One dubious thing after another in Crist statement

Memo to self: Listen to what they’re saying, and analyze.

This strikes me as a mission for the next six months, right up to election day, Nov. 2. I’ve been trying to do this with Marco Rubio, who sometimes demands of his audience: “Now listen to what I’m saying. Listen!” And then he tells a whopper. As if “Listen to what I’m saying” is anesthesia of the brain and auditory nerves, and no one will challenge his saying, for instance, that the United States is great because it’s the only place on earth where you can write a business plan  on a cocktail napkin and then go out and get wealthy.  What? You can do that lots of places. Probably Communist China is the best place for that trick. Especially if you’re a Communist.

Yesterday Gov. Charlie Crist spoke for less than six minutes announcing his switch to running for US Senate as a former Republican, and if you wade through the platitudes, you’ll find quite a few examples of doubt-provoking statements.

My crude Flip video-editing skills may not be fully up to the challenge of describing on video how it went, so I’m adding some written commentary here so that when you get to the video down below, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

He starts, for instance, by saying his decision to run without a party label says more about the United States and Florida than it does about himself. Seems pretty dubious to me. He’s the one dragging in the polls as a Republican. If it must  point at something other than Charlie Crist, how about pointing at the Republican Party, which is riven by ideology and corruption?

Next clip declares that our political system is broken. Again, it’s really the Republican Party and its divisions that are highlighted by Crist's exit from the GOP. The broken political system is better seen when one looks at the Republicans in the US Senate, the Party of No.

Easy thing would have been to run for governor? Wait a minute! Way back months ago when Mel Martinez followed Sarah Palin in quitting his/her elected office well before time done/job done, there was speculation that Crist would bail out of the governorship because Florida was heading for unemployment like seldom before, and he’d be blamed for that if he ran for re-election as governor. So I don’t think he’d have had an easy run. I think his career is at an end. And the jobless rate is still over 12 percent, as Democrat Kendrick Meek reminds us along with the fact that Crist and Rubio are the political authors of the misdirection in the Florida economy.



Note: the tipoff in the example above is that he starts with the word frankly -- a major clue that the next phrase will be untrue. "Frankly, the easy thing for me would have been to run for re-election as governor."

To continue, Crist talks about his brilliant decisions and declares that he’s stopped off-shore drilling. What? What was it that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico the other day? It doesn’t seem he stopped it, not at all. But it was a pretty good applause line.

Then he says he’s going to be with us forever. Forever! What more can I say?

US Senate: Kendrick Meek's campaign video released

Enjoy:




UPDATE: It was announced Thursday that the Meek campaign had qualified for the ballot by the petition method -- first time for a Senate candidate. The state Division of Elections verified over 115,000 petitions collected all around Florida.

Someone should be asking Rubio is he’s still big on “citizen journalism”

Now that the dissembler who got notoriety for attacking ACORN has been unmasked as something like a burglar, would someone please ask Marco Rubio if he’s still enthusiastic about what he called “citizen journalism?” Does the Republican candidate for the US Senate (along with Charlie Crist) approve of intruding into US Senate offices and messing with the phone?

This is a video I did last September after Rubio spoke at my sailing club in Key Largo.

It was one of four videos in a blog post about Rubio linked here. Love the way he calls me a gentleman.

Kendrick Meek video'd a rescue in Haiti. Thanks to Miami Dade rescue team!

This just in. Though I'm a week late with this, it still moves me.



Kendrick Meek, now running for US Senator, represents District 17 in the US House, and has the largest number of Haitian people in any congressional district, I've heard.

Massachusetts lesson for Florida Dems: Wall Street will be our foe

What was going on in Massachusetts? It was hard to tell from South Florida, so with the hindsight of knowing who won, let’s just look ahead to Florida and November of this year when we are electing a US Senator, and ask ourselves, Who will be behind the Republican candidate? Especially if it’s Marco Rubio.

The answer is in my email today in a jolly call from Club for Growth for a “knockout blow” to “big government,” which is said to be “the issue on everyone’s minds.”

Set aside the fact that big government is not on everyone’s mind when the job is gone or endangered, the mortgage is under water, and the health insurer is waiting to get your last penny and then deny you coverage.

And where does Chris Chocola, speaking for Club for Growth, want to swing and land that knockout blow? In Florida, in the Marco Rubio campaign.

That’s all laid out in his email, and below you’ll find excerpts to prove it. But before that, let’s consider the Club for Growth. Call it Wall Street. Call it Goldman Sachs. A front group.

Read what our friends at Think Progress and Daily Kos lay out on who funds the Club for Growth and who will fund Marco Rubio in Florida. It will be Wall Street, even as the handsome former speaker of the Florida House trots around the state playing to the teabagger crowd, which is deeply suspicious of Wall Street.

