Demanding a Refund for Florida Oil Study

"Oil spills from offshore exploration, development, production and the transportation associated with these activities are unlikely to present a major risk to Florida."

-- Florida Gulf Coast Oil and Gas Risk Assessment, April 9, 2010
-- Phil Ellis, CEO, Structured Risk Solutions, London, England
Ordered by Florida House Speaker Dean Cannon (R-Winter Park, FL)Paid for by Florida taxpayers

Just a week and a half before the BP oil disaster, the Republican majority in the Florida Legislature paid $200,000 in taxpayer money to commission a 'drill-baby-drill' report. The report found "minimal risks in drilling off Florida's coasts."

Would you be surprised to learn the money went to a British firm called The Willis Group? You can read the full text of the laughably incompetent report here. You also can print it out as a fisher-wrapper to hold the tarballs and dead, oil-befouled fish you'll be picking up off Pensacola Beach for years to come.

Governor Crist, whom the crazed Florida Republican Party has abandoned because he wasn't stupid enough for them, should demand a refund. Especially since just two months beforehand the Collins Center for Public Policy, a home-grown Florida think tank, had given the Legislature for free a much more complete and balanced report. ["Potential Impacts of Oil and Gas Explorations in the Gulf"] Warned the Collins Center:

Oil spills can cause impacts from only a few days to multiple years or even decades. Florida’s coastline is especially sensitive to spills because of its mangrove forests, seagrass beds and coral reefs.

Complex processes of oil transformation in the marine environment start developing from the first seconds of’oil’s contact with seawater. The progression, duration, and result of these transformations depend on the properties and composition of the oil, the size of the oil spill and a range of environmental conditions such as temperature, wind and currents.

Oil released into marine waters more than 100 miles off the West Florida shore would probably become entrained in the Loop Current, which feeds back into the Gulf Stream. Depending upon the ability of emergency responders to contain the spill and/or the rate of oil degradation, such spills could pose some risk to coastal communities in the Florida Keys and on the east coast of Florida. Accidental releases on the West Florida shelf closer to land would be subject to prevailing winds and water currents. These can vary considerably.

Holding all other factors constant, the closer an accidental spill occurs to the coastline the greater the risk it poses to coastal communities.

We repeat: That was free.

But the Florida Legislature paid $200,000 US to a British firm that said, "Oil spills from offshore exploration, development, production and the transportation associated with these activities are unlikely to present a major risk to Florida."

If The Willis Group doesn't refund our money, then the Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Dean Cannon, should pay it back out of his own pocket.

Mr. Oil Spill

You couldn't tell it from the on-line version, but the dead tree Pensacola News Journal this morning trumpets the front page news that Jeff Miller, the incumbent Republican congressman from Northwest Florida, is doubling down in favor of Gulf oil drilling. Click the article image to read his latest, post-Deepwater statement.

Reality... inconvenient facts .... tens of thousands of his constituents who depend upon tourism.... the millions of Americans who enjoy our sugar-white beaches... the fish and fauna throughout the central and eastern Gulf of Mexico... All can be damned as far as "Oil Spill" Miller is concerned. He'll continue working, as he has promised so often he would, to make sure the unique sandy beaches of Northwest Florida eventually are befouled by a massive oil spill.

The pathetic man we have sent to Congress these past eight years has been publicly sucking up to the oil industry for so long, now, he can no longer help himself. It's become more than a habit with Miller. It's his raison d'être for being in Congress.

Even the ongoing BP Deepwater disaster, which now threatens to rival the scandalous Exxon Valdez oil spill, can't shake Miller's allegiance to Big Oil. Our local congressman continues to 'work hard' to bring oil drilling platforms as close as possible to Pensacola Beach.

"Drill, baby, drill" was his mantra before anyone in the lower 48 ever heard of Sarah Palin. He can't very well change now, he must be thinking; his record is too deeply engraved in the public consciousness. Jeff Miller has, you might say, oil all over his hands.

Miller went so far four years ago as to try to introduce oil drilling platforms directly off-shore of Destin, Fort Walton Beach, and Pensacola Beach. This would have put oil company platforms directly in the path of jets and trainers from Naval Air Station, Eglin AFB, and Hurlburt.

The Defense Department quietly took Miller to the woodshed. After that, Miller changed his tune ever so slightly to add, 'drill everywhere' except where it would "impact the military mission."

