I have really been impressed with the governor and his emergency response team.
This evening Scott cancelled schools state wide. He will use the schools to shelter evacuees and to be used as staging areas. South Florida traffic is extremely heavy along the interstates and very slow. The fear is everyone will not make it out of Florida.
Posts : 6472 Join date : 2012-06-14 Location : Pensacola Beach, FL
The problem is Scott should've canceled the schools long before he did. As it is, now there will be untold numbers of parents, especially in areas like ours where business as usual will likely be the case -- who'll have to somehow scramble to arrange for last minute sitters for their kids if they still have to go to work, and/or a lot of mothers or fathers will be calling in sick Friday and/or Monday. Not saying it was a bad idea, just that the delayed timing was very regrettable.
Thankfully in gulf breeze the recreation center will be open all day Friday for school-age children. The only thing you have to do is provide their lunch. The closure of schools should not affect day care centers.
RealLindaL wrote:The problem is Scott should've canceled the schools long before he did. As it is, now there will be untold numbers of parents, especially in areas like ours where business as usual will likely be the case -- who'll have to somehow scramble to arrange for last minute sitters for their kids if they still have to go to work, and/or a lot of mothers or fathers will be calling in sick Friday and/or Monday. Not saying it was a bad idea, just that the delayed timing was very regrettable.
Today was grandparents' day and my daughter didn't receive a call...took her daughter to school as usual, along with several other parents who didn't know. School is also cancelled for Monday. If they turn the elementary school into a shelter, how long will it be before school can reopen? I know hurricanes are unpredictable, but Pensacola has never been in the projected path. However, all of South, Central and Eastern Florida should have already evacuated...although I know of at least one friend in Key West who decided to stay...against all odds.
Joanimaroni wrote:I have really been impressed with the governor and his emergency response team.
This evening Scott cancelled schools state wide. He will use the schools to shelter evacuees and to be used as staging areas. South Florida traffic is extremely heavy along the interstates and very slow. The fear is everyone will not make it out of Florida.
I don't like him that much. He has shown great leadership though.
I think the Governor did his job quite well with regard to the storm threat but something that kinda puzzles and or puzzled me was when he made his public statements regarding storm preparedness he always has/had this huge cadre of people in camo outfits . . . . . they never utter a word but simply stood there reverently . . . . any explanations?
Posts : 6472 Join date : 2012-06-14 Location : Pensacola Beach, FL
Funny knot, my husband asked the exact same question. Only thing I couild figure was it was just for show, to let the people know he had all those resources available to save the state from Irma. Or something.
Glad yall were equally curious Linda . . . . . personally I suspect some just cannot pass up an opportunity to suck up to "first responders", it's in the DNA even though all sane people appreciate what they do but it's part of an orchestrated presentation. Hey it's politics!!!! Duh . . . lol
RealLindaL wrote:The problem is Scott should've canceled the schools long before he did. As it is, now there will be untold numbers of parents, especially in areas like ours where business as usual will likely be the case -- who'll have to somehow scramble to arrange for last minute sitters for their kids if they still have to go to work, and/or a lot of mothers or fathers will be calling in sick Friday and/or Monday. Not saying it was a bad idea, just that the delayed timing was very regrettable.
Nothing satisfies you libtards. If he came up with a cure for cancer, you'd say he was taking jobs from doctors .
RealLindaL wrote:The problem is Scott should've canceled the schools long before he did. As it is, now there will be untold numbers of parents, especially in areas like ours where business as usual will likely be the case -- who'll have to somehow scramble to arrange for last minute sitters for their kids if they still have to go to work, and/or a lot of mothers or fathers will be calling in sick Friday and/or Monday. Not saying it was a bad idea, just that the delayed timing was very regrettable.
Nothing satisfies you libtards. If he came up with a cure for cancer, you'd say he was taking jobs from doctors .
He's a crook...already was before he stole the office of governor. What part of that is difficult for you?
Stole...bought...whatever. He spent $73 million in 2010 to "win" the office of governor, barely scraping by without a recount. He was obviously hand picked by Jeb Bush, in view of the fact that he was a former partner of George W. Bush.
Carl Hiaasen: Gov. Scott picks the public’s pockets
AUGUST 15, 2015 1:00 PM
Is Rick Scott the worst governor in the history of Florida?
It’s a question lots of people ask, and the verdict’s still out. The state has had many lousy governors since 1845, when the job first opened.
Scott is certainly a prime contender for worst ever, and each new screwing of Floridians pushes him closer to the title. The latest outrage reveals the fair-weather fiscal conservative reaching deep into public pockets to bail himself out of legal trouble.