This is the irony underlying the Rubio campaign. It’s what our friend FlaDem describes in his Daily Kos post as the lesson from Massachusetts: “ … the Massachusetts race teaches that a Wall Street funded anti-Wall Street politician is a formidable foe.”

Quotes from the Club for Growth email:

It's a new year. Campaigns have begun in earnest.

After a year of liberal tax-and-spend politics, big government is the issue on everyone's minds.

Even in Massachusetts, voters have rejected Barack Obama's out-of-control liberalism, leaving the tax-and-spend Democrat leadership in Congress reeling.

Well, it's time to deal them the knockout blow.

And there's no better place for you and me to focus right now than the Florida U.S. Senate Republican Primary.

There's no doubt about it, this will be the most critical and closely-watched Republican primary in 2010.

The stakes could hardly be higher.

In one corner of the ring stands our endorsed candidate, Marco Rubio.

....

But his opponent -- in the far left corner - stands [sic] Governor Charlie Crist.
...

Polls have been tightening over the past few months, as Marco Rubio has dramatically closed the gap. In fact, according a December Rasmussen Poll, he's now neck and neck with Charlie Crist!

That means this race will likely come down to money. Plain and simple. 

As you may imagine, the email is replete with links to donate money to Rubio. Any questions? Remember, the Club for Growth has been one of the biggest backers of the economic policies that drove the US economy -- and much of the world -- to the brink of destruction. They are no one's friend. And their vision is seriously skewed if they think Charlie Crist is "far left."

Daily Kos speculates on Crist turning Democrat

With tongue perhaps in cheek, the mighty Kos blogged yesterday that Charlie Crist might as well switch to the Democratic Party in his quest for a seat in the US Senate.

Almost more interesting to me was the Daily Kos polling on the opinions behind the Republicans who favor the outgoing governor Crist or the former Florida House speaker, Marco Rubio, to be nominee for Senate. Turns out – surprise! – a lot of Rubio’s backers don’t think Barack Obama is a US citizen. That has been a quiet front lately. But the birthers are still lurking around the corner from all our polling places, and Rubio bids to be the one to set them loose.  What a strange state we inhabit. We can be certain that the nation and the world will be watching Florida closely through the 2012 election. We started this in 2000.

ASIDE: My first shot at posting this news of the Kos poll didn’t quite come off. It may be nuts for a blogger to confess this, but I was not even to the state of blogging while wearing pajamas at my computer; I was flat in bed browsing news through Google Reader on my iPhone, and tried to post with an email to the magic Blogger address that makes it all happen. But NOW I’m blogging while wearing pajamas at my computer …

For the record, all that was posted on the first attempt was this URL which sort of takes one on a loop to Google Reader and not much further into knowledge of the wider world.

http://www.google.com/reader/i/#stream/user%2F14525197483831170873%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Freading-list

Public option? Robert Reich's view

Your blogger is kinda steaming about the opt-out public option that's now atop the US Senate. So in the meantime here's a video by Robert Reich that sounds as if it was recorded before Tuesday's developments.



The email inbox includes one from the White House saying the president is OK with opt-out. I thought he'd be stronger on the public side.

FL-Sen: Kos keeps backing Rubio's chances against Crist

All I can say is, read it and ponder. This is the big guy among us bloggers, Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos, judging that Marco Rubio is going to beat Charlie Crist to be the Republican nominee for US Senate next year. Is it just the similarity of their first names? Both young guys with Latino origins?

I'm assuming Markos wouldn't vote for Rubio, if he were a Floridian. But just to be sure I'm posting a comment to link my recent post on Rubio's appearance  in Key Largo.

Do Republican Senate hopefuls think they're immune to suspicion?

Thanks to the Miami Herald's Naked Politics blog for pointing out how the two big Republicans running for US Senate don't mind tainted money. Gov. Charlie Crist is going to raise money with a convicted fraudster in Arizona (later pardoned) and Marco Rubio launched his campaign with a bash hosted by the Broward ophthalmologist at the center of a federal corruption indictment.

Business as usual. The word is brazen.

Maurice Ferre makes it official: Running for US Senate nomination

The crowd running for office in Florida next year just grew. Maurice Ferre, former mayor of Miami, announced he's running for the nomination for US Senate. Darned if I heard him say Democrat in this video:

Thank you, Bill Nelson! A vote for the public option

This was in the Senate Finance Committee today, but alas, not enough to get it through. The session is not finished, but it doesn’t look good for the public option. The vote was 13-10 against an amendment by Chuck Schumer. Bill Nelson, never having spoken for the public option, voted yes and was on the losing side, while two key senators did not vote for the public option –Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, and Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine.

They already are targets of campaigns to put pressure on them. Check it out at Democracy for America and Act Blue.