You need to know that background to fully appreciate the editorial in today's PNJ ["All In on Risk"]. It is a doleful warning to all the "drill, baby, drill" politicians in Florida who, like Miller, routinely promote drilling with the single exception of the "military mission":

For centuries, the white sandy beaches of what we call home have been a wonder of Mother Nature. Now, that white sand, unparalleled in all the world, is in jeopardy.

About 100 miles due south of Pensacola is a massive oil slick, the result of an oil rig explosion off the Louisiana coast two weeks ago. The blast killed 11 and has sent hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into Gulf of Mexico waters.
* * *
The April 20 explosion on the Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil rig mocks the promise of safe drilling. It mocks the promise of clean drilling. It mocks any who have tried to portray drilling for oil in the Gulf to be as easy as pumping gas into the family car.
* * *
Oil truly is, we are finding out, dirty money.

And we hope it convinces our state legislative delegation, which has opposed drilling almost apologetically, mumbling about the perils of interfering with the military’s mission instead of standing up for the Panhandle’s already battered environment.

Then, in a pointed message to the Republican-dominated Florida legislature as well as Mr. Miller, the editorial adds:

Gentlemen, it’s also about the environment and tourism. Not just the military. What the explosion and the expanding oil slick have done is reveal that to hide behind “drill baby drill” is folly and that Florida will have to make a choice: intolerable risk to our beaches and environment, or oil money.

It can’t have both. Oil spills don’t leave us a Plan B. So make no mistake: If the Florida Legislature allows drilling in our coastal waters, then all of us are, in the language of the gambler, "all in" for the risk.

All of us.

The commercial fisherman. The hotel owner. The parents of the family who love beach
cookouts. The divers. The natives. The tourists. The people who love Pensacola for its beauty.

All of us. All in. [italics added]

Miller and his drill-happy cohorts can gamble all they want with their own lives property in landlocked Washington D.C. and Tallahassee. But to continue tossing the "drill, baby, drill" dice means endangering the lives and livelihood of all the rest of us who live along coastal Florida or want to visit our beaches. If the Deepwater oil spill disaster proves nothing else, it is that these politicians -- no more than dissembling oil corporations like BP, trapped in their own lies -- have no moral, ethical, or economic right to put our lives and property at risk.

Miller quite obviously doesn't get it. So we should be sure to send him another message at the polls this year.

Florida Teachers Beware: 'Son of S.B. 6' Coming Soon

John Koenig, who holds out against the internet savages at FloridaThinks.com ("The forum for civil debate") is warning public school teachers that Charlie "Crist's Veto May Only Delay the Inevitable."

The advocates of Senate Bill 6 – the Legislature’s Republican leadership, former Gov. Jeb Bush and Florida’s major business organizations – are not going away. They will continue to fight for merit pay and an end to teacher tenure long after Crist is out of office.

That is no doubt true. As Koenig admits almost everyone on the planet is "advocating greater accountability from schools and teachers." Yesterday's veto, he says, "only buys teachers a bit of time to come up with their own accountability proposals."

Along the way, he shares an interesting anecdote:

[E]ven for the private sector, performance-incentive programs are tricky. Basing them on too few variables or the wrong variables can lead to counterproductive results.

Consider this story from Fast Company magazine. Ken O’Brien was an NFL quarterback in the 1980s and ‘90s who threw a lot of interceptions. In an attempt to improve his performance, the owners of the team on which he played put a clause into his contract docking his paycheck for each interception. The next year, O’Brien threw fewer inceptions. But that was because he threw the ball hardly at all. The net effect: The team did no better.

The article Koenig refers to has more "incentive pay" horror stories. As if we needed them after Wall Street's investment bank geniuses brought the world to the brink just so they could snag their multimillion dollar "performance bonuses."

For example, there's Ma Bell, who "tried to encourage productivity by paying programmers based on the number of lines of code they produced. The result: programs of Proustian length." There's Merrill Lynch (R.I.P.) whose pay program so deeply discouraged a young novice from getting sage advice from his seniors that he wound up writing a scorching best-selling expose whose title tells it all: "Riding the Bull: My Year in the Madness at Merrill Lynch."

All this talk about incentive pay for public school teachers draws on the supposed lessons of the private business sector. That misses a couple of very big points.

First, of course, is the fact that the tax payers and politicians, perversely, refuse to pay elementary and secondary school teachers -- who are the most important front in educating our children to read, calculate and think -- anywhere near