Category: Florida

As we know, the Hispanic vote continues to evolve in its impact on this state. Hispanics are the fastest-growing demographic, with Puerto Ricans representing the most rapid-growth group of all. And the political implications are serious. Aside from the usual hard-line, Cuban suspects in South Florida, the Hispanic vote remains solidly in the Democratic column.

Now there’s word that the Puerto Rican diaspora to the U.S. mainland, most notably Florida, is surging again. And the exodus increasingly includes professionals and middle-class Puerto Ricans. It has everything to do, alas, with ratcheting unemployment, cost of living and crime on the island–as well as the allure of service-sector employment around Orlando.

The state of Florida–for the 19th time–now has a lieutenant governor. He’s Carlos López-Cantera, 40, and he has filled a nearly year-long void since the embarrassing departure of his predecessor, Jennifer Carroll.

Will he be more like Ray Osborne and Tom Adams, who served unremarkably under Govs. Claude Kirk and Reubin Askew? Or more like Buddy MacKay and Frank Brogan, who served quite capably under Lawton Chiles and Jeb Bush?

Will he remind observers of the undistinguished Jeff Kottkamp, who worked under Charlie Crist? Or will the former Florida House majority whip and majority leader invoke memories of the legislatively savvy Toni Jennings, the former Senate president appointed by Bush (after Brogan resigned to become president of Florida Atlantic University)?

If pragmatically smart politics and common sense prevail–hardly a given–López-Cantera will not be the second coming of Kottkamp nor merely next up in the minority-appointee playbook. If he’s only used as a would-be Hispanic shill, he will be an insulting, net minus. A South Florida Cuban can’t be all things to all Hispanics just because he speaks Spanish.

But López-Cantera looks good, speaks well, understands the game and knows his way around Tallahassee. He can actually assist an inherent outlier who’s now an awkward incumbent.

While lieutenant governors, any more than vice presidents, don’t flat-out determine elections, they can be useful administratively and complement the top of a ticket. Scott, up for re-election in nine months, in still an unpopular, hustings-challenged campaigner who needs help.

What the Scott Administration should consider is issuing some serious portfolios, representing some serious priority updates and changes, to López-Cantera. And then, rather than relying solely on the ham-handed political skills of the personally divisive Scott, allowing López-Cantera to help make the case.

And there are cases that need making to voters beyond the usual conservative suspects.

Stand Your Ground, for example, should no longer stand as is. The Second Amendment can still be saluted without rhapsodizing over a gun culture that has resulted in more than a million Floridians with conceal and carry licenses. It speaks volumes that we even know who George Zimmerman and Curtis Reeves are.

And maybe Sen. René García, the Hialeah Republican, could use some help with Round 2 of the Medicaid-expansion endeavor. She recently filed a bill in support of accepting the federal government’s help that is worth billions–with implications for the uninsured as well as the economy.

The governor is on record as favoring Medicaid-expansion acceptance, but never deigned to lobby Will Weatherford or anybody else over it. Why not López-Cantera as a surrogate?

And there are plenty of other point-man priorities that López-Cantera might be suited for. They range from the ultimate restoration of–and net addition to–education and environmental funding to incentives toward solar-energy viability in this Dark Ages Sunshine State. Scott, of course, is no longer an outsider, but he can’t be his own effective insider without coming across as an expedient hypocrite.

Scott, given the antipathy target he still wears, can’t afford to relegate López-Cantera to the roles of ceremonial fill-in and cheerleader, one who just might mitigate matters with Hispanics.

By law, the lieutenant governor has no specific duties–other than replacing a deceased or incapacitated chief executive. But there’s another law. The law of political survival. Even against a flawed challenger, Scott needs to do more than take credit for Florida’s participation in the national economic recovery with the addition of jobs that still skew to the service sector.

Florida is already a well-known, low-tax state. For it to ultimately woo the “jobs, jobs, jobs” and lifestyle employees of the future, it will have to make the case for quality of life, infrastructure and education. That case, arguably, is not made convincingly by gimmicky tax cuts nor by the man who embodies that approach.

Typically, the lieutenant governor isn’t an important factor in a gubernatorial race–especially a re-election where there is a track record. But there’s nothing typical about what’s coming up this November.

We’ve all heard the range of speculation on medical marijuana now that it’s assured of being on the November 2014 ballot.

John Morgan isn’t the only one who thinks it’s “advantage Democrats” because it’s a “progressive” issue in a non-presidential election year. But others note how less than convincing the correlation data is from previous states that have had medical marijuana ballot initiatives. Still others think there are more than a few closet GOPster potheads, so it might just be an ironic wash.