Earlier today the Miami Herald had a story from Washington correspondent Lesley Clark quoting, among others, my fellow blogger Dave Patlak on why MoveOn has put pressure on Bill Nelson. You know, Senator, you could have avoided all this by taking a leadership role early in the process, and maybe you could have helped put the public option in the bill. Anyway, I’m just saying. And remembering.

UPDATE: Sen. Nelson had an essay in USA Today with his position on --- not the public option -- Medicare Advantage and other aspects of senior care.

Dem Blogger videos Republican Senate hopeful

In this piece your blogging videographer, or your videoing blogger, takes a step into Republican territory. Marco Rubio is the subject. He’s the former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives who’s vying with Gov. Charlie Crist to be the Republican candidate for US Senate in the 2010 election. Rubio is raking in about a tenth of Crist’s money, according to the Sept. 20 workup in the Miami Herald that described how Crist spends most of his time (on our dime, fellow taxpayers, but that’s politics, ain’t it) dialing for dollars or squeezing official events between his appearances at fundraisers.

Rubio’s counterpart of that latter activity – the fundraiser – is how I found myself in the same room with him for an hour Saturday evening, at my sailing club in Key Largo. One of the founding members is a leading local Republican, Ken Sorensen, who hosted a fundraiser for 50-60 people. I’ve had many a fine political argument at the sailing club bar with Sorensen, who is a former state representative and, then when termed-out, an assistant to Speaker Marco Rubio. Our last argument was about ACORN, and so it goes.

Speaking of ACORN, I was on the Herald website the other day and hit the editorial asserting that ACORN “must prove it’s squeaky clean” and be purged from top to bottom. In the Comments section I veered decidedly away from everyone who thought ACORN was below Lucifer. My comment suggested applying the same standard to the Republican Party, which even if confined to Jack Abramoff and his co-conspirators must have more people in jail than ACORN. Not to forget John “Torture Memo” Yoo, who’s got a column on the Herald op-ed page when he ought to be facing trial for war crimes. Yes, let’s do a top-to-bottom cleanup on the Republicans, and then turn to the small potatoes at ACORN.

Rubio, you’ll see in the following clip, took notice of my Flip camcorder and gave me a supporting role as citizen journalist sort of like the heroic “college students” who tipped us all off to the purportedly bad apples in an ACORN office. Well, Media Matters checked out some of that story and learned that the “college students” were Republican activists. Plus, the ACORN lady who sounded like Lizzy Borden with a propensity for killing her husband was just leading on the strange couple invading her office. The police say all her ex-husbands are alive and well. Anyway, that’s the poor backgrounding and unethical investigators you get from a far-right world where the gospel comes from Fox and Beck and no questions are asked.

You’ll hear Rubio, like everyone on his side, crow over how CBS and other media didn’t get this (over-hyped) story. Like George W. Bush, he’s probably mad that the US attorneys couldn’t find valid charges against ACORN, either. Well, there is this thing about ethics of prosecutions and of reporting, wherein you don’t start off by lying about who you are, like the “college students.” There is a place for hidden cameras and underground investigations, no doubt, but if Rubio’s taste prevails, “citizen journalism” will be the Wild Wild West.

As Rubio asks us to “listen closely,” I think I heard him saying that ACORN was “a front for political activists.” What’s that, some new offense? Maybe the “college kids” are “a front for political activists,” and we’ve got tit for tat here. Big deal. Readers are referred to the section above where I urge attention to war crimes first, small potatoes later.

The Atlantic, in its fresh October issue, has a rundown on rise of internet reporting with a close examination of how partisan politics is taking over from traditional media, and standards often suffer:

With journalists being laid off in droves, savvy political operatives have stepped eagerly into the breach. What’s most troubling is not that TV-news producers mistake their work for journalism, which is bad enough, but that young people drawn to journalism increasingly see no distinction between disinterested reporting and hit-jobbery.

In the next clip Rubio takes on Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, against whom he’s not running, and Gov. Crist, his main opponent, and says he doesn’t know what they stand for. I thought I’d find something on Bill Nelson’s campaign website or official website to contradict Rubio, but something must be under construction. Well, Nelson doesn’t have to run until 2012, so he has an excuse. And there is plenty of information, though no platform in sight.

Next he’s talking about health care legislation (my question, he didn’t mention it in his stump speech, nor environment/energy/education except in the most sketchy way), and he makes a pretty wild statement about health care in the rest of the world, making it sound as if no country ever has had a good public health system. It may be that he’s defining it so narrowly (he’s a lawyer, after all) that it would have to be a single-payer system that didn’t have the tiniest smidgeon of rationing of care to meet his standard. Well, great, but we’re here in the real world where tons of countries get better results with lower expenditures than ours. And our care is rationed all the time by insurance companies that get rich by denying care.

