Miami's Carl Hiassen: The best Legislature money can buy

[seafan]

Carl Hiassen writes in the Miami Herald:

April 2, 2011

I once referred to a past Legislature as a festival of whores, which in retrospect was a vile insult to the world’s oldest profession.

Today’s lackluster assemblage in Tallahassee is possibly the worst in modern times, and cannot fairly be compared to anything except a rodeo of phonies and pimps. It’s impossible to remember a governor and lawmakers who were more virulently anti-consumer, and more slavishly submissive to big business.

The list of who’s getting screwed in the state budget battle is long and sadly familiar: the schools, college students, foster children, the poor, the elderly, the sick and the jobless. The happiest faces, of course. belong to lobbyists for corporations, insurance companies and utilities, who are getting almost everything they want.

It’s astounding that so many voters were suckered into thinking that this new generation of Republicans was going to fight for the common man instead of the fats cats and their special interests.

.....

Wish we could put this piece in every residential mailbox around the state.

[XanaDUer]

1. I was wondering the other week what Carl H. thought of

Rick Scott and his ilk.

[highplainsdem]

2. K&R

[seafan]

3. Hiassen: 'It’s hard to know whether to laugh or vomit.'

More from Carl Hiassen on the state of the Florida Legislature:

.....

The House is swiftly moving to deregulate 20 different types of business, including intrastate movers and telemarketers — two occupations that aren’t exactly famous for being scrupulous and undeceptive.

.....

Bills are also sailing through the House and Senate that will allow Florida Power & Light to raise your electric rates for the next five years while at the same time giving the utility a controlling grip on the state’s future solar energy market.

.....

More bad news: If your home is one of 1.3 million insured by Citizens — the state-run pool that was established after Hurricane Andrew — your premiums could soon rise by as much as 25 percent.

.....

But to benefit themselves, lawmakers resurrected and decriminalized a scummy little gimmick called “leadership funds,” which allow special interest groups to give gobs of money to special campaign accounts controlled by the leaders of both political parties, who can spread it around as they see fit.

Outlawed by a long-ago Legislature, leadership funds are simply a sanitized way of buying votes, slightly less sleazy than taking cash in a paper bag.

.....

No need to sanitize it. Keep it coming.


Troxler's also unafraid to expose this Whore of Babylon.

[XanaDUer]

5. Two years ago I was offered a job back home in FL

and I really, really wanted to go back. But, since then they universities were taking massive cuts, I didn't accept the job. This was before Scott and his tea-party ilk took over Florida.

[SpiralHawk]

4. As goes Florida, so goes the Republicon Homeland

Americans weep for the America they built as Republicons lie, then dismantle it to create their soul-ugly & cruel corporate-totalitarian Homeland, with the vast majority of people relegated to the role of miserable minimum-wage Proles.

[SpiralHawk]

6. "So many voters were SUCKERED..."

The very hallmark of Republiconism - suckeritude.

[highplainsdem]

7. Yes. The Tea Party has been very useful to the GOP as an astrotuf "populist" movement.

It's harder to hide the puppet strings their corporate masters are manipulating when you see the actual legislation and policies.

[SpiralHawk]

8. TeaBagliConism (R) is just an astroturf pack of SuckerPuppets

Mindlessly gulping the Fox & Limbaugh RepubliCorp-brand kool aid, and working blindly * dilengently against their own family's interests.