During the last few months, taxpayers have been soaked for more than $1 million to settle lawsuits in which Scott and his dim-bulb Cabinet flagrantly violated Florida’s open-records and open-meetings laws.
No other sitting governor has used tax money to end public-records cases that were caused by his own secretive misbehavior. Scott couldn’t care less.
He paid off in one case to avoid producing thousands of emails from private Google accounts on which he and staff members conducted public business, against the law. Scott said such accounts didn’t exist, which was a flat-out lie.
The stealth emails came to light in a lawsuit by Tallahassee attorney Steven R. Andrews, who was trying to buy an office building on property that Scott wanted to use as a “legacy park” around the governor’s mansion.
Once Andrews learned about Scott’s undisclosed emails, he pushed hard to obtain them. After a court recently ruled that Google had to turn over all relevant correspondence in the governor’s accounts, Scott quickly decided to settle the case rather than reveal the contents of his messages.
He agreed to pay Andrews $700,000 to end the case.
More accurately, he agreed to pay $700,000 with state funds. The governor personally won’t be writing the check, even though he’s the one who broke the law.
The payout to Andrews is coming out of “grants and donations” in the budget of the governor’s office ($120,000); the Department of State ($60,000); the Attorney General’s office ($75,000); and, most arrogantly, the Department of Environmental Protection ($445,000).
This is the sort of ripoff that vaults Scott to the top of the list when people talk about truly terrible governors. Who else would raid the budget of the agency in charge of safeguarding the environment to pay for a lawsuit that has no environmental angle?
It’s another kick in the teeth for the 4 million Floridians who voted for Amendment 1, believing DEP would use newly designated revenues for the purchase and protection of conservation lands. Nobody dreamed that the governor — even this governor — would loot DEP to pay his own legal bills.
Another case that cost taxpayers a bundle was the firing last December of Gerald Bailey, the widely respected head of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Bailey’s dismissal was orchestrated by Scott and retroactively supported by the Cabinet.
St. Petersburg lawyer Matthew Weidner and several media organizations, including this newspaper, filed a lawsuit charging that Scott and Cabinet members violated Florida’s open-meeting law by terminating Bailey without any open discussion or vote.
Afterward Bailey went public with complaints that the governor and his staff had tried to improperly influence an FDLE criminal investigation and described other incidents of alleged interference.
As we know from past video depositions, Scott isn’t the most credible or polished witness under oath. His aversion to trials is understandable.
Rather than sit still and testify about why Bailey was fired, the governor chose to bail out. Nervous Cabinet members were close on his heels.
The Weidner lawsuit was settled in June for $55,000, a fraction of its true cost to taxpayers. At one point more than a dozen private attorneys were working on behalf of Scott and the Cabinet, racking up legal fees of about $365,000.
Once again, the governor and his cohorts break the law, and we get hammered with the bill.
You’d never know it from what’s happening today, but Florida actually pioneered the concept of “government in the sunshine.” For a long time, our laws opening records and official meetings to the public were considered models for other states.
Politicians have always tried to weasel around these regulations and do business the old-fashioned way, in backrooms and bars. The new-fashioned method of subversion is texting and emails, a style that suits Scott’s sneaky nature.
It’s still too early to crown him with the title of Worst Governor Ever, but none in modern memory has worked harder to conceal his actions or spent more of the public’s money covering them up.
Scott wants to be remembered for creating jobs, and he will be.
It's the million dollar question: Exactly how corrupt is Florida Governor Rick Scott?
The answer may be "beyond our wildest dreams." A new lawsuit brought by former Democratic candidate for state attorney general George Sheldon claims that Scott has failed to disclose about $200 million in assets on his state financial disclosure forms, instead using a "web of complex financial arrangements" to shuffle around the governor's various investments and "financial interests from public view." This gigantic nest egg may tie the Tea Party favorite and Skeletor lookalike to innumerable conflicts of interest and possibly instances of outright corruption.
Scott has officially disclosed about $132 million in holdings held in a blind trust, but the incompleteness of that disclosure looks pretty suspicious given that he's using a law he passed to partially shield his assets from public view. Sheldon's lawyers want to know what happened to the rest of the $300 million plus in stock he received as part of his severance package from his former employment at health care company Columbia/HCA.
If Scott has nothing to hide, then it's curious that he's fighting the lawsuit so furiously. His lawyers have branded the requests to disclose more information on trusts owned by him and his wife as "blatant harassment" and say the information Sheldon is requesting is "highly confidential." Essentially, they're arguing the Florida public has no right to know what whether or not Scott's holdings violate state ethics laws. Instead, the legal team says that Scott's financial disclosures should be handled by the state's ethics commission rather than the judicial system.
The perverted thing is that this is Florida, often considered one of the most corrupt states in the country, so Scott probably stands a good chance of getting away with it. The ethics commission his lawyers think should handle his financial disclosures is so weak that it's failed to collect half a million dollars in fines. Former Department of Law Enforcement commissioner Gerald Bailey told the New York Times that he was forced out of his job after "he refused to acquiesce to repeated requests by Governor Scott and his staff to violate policy, take political sides and, in one case, target a county clerk for something she had not done and then falsify a news release." His replacement, Rick Swearingen, spent three years supervising Scott's personal bodyguards.
Florida Republicans are a nasty bunch, and Scott is no different. During his tenure as CEO of Columbia/Hospital Corporation of America, Scott claims to have somehow missed that it was in the middle of committing what was then the largest Medicare fraud in history. The government slapped the company with a $1.75 billion fine. During the trial, Scott pleaded the Fifth Amendment not once, not twice, but 75 times.
Scott then essentially bought his way into office with $100 million of his own money and an agenda devoted to privatizing as many of the state government's functions as possible. One of those functions was prison health care. The governor's administration awarded Corizon Health a $1.2 billion contract in 2011 to run inmate health services, overlooking the fact that it had been sued 660 times for malpractice between 2008 and 2013. As a result, inmate death rates skyrocketed to a 10-year high. Scott's new prison budget includes no new money to investigate why. Al-Jazeera Americanotes that his administration has "overseen the destruction of natural springs, the sale of protected lands and the defunding of conservation."
Here's one example of the kind of conflicts of interest Scott might be trying to hide. The Tampa Bay Times tied Scott's aggressive support of mandatory drug testing for state employees and welfare recipients as well as his attempts to shrink Medicaid and the public health clinic system to $62 million in Solantic Corp. holdings he transferred to his wife. Solantic Corp. owns 32 urgent care centers that handle everything from emergency walk-ins to drug screening. It took a year of public pressure to get him to sell his stock.
In another conflict of interest, the Scott family is in a position to greatly benefit from a 474-mile pipeline being constructed for Florida Power & Light. His chief of staff had financial ties to Scott's All Aboard Florida project, which would build a rail system between Orlando and Miami. Scott previously rejected $2.4 billion in federal funding for a similar project that would have created 27,000 jobs.
Who knows what else could be lurking deep in the tangled web of Scott's finances, but $200 million is a whole lot of money, and Scott's record suggests a man with few ethics or moral principles. This could be a gubernatorial scandal that makes Chris Christie's Bridgegate look like a harmless prank.
Posts : 1063 Join date : 2017-08-20 Location : Pensacola
Rick Scott is a thief and a jerk and will tell everybody in this state how good they are recovering whether it's true or not. The same thing will happen in Texas, because no matter what the response from Washington is, both governors will try and convince you the feds are doing absolutely everything they can. They are both "good" Republicans.
Thirty six percent of Americans will believe it because they are fools.
There can't be a fast and effective recovery from these two storms because there is not enough money in the national treasury. Sometimes, facts matter.
Posts : 6472 Join date : 2012-06-14 Location : Pensacola Beach, FL
Maybe so, but I think I'll just wait for the perspective of time and a lot more reports from those affected as to how well things worked (or didn't) for them thanks to Scott's efforts. In other words, we shall see.
RealLindaL wrote:Maybe so, but I think I'll just wait for the perspective of time and a lot more reports from those affected as to how well things worked (or didn't) for them thanks to Scott's efforts. In other words, we shall see.
Fla. nursing home says they called Gov. Rick Scott 36 hours before deaths from Irma
The Florida nursing home where eight patients died days after Hurricane Irma knocked out its air conditioning says it contacted a special number cell phone number Gov. Rick Scott had given them 36 hours before the first death asking for assistance, CBS Miami reports.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott's office issued a statement to CBS Miami's Jim DeFede saying all calls to the hotline were returned in a timely fashion.
"Every call made to the Governor from facility management was referred to the Agency for Health Care Administration and the Florida Department of Health and quickly returned." said Scott's communications director John Tupps.
CBS News' Jonathan Vigliotti reported Thursday that records show several 911 calls came from the center starting at 3:30 a.m. But it was nurse Judy From, at a hospital just across the street, who walked over with colleagues to find out for herself what was happening.
"It was a situation where we knew we had to get those patients evacuated," From told Vigliotti.
The Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills says it lost power during Irma, but utility company Florida Power & Light issued a statement to CBS Miami on Friday saying part of the facility had electricity.
"What we know now is that a portion of the facility did, in fact, have power, that there was a hospital with power across the parking lot from this facility and that the nursing home was required to have a permanently installed, operational generator," said FPL's Peter Robbins in a statement.
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