All the pondering is prompted by the sobering reality that less than half of registered voters typically determine who their mayors and governors are.

But wouldn’t it be refreshing–even a new subset of “American exceptionalism”–if we didn’t routinely muse and strategize over the impact of certain issues on voter turnout? As if societal right and citizen duty were actually motivation enough.

As if we practiced democratic self-determination via the vote as fervently as we preach it as an ideal in regime-change scenarios overseas.

So Florida is now under court order to start serving kosher meals to prison inmates. It hasn’t been doing so since 2007, but now has until July to gear up. According to Michael Crews, incoming secretary of the Department of Corrections, it’s becoming a major budget concern: The religious meals are four times more costly than the alternative.

And because there’s no real, readily-agreed-upon litmus test for who’s Jewish and “eligible,” and who’s a gentile and gaming the system, Crews expects the kosher requests to keep ratcheting up. It’s a matter of religious freedom meets finite resources.

Too bad old-school common sense can’t prevail.

It’s called prison. It’s not for everybody. You earn your way in. It’s a form of societal punishment. So, sorry, but no ESPN; this isn’t a sports bar. And no kosher; this isn’t an airliner.

But that wouldn’t be kosher.

Would that we were the “Gun-shy State” instead of the “Gunshine State.”

No, not a bunch of wimps and wusses or Second Amendment blasphemers, but a state that knows the difference between self-defense and self-delusion.

In fact, a state that would rather win an infrastructure challenge or an innovation competition than an arms race. A state that knows that 1.1 million Floridians with a license to conceal and carry does not make for a safer society. A state that doesn’t equate gun laws with Constitutional effrontery and gun rights with patriotic fervor.

It’s beyond problematic when packing a concealed weapon for self-defense is seen not as a failure of civil society, to be lamented, but as an act of citizenship to be celebrated. Another ideological arrow in the quiver of neo-American exceptionalism.

That awful incident at the Cobb Grove 16 is only the most recent Exhibit A for our need to rethink a culture that is increasingly warped when it comes to weapons. A popcorn assault is met with gunfire from a .380 semiautomatic.

The shooter was packing as part of his movie-matinee ensemble. Wallet? Check. Keys? Check? Gun? Check. Why have an unexercised right? Why have an unexploited Second Amendment? This is insane. “Lone Survivor,” the movie about kill-or-be-killed in the outlier hell of Afghanistan, made much more sense.

And no, this was not about texting-protocol abuse, as some in the Twitter World have suggested. This was about unconscionable, unnecessary use of deadly force. Cobb Grove as one-sided OK Corral.

And by the way, because conceal and carry is legal, even if against house rules, doesn’t make it otherwise right. It makes it not illegal. Big difference.

Here in Florida, we’ve recently seen a gun rights group sue to force state universities to allow guns in campus housing and in on-campus cars. We know that “Stand Your Ground” will still be standing after another ideology-driven session of the state legislature. We know that Marion Hammer will remain the patron saint of the locked-and-loaded crowd.

And in Washington, the ultimate response to Sandy Hook and Nancy Lanza’s “Live free or die,” home-arsenal mentality, was–in effect–nothing. No reinstitution of the federal ban on the possession, transfer or manufacture of semiautomatic assault weapons that expired in 2004. Imagine, Congress couldn’t even agree to limit such weaponry to SWAT team members.

In the search for context in our evolving–or devolving–relationship with guns, look no farther than the National Rifle Association.

For most of its history, the NRA, founded in 1871, was mainly a hunting and “sporting” association. It supported, for example, the 1934 National Firearms Act, the first major federal gun-control legislation, and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act.

But by the 1970s the NRA was making the case that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to carry a gun–as opposed to the people’s collective right to form a “well-regulated militia” in providing for the common defense. Ronald Reagan was the NRA’s first endorsed presidential candidate.

Today there are more firearms in the United States than there are Americans. And the U.S. population is well over 300 million. The U.S. has the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world–far outstripping second place Yemen.

It’s a dubious distinction. While no civilian population is better, as it were, armed, one of the tragic upshots is that approximately 100,000 Americans, on average, are annually killed or wounded with guns. Typically none are militia muskets that the Founding Fathers were referencing in adopting the Bill of Rights in 1791.

Columbine. Gabby Giffords. Founding Fathers. Adam Lanza. 

As a society, we shouldn’t be collectively familiar with names such as Trayvon Martin, a high school student who used to visit his father in Sanford, and Pasco County’s Chad Oulson, an employee at an ATV and jet ski dealership, who planned a matinee movie date with his wife last week. But in tragic death, they’re now bigger than life.

Gun rights. Freedom. Nancy Lanza. Littleton.

As utterly needless, fatal shooting victims, they’re heart-wrenching symbols of something that is very wrong in this country and this Gunshine State. It’s a corrosive culture, aided and abetted by ideological cheerleaders, that brazenly abuses sensible connotations of freedom and perverts meaningful application of the Second Amendment. We’re not, to be sure, talking about a “well-regulated militia” these days.

Right to carry. Congress. James Holmes. Wayne LaPierre.

Check out these headlines within the last fortnight. “Gun Rights Group Sues UF Over Ban on Weapons in Cars.” “Florida Carry Sues UF Over Campus Housing Gun Ban.” “USF Allows Guns in Cars.” Where legal underpinning meets Founding Father fodder.

And this just in. Because something is legal, doesn’t make it right–or even preferable. It makes it officially not illegal. But close enough. Why chance being unarmed when road rage strikes on the way to USF?

You own a weapon? You’re among the 1.1 million Floridians with a license to conceal and carry it? Bring it.

To the mall. To the movies. To the coffee shop. To the gym. To work. To school. To church. To a Tampa GOP political convention. Why have unexercised rights? Why have an unexploited Second Amendment? Never know when a bad guy will need confronting.

Gun laws. NRA. George Zimmerman. “The Dark Knight Rises.”

Look, I’m not some central casting bleeding heart. I don’t take lock-step liberal stands on the minimum wage or felon rights or profiling, for example. I believe in context and common sense and not outsourcing my ideology to the usual suspects, left or right.

But when I see blatant cases of cranial and moral fracking, I’m not letting it pass.

Let’s look at our most recent Gunshine State Exhibit A at the Cobb Grove 16 theater. It’s hard to believe that a disagreement over animated texting to a little kid–during the movie TRAILERS–should have even resulted in raised voices and tossed popcorn. But stupid happens. At worse, it should have escalated into nothing more than ever-higher decibels, an airborne, retaliatory Diet Coke and summary expulsions from the theater.

End of embarrassing incident. Everybody go home, adopt an adult demeanor and consider behavior modification and Netflix.

Instead, dumb morphs into the dumbfoundingly tragic–and a second-degree murder charge results. That’s because the shooter, the one who took exception to the texting, was armed.

So, let’s go over this again. You’re–retired TPD cop-status notwithstanding–at a movie and you need to pack heat? What the hell’s up with that?

Even if you claim you weren’t the initial aggressor, why had you strapped on a .380-caliber, semiautomatic pistol as part of your “Lone Survivor” prep? Because that’s the counterproductively sick culture we increasing are forced to live–most of us–with.

And it’s not changing any time soon. As we well know, it remains unconscionable that Congress can’t even agree to ban the sale of assault weapons to anyone not on a SWAT team.

And here in the Gunshine State, “Stand Your Ground” will still stand after the next Legislative session. If this is the new normal, it’s hardly disarming.

Marion Hammer. Trevor Dooley. Aurora. Wesley Chapel.

Talk about effrontery.

How does Gov. Rick Scott dare show up around here for anything–let alone those orchestrated drive-bys that self-servingly hype something he’s taking credit for? And that includes the plan to knock $25 off the cost of auto registration fees that he’s recently been hawking. Yeah, the auto tag-fee reduction he wasn’t interested in until the last year of his term. But, no, don’t dare ask about anything not on his script–anything like whether he still supports expanding Medicaid eligibility to more uninsured and poor Floridians.

As if we in Tampa are supposed to have forgotten and merely moved on.

This is, of course, the same duplicitous ideologue who undercut Tampa right out of the blocks by turning down high-speed rail–not even allowing bids–and wouldn’t even accede to Mayor Bob Buckhorn’s request to help implement a gun-free zone around the Republican National Convention perimeter last summer.

He’s Florida’s governor, but he’s no friend of Tampa.

You don’t have to be Craig Latimer, Deborah Clark or Brian Carley, supervisors of elections for Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco counties, respectively, to see the sheer senselessness in that directive that recently came down from Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner. He said he wanted all 67 of Florida’s election supervisors to impose changes in the handling of absentee ballots.

Specifically, Detzner, a gubernatorial appointee, has been pushing elected supervisors to eliminate all absentee ballot drop-off sites other than main offices. “Uniformity” and “security” is the specious rationale, even at the obvious expense of convenience.

The reaction was as predictable as it was immediate and incredulous.

* “I was flabbergasted,” responded Latimer. “It’s a perfect example of a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

* “This is not promoting ballot accessibility,” replied Clark. “I’m very worried about this. I’m just stunned.”

* “It does give me pause as being anti-voter, and that greatly concerns me,” retorted Carley.

For good measure, Ion Sancho, the veteran supervisor of elections in Tallahassee’s home county of Leon, couldn’t have been more blunt. He labeled Detzner’s directive “un-American.” Ouch.

Now Detzner is indicating that he’s willing to, well, discuss it after-the-fact. It’s called knee-jerk, damage control. But you can’t undo politically self-serving, ignoble intent and resultant ill will.

You would think these are professionals whose job, as they see it, is to accommodate–not inconvenience–voters. It is. You would think Detzner, the Kurt Browning replacement, was a Tallahassee insider who had spent the lion’s share of his lobbying days as the executive director of the Florida Beer Wholesalers Association. He has.

He also doesn’t issue significant, voter-impacting orders without a go-ahead from the man who appointed him, Gov. Rick Scott. There’s precedent, as we know.

This is the same political hack who alienated supervisors last year with that well-chronicled and discredited effort to purge non-citizens from the voter rolls. And a sequel is in the works. Thanks again for helping the national media with more “Flor-i-DUH” material. He is now converting well-earned supervisor skeptics into full-fledged, cynical adversaries.

The timing, of course, is beyond suspicious–just as it was leading up to the presidential election in 2012.

Pinellas County is especially vulnerable but fortunate that Supervisor Clark has served notice of her non-compliance. She has underscored the remote drop-off sites actually boost voter turnout and save money. Not a bad argument.

It’s hardly happenstance that Pinellas has more voters who choose to mail or drop off ballots than any other Florida county. Last year more than 100,000 Pinellas voters utilized (14) drop-off sites for the presidential election. (Hillsborough had 13.)

Pinellas also has a special congressional election early next year to fill the seat of the late Rep. C.W. “Bill” Young. It is a national barometer race and could go Democratic for the first time in most residents’ memory. The absentee-ballot-drop-off vote skews Democratic.

This whole meddlesome modus operandi makes no sense for several reasons.

Making voting more inconvenient–whether it’s cutting hours, decreasing days, harassing ostensible “noncitizens,” or eliminating secured ballot drop-off venues is not good governance. More to the point, it’s not good democracy. We’re better than this. We don’t have to be in self-perpetuating, Flor-i-DUH mode all the time.

But, ironically, it’s not even smart, partisan politics.

Scott has already earned statewide enmity and national notoriety over last year’s ham-handed efforts to limit voting in the disingenuous name of fraud-fighting. He has a transparent re-election strategy–take continuous, unqualified credit for the drop in unemployment and the increase in jobs–and the assurance of obscenely-stocked campaign coffers. He doesn’t need to chance motivating his Democratic opposition with visceral reminders of “voter suppression” scenarios.

That’s the inexplicable risk he incurs by his puppet-master routine with Detzner that has unnecessarily added a legally problematic, absentee-ballot  subplot.

Moreover, he doesn’t need to give pause to any voter offended by any perception of over-reaching, big government. It’s a losing strategy for Detzner to channel Scott by advocating intrusive, counterproductive forays into local county business. Doing the democratically wrong thing for all the usual wrong-headed, partisan reasons is beyond outrageous.

You don’t have to be a political consultant to figure this out. Who’s advising this governor? Lance Armstrong? Paula Deen?

Anybody else think this? Given how often we are tragically reminded that we live in a gun-enamored society, how is it still possible that anybody off the street can rent a weapon at a shooting range–with no background check needed? No training required. No questions asked.

Last week a guy rented a gun at a Pinellas Park shooting range and turned it on himself.  Others could have died as well. And it wasn’t the first time that a person had used the Shoot Straight Gun Range as a suicide venue. The last one was four months ago. Surely, background checking gun renters is something the Founding Fathers would not have frowned upon. Surely.

Florida’s unemployment rate is down, jobs figures are necessarily up and Gov. Rick Scott is reminding voters that he’s the one to thank. Additional tax cuts in a low-tax state and poaching letters to states with Democratic governors obviously turned the tide.

Three quick points.

First, Florida is participating in an ongoing national economic recovery. Why wouldn’t we?

Second, many of the Sunshine State jobs are in service and tourism sectors that pay less than the jobs that fled.

Third, Florida’s economic future lies in the jobs of the future. The ones that are attracted less by marginal tax cuts and gubernatorial prose than by investments in infrastructure–notably transportation–quality of life and education.

You want to talk serious jobs–as well as quality-of-life enhancements? Accepting high-speed rail funding and lobbying for Medicaid-expansion assistance would have helped. Might even have helped mitigate feelings over Scott’s deposition from hell in that notorious Columbia/HCA Medicare fraud case. Might have.