of Bush's time in the governor's office and in whose eyes Crist's tenure has been very frustrating by comparison. From the source:
Jeb Bush always put the state first, then the party and his own ambition last. Toward the end of his term, he was being recruited to run for the U.S. Senate, and he turned it down because he wanted to finish his term strong. He could have been the NFL commissioner, but he turned it down because he wanted to finish strong. You can't even begin to compare Jeb's passion for Florida and his respect for the office of Governor with Charlie Crist. Jeb didn't see the office as a stepping stone. He saw it as an opportunity to make meaningful changes and he worked until the clock ticked to zero.
Two governors with whom Ponzi schemer Rothstein invested millions
From the Sacramento Bee comes word that Scott Rothstein's firm donated $250,000 to the campaign to pass Proposition 11, a ballot measure that was passed by California voters earlier this month. For a guy like Rothstein, that's a far-flung state and a decidedly unglamorous issue -- the measure formed a 14-person commission for the purposes of redrawing the boundaries of California's congressional members.
But chances are, Rothstein was swayed by the glamour of that ballot measure's spokesman: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, for whom Rothstein had fund-raised.
For the investors in our audience, sorry, but it appears that since Rothstein's quarter-mill went to the campaign and not directly to Schwarzenegger the Guvernator is not inclined to have it returned.
I put a call out to opponents of Prop 11 to see if they have a better theory for why Rothstein invested so much money on this campaign.
That's the post-CNN Lou Dobbs from last night's episode of the Daily Show, which means he's still lingering near the Big Apple. But judging by the interview that he gave to gossip queen Cindy Adams in today's New York Post, Dobbs is looking forward to the end of this junket so that he can head to...
"West Palm Beach. To relax and breathe deeply. Also to assess my next step."
"Relax" is the word that jumps out at me -- did Dobbs have some health problems? Clearly, he spent a lot of energy fulminating at American immigration policy and Barack Obama. But the rest of the column offers no more clues -- just maddeningly elliptical quotes from Dobbs.
Like the rest of America-loving Americans, we Juicers have been worried about the big guy getting blown by the winds of change. Looks like he'll keep us in suspense for a while. Here's hoping inspiration strikes in West Palm.
Lantana Town Manager Mike Bornstein says he got a pretty good laugh when he found out the hundreds of coconuts he'd mailed to Postmaster General John E. Potter had been given away to homeless shelters. "We were
imagining the cafeteria at the shelter handing each poor homeless person a big coconut on a
plate. They clearly didn't realize how much work it is to open a
coconut. You burn more energy getting into it than you'd ever get out
of it."
Bornstein, with the help of a bunch of schoolkids and neighborhood residents, had mailed hundreds of coconuts to Washington to protest the closing of the Lantana Post Office. "There's an old legend about the barefoot mailmen," says Bornstein. "You know they had to walk up and down the beaches carrying a heavy mail sack. Their friends would play a practical joke on them and send coconuts addressed to somebody through the mail. The mailman's bag would be full of coconuts, and as you know, they're pretty heavy."
It wasn't so long ago that Wisconsin had five dog tracks, second only to Florida in terms of total live-racing facilities. This week, the operators of the Dairyland Greyhound Park in Kenosha announced that the track will end racing on New Year's Eve. This will mark the end of greyhound racing in the state.
Apparently the track has lost $17 million over the past seven years. And it's not totally clear yet what will become of all the dogs.
Antiracing groups like the Massachusetts-based GREY2K USA are delighted. "New Year's Eve will be a very special one for the greyhounds this year," GREY2K's president, Christine Dorchak, told me. Dairyland joins Raynham Park in Massachusetts and Phoenix Greyhound Park, which will both cease live racing the same day.
The video comes with a handy summary at this YouTube link, for those curious about who started it. Good luck with that.
UPDATE: This new version of the video is annotated for your viewing pleasure. Seems we're looking at Amnesty supporters joined by two Tea Party interlopers, one in the black T-shirt and shorts, the other wearing a pink oxford. They claim black T-shirt guy was sucker-punched, though it's hard to tell. They're damned lucky they didn't run into oncoming traffic.
Long before George LeMieux was selected by Charlie Crist to be the state's newest U.S. Senator, he was the most powerful figure in the North Broward Hospital District.
An episode from this past March illustrates LeMieux's godfather-like role. That month Marc Goldstone was still the general counsel of the North Broward Hospital District. He found himself in an awkard political position.
On one hand, his job called for him to be certain that the district made smart legal decisions -- and the district's willingness to participate in a class action suit against bond rating agencies failed that standard. There are only so many bond rating agencies, and a $1 billion public hospital district may not want to antagonize them, lest those agencies be inclined to give Broward Health's bonds a low rating. Or maybe Goldstone just thought there was no way to win the class action suit. Whatever it was, he wanted to get the district out of this legal loser.