In the following clip I can agree with his drift on malpractice, especially where he says there’s an overabundance of lawyers.

Finally, is it a waste of time to consider Rubio when Crist is raising money by the ton? If the primary were in a month or two it would be easy to dismiss the young (38) Rubio as someone polishing his resume to run against Bill Nelson two years later. But the primary is almost a year away, and Crist keeps getting skunked in Republican straw polls. What’s going on? A lot could happen.

Check out this story on Fine Print in which Rubio is itching to get into a debate with Crist. Could be interesting.

Meanwhile, our side's main contenders are Kendrick Meek, the congressman from Miami, and North Miami Mayor Kevin Burns.

For the record, the seat was held by one-termer Mel Martinez, who left for no good reason. Gov. Crist could have appointed himself to take the seat but instead named his sometime campaign manager George LeMieux, who's trying to live down the label of crony. So far has the US Senate fallen, when the Constitution, in the 17th Amendment, clearly prefers election rather than appointment to fill a vacancy. Now who's the strict constructionist? Your faithful blogger.

.

Bill Nelson's Senate speech on health

Over nine minutes, no room for mention of public option.

Crist vulnerable? Here comes Kendrick Meek

His 43rd birthday, according to Wikipedia, was on Sept. 6, but no matter, Kendrick Meek was still partying Sunday afternoon with a low-threshold fundraiser in Coral Gables. The U.S. Representative from District 17 in Miami-Dade, who’s running for US Senate in 2010, only wanted $20.10 from attendees, and there was a nice crowd of over 100 at the Biltmore Hotel to meet the candidate and donate.

The Sunday Miami Herald enticed your blogger out for his third time around with Senate candidate Meek. Interesting story by Adam Smith of the St. Pete Times pointing out the feet of clay worn with the empty suit of Charlie Crist, the supposedly leading Republican contender for the US Senate.

Charlie Crist could be vulnerable in race for U.S. Senate - South Florida - MiamiHerald.com

The story covers the usual ground with Crist -- that he's popular (despite his record) and that he runs for one office after another (despite not finishing the job). But then it seems that Adam Smith and a lot of Republicans are catching on that Crist, for all his money, is not a slam-dunk for the Republican nomination.

My favorite quote from the article:

But talk to veteran Republican activists across Florida, from local organizers to elite operatives to big-money bundlers, and there's a sense Crist could be in trouble. Probably not, but just maybe.

Meek was introduced at the fundraiser by Ana Navarro, who described herself as the "token Republican" on the Meek campaign. She declared forcefully that Crist will be beaten. I guess she was saying that Meek will beat Crist next year, though Crist's more immediate challenge comes from Marco Rubio, the former speaker of the Florida House, who's well off to the right of Crist and contending for the Republican nomination.

This is what raised my morale -- the prospect of a nasty battle between Crist and Rubio. Crist is the governor who has backed out of the trials of managing Florida to run for the US Senate, and has already fouled the nest by appointing his crony George LeMieux to complete the Senate term so ignominiously uncompleted by Mel Martinez. What a bunch of quitters! And the other main Republican contender, Rubio, will throw red ideological meat to the Republican base and alienate them from Crist. We Democrats will look like the soul of reason in comparison by the time people start voting in 2010.

So it was a pleasure to have a piece of birthday cake and dream of one more Democrat in the US Senate after the next election. And not a Blue Dog.

For the record, I should point out that the Florida Division of Elections has six active Democratic candidates for the US Senate and nine Republicans, not to forget four independents. Also, there are seven Democrats registered as candidates to succeed Meek in his reliably Democratic Miami District 17. So we have our own chances to dissolve into nasty primary fights. Let us hope that we got infighting out of our system with the Republican-plotted mess around the early presidential primary date in 2008.

UPDATE: And here's Politico's wrapup of how Crist is in trouble from both sides now. Thanks to the DSCC for pointing this out to me.

"Empty suit" Charlie Crist gets national attention

I think this ad from the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee would be more effective if it pointed out that Crist is chicken to say anything about Sonia Sotomayor, but anyway, here it is.

Sen. Bill Nelson still waffling on health care

We’re getting through to him, at least in the sense that he has heard the phones ringing off the hook. Sen. Bill Nelson, whose former job as state insurance commissioner makes us suspect him of being too close to the insurance business (definitely not a problem in his earlier career as astronaut), is listed as “unknown” on this chart at Open Left. Dear me, unknown is further from the goal than the maybes.

Come on, Senator. We who put you in office are in a big majority for strong health care reform with a strong public option. Why waffle? We like leaders better than those who tinker at the edge.

Here’s what’s up on his Twitter page, dated June 18.

Lotta folks asking me about health-care reform. We really need it. I'm working on it. But we need a viable plan for how to pay for it.4:43 PM Jun 18th from web