On the other hand, he may have recognized that the district's participation in the suit had been brokered through Commissioner Joseph Cobo, who was appointed by Gov. Charlie Crist. In addition, he may have known that the attorneys who stood to profit from the suit belonged to the firm of a major Crist fundraiser: Scott Rothstein.
Attorneys at Scott Rothstein's firm landed a highly privileged meeting with the executive leadership of the North Broward Hospital District in September 2008, the month after Rothstein was appointed by his friend, Gov. Charlie Crist, to the nominating committee for Florida's 4th District Court of Appeals, according to documents that were part of an internal investigation at the district.
Also, at that meeting: Broward Health Chief Operating Officer Spencer Levine, who was seeking the judicial appointment by that very same committee on which Rothstein had a vote.
Conspicuous by his absence: Troy Kishbaugh, the acting general counsel, a position that based on the district's charter gave him sole responsibility for selecting outside attorneys, the status Rothstein's firm was seeking. The architect of the meeting: Commissioner Joseph Cobo, who is currently weathering a criminal investigation for corruption by the Broward State Attorney's Office.
Yup, this is going to get complicated. Let's get into it after the jump.
In Washington, D.C., the St. Petersburg Times politics blog Buzz button-holed Sen. George LeMieux, who's holding that seat for his benefactor, Charlie Crist. Here's what LeMieux had to say about young, handsome, impeccably conservative Marco Rubio, who's been hammering Crist over supporting the federal stimulus:
It's very easy to be a critic, and the speaker now is not in office. He wasn't there when the state was facing the challenges of the huge recession and the stimulus. He didn't have to vote on that. All of the folks that were in his administration voted for the stimulus money.
It's part of the center's "restoration weekend." Not sure exactly what is being restored, but there may be a clue lurking in the weekend's cryptic title: "Defending Our Freedom and Our Culture."
Hmmm. Defending our "culture," you say? And that's a mighty Caucasian guest list, isn't it?
The Florida Bar Association has ruled that Sam Goren, acting general counsel of the North Broward Hospital District, did not act incompetently or violate professional ethics standards in giving advice to the board, which led to the firing of the district's two lead attorneys and the hiring of Goren's firm to that powerful position.
UPDATE: Had the hard copy but had to wait a few hours to upload the document itself. Here it is.
We've gone over this issue many, many times on this blog. I'm not surprised by the bar's ruling. This is an organization that has a tradition of protecting the status quo. Not even bribing a murder witness, apparently, is grounds for suspension, let alone disbarment.
After the jump, let's compare the two sides of the story at the heart of the bar complaint.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that former Broward County commissioner Joe Eggelletion was a vice mayor under Broward Mayor Stacy Ritter. This article has also been changed to clarify Ritter's relationship with Scott Rothstein.
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After the year that Broward County has had, we may all need shot glasses to endure Mayor Stacy Ritter's State of the County speech. A former colleague, of course, is now facing federal corruption charges. The top lieutenant of the county's top law man recently ushered a fugitive out of the country. Ritter herself has been linked to Scott Rothstein, as well as the other biggest alleged Ponzi schemer in state history, Joel Steinger. And let's not forget the vicious round of layoffs and program cuts that were necessary to get the budget balanced.
Somehow, Ritter's going to have to find a silver lining in that jet-black cloud, which should be quite a spectacle. We may as well try to enjoy it. After the jump, your First Annual Juice State of the County drinking game.
That's video from August 29, when Pembroke Pines Mayor Frank Ortis climbed in the ring with NFL Hall of Fame linebacker Lawrence Taylor. Considering that LT could have crushed Ortis' skull with one swing, I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that the rolly-polly mayor is an advocate of civility and good sportsmanship.
In an op-ed that he wrote for the San Antonio Express-News, Ortis called on the mayors attending this past weekend's Congress of Cities to keep the political punches above the waist in an era when the low-blow has become so common.
This week Lou Dobbs, the last of the original CNN anchors, announced he was leaving the station and ending his show on that network to "go beyond the role here at CNN" and "engage in constructive problem solving."
While this could mean many things, the smart money says his "constructive problem solving" means playing some golf outside of his West Palm Beach home (which we're sure was built solely by legal residents of this country, and is situated on a golf course we're also sure was built by only White mid-western farm boys) and waiting around for a time slot on Fox News.
I called the phone number listed for his WPB house to ask Lou about his plans for the new time off, but there was no answer--he must be out eating at restaurants who employ only legal residents or shopping for clothes made only by American hands from fabrics made of materials procured by non-immigrant field workers. So we decided to put together a little list of five things Lou will do while in the Sunshine State.
Documents recently made available by the North Broward Hospital District show that former general counsel Laura Seidman made major improvements to a legal department that -- by some indications -- had been full of cronyism and waste under attorney Bill Scherer. The most striking example of Seidman's progress: She reduced the district's outside billings by a third in just her first year, a savings of nearly $2 million for a public hospital district that depends in part on your tax dollars.
These findings suggest that whatever outrage there was over the political friendships that helped Seidman get hired in March 2006, there ought to have been even more outrage for the apparent political reasons she was pushed out the door two years later.
Since May, Sam Goren has been the acting general counsel of the North Broward Hospital District, a position that allows him to dole out millions of dollars in legal work and makes him one of the county's most powerful attorneys.
But the manner in which Goren landed that job keeps getting murkier and murkier. The most recent cause for discomfort comes from within a lawsuit filed by the man Goren replaced, Marc Goldstone. Hospital district commissioners fired Goldstone in mid-May, in part based on their consultation with Goren. Commissioners claimed that Goldstone -- who moved here from Tennessee -- had misled them about the manner in which he was going to become licensed to practice law in Florida. Can you guess what licensed Florida attorney was advising Goldstone as to how he should gain admission to the Florida Bar?
That's a video presentation by Susyn Stecchi, a former Fort Lauderdale employee who in 1990 had the idea to turn the FEC railroad crossing at Riverwalk into a gigantic gator mouth. But according to the comments she attached to this video, the technology for this zany idea wasn't available -- until now. It appears the Fort Lauderdale Centennial Committee -- chaired by ex-Congressman E. Clay Shaw -- is toying with the idea.
Stecchi's plucky, persistent 20-year pursuit of this gator bridge makes me wonder whether she's our local version of Parks and Recreation dynamo Leslie Knope, who will appear on NBC TV at 8:30 tonight.
Shortly after Marc Goldstone began his new job as general counsel of Broward Health in November of last year, he found that the public hospital district -- which is among the nation's largest -- had been violating a range of federal laws and court orders, some of which jeopardized the safety of patients.
He also found that at least two of the seven commissioners who hired him had committed grievous ethical lapses that warranted change. In a suit he filed yesterday afternoon in Fort Lauderdale's U.S. District Court, Goldstone claims that he was fired in mid-May before he could make these reforms and that the decision by commissioners was based on their desire to protect a corrupt status quo.
School Board Member Beverly Gallagher faces corruption charges.
No more dragging a stack of papers home to grade at night while watching Glee. No more late afternoon conferences with parents, or volunteering to chaperone the math team's car wash -- at least not until after Thanksgiving.
For the next couple of weeks, the Broward Teachers Union is asking its members to stop all unpaid, after-hours work, and instead "work to the rule" of their contracts, pressuring district officials to give them raises.
"The point of 'work to the rule' is to show the community all of the extra things that teachers contribute," says
Move over, Alan Grayson. There's another Florida Democrat who's not afraid to ruffle Republican feathers -- West Broward Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. In yesterday MSNBC segment (roughly 3:15 of the video above) she was given the chance to recant a quote that appeared in this Politico article -- the part about women being "repulsed" by the Republican Party.
As you can see, she not only stood behind those words, she added another stinging quote, calling House Republicans "a caucus (that's) 90 percent male, 100 percent out of touch about issues that matter to women."
And that's not even the portion of the interview that offended House Minority Leader John Boehner.
Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio congressman known for his love of television cameras and his quixotic presidential bids, will no longer be the keynote speaker at this Saturday's Palm Beach County Democratic Party dinner. He canceled the gig last week after several local Dems lambasted his voting record on Israel.
As state Rep. Kevin Rader, D-Delray Beach, told the Palm Beach Post: "There's probably a dozen members of Congress who consistently, always vote against Israel. Consistently. And Dennis Kucinich is one of them."
Whether such criticism is warranted depends on one's political slant. "He's a national figure who's very popular," says Mark Siegel, Palm
Beach County Democratic party chairman. "Plus, he's a charming guy and an
excellent speaker."
But there are plenty of reasons why Palm Beachers should be glad they were spared a Kucinich speech.
The ACLU filed a class action lawsuit Friday on behalf of Palm Beach County students and parents, naming Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, House Speaker Larry Cretul, Senate President Jeff Atwater, and Florida Commissioner of Education Eric J. Smith as defendants. The suit charges that the State of Florida has failed the county's students, citing as evidence abysmally low high school graduation rates. One-third to one-half of Palm Beach students fail to graduate high school, the suit says, and black students lag far behind whites.
The suit is the first of its kind in the country, said Chris Hanson, ACLU staff attorney, when we spoke to him by phone on Friday. "This is still the only case in the country that makes the argument based on low graduation rates," he said. "We looked around to find a place where the state admitted a constitutional right to adequate education, plus a school district with low graduation rates, and Palm Beach County was one such area."
Looks like Office Depot, which is based in Boca Raton, has a major scandal on its hands. A former senior account executive named David Sherwin has accused the office supply retailer of overcharging governments across the country, and there's talk of a grand jury investigation in Florida.
Judging by the article in the Naples Daily News, Sherwin left his former workplace with a juicy batch of documents, yet he's struggled to convince governments like Collier County's to perform audits to determine whether they were cheated.
Though Sherwin asserts the Collier district's lack of response is the worst he has heard of yet, the fact is most agencies purchasing from Office Depot reacted similarly upon learning of Sherwin's allegations through media reports and his relentless nationwide campaign of e-mails, faxes and telephone calls.
Among the Broward cities that responded to Sherwin, Pembroke Pines
Deerfield's Mango Festival has been a financial juggling act
I've been stymied in my efforts to get an answer to the question I put at the bottom of this mammoth post from yesterday, about the Deerfield Beach's Mango Festival. Namely, why did the city cut the Mango Festival a check for $36,000 in June 2008?
Acting parks and recreation director George Edmunds might know, but he hasn't returned calls or emails. Nor has City Manager Mike Mahaney (update: until just a moment ago). Vice Mayor Sylvia Poitier, the festival's leading patron on the commission, isn't picking up her phone, either.
The president of the Mango Festival, Norm Edwards, didn't act on a appointment we had to discuss the issue yesterday. And he hasn't a returned a message I left for him today. So we'll have to try cracking the case without help from the people closest to it.
Usually, we're skeptical when a campaigning politician cites a breaking news story as a basis for new legislation, but we'll suspend that cynicism for the moment. State Sen. Dan Gelber, Democratic candidate for Florida attorney general, has seized on the recent corruption cases in Broward County to demand new laws against official misconduct.
This issue is right in Gelber's wheelhouse: He used to work in the public corruption unit of the federal prosecutor's office in Miami, meaning he worked on cases exactly like the ones those against Broward County and School Board officials. He knows the advantages that a federal prosecutor has in working with an "honest services" statute.
But now that he's a state lawmaker, Gelber also understands how much weaker Florida public corruption laws are. Here's the passage of that blog post that makes a muckraker's heart flutter:
One of the photos that Mango Festival organizers did not want you to see.
The Mango Festival of Deerfield Beach has a math problem: Its most recent festival, in June 2008, attracted a lot of people. But for some reason, it didn't make a lot of money. And for the city, which has invested more than a million dollars in that festival over the last several years, that should be cause for concern.
"There's nothing that we're hiding," insists the festival's president, Norm Edwards. "Everything is done by the book."
We'll see about that. After the jump, let's take a close look at how the Mango festival handles its money.
In a post yesterday that's part of our Panning for Gold series, I made a crack about how it's rather foolish to trust a charter fisherman's hunch about the sustainability of fish population -- not just for the obvious fox-running-the-hen-house reasons. Mainly, it's because there's a much more reliable, objective means for ascertaining fish population: the federal government's science-based research tools.
As if on cue, Florida's Broward-born, shiny-new senator, George LeMieux, can be seen in the video above (also from yesterday) asking the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to relax restrictions against fishermen like those who protested recently in Fort Walton Beach, claiming they knew the fish population better than government researchers.
It would have been a more fortuitous sign for Marco Rubio if Doug Hoffman hadn't lost his congressional race in upstate New York, but the fact that a Conservative Party candidate won 45 percent of the vote has Rubio more hopeful than ever. The same can be said for the right wing of the Republican Party, which is now treating Florida Senate seat as its biggest priority.
The Wall Street Journal is so eager to cover that it treated the New York campaign as a mere undercard to the Rubio-Crist title bout in August.
The article makes no mention, however, of the scandals brewing in Broward County among some of Crist's most active supporters.
After watching three Republicans on the Palm Beach County Commission head to prison on corruption charges, one might imagine local Democratic operatives corking champagne bottles in anticipation of next year's battle to fill the seat held by Republican Commissioner Steven Abrams.
But politics in Corruption County are never that simple. Indeed, the Dems have yet to find anyone to run against Abrams. "Of all the races we're scoping out, it's probably the toughest race in the county," says Mark Siegel, chairman of the
Contributors: Eric Barton, Michelle Centrone, Deirdra Funcheon, Keith Hollar, John Linn, Michael J. Mooney, Bob Norman, Lisa Rab, Nicole Rodriguez, Gail Shepherd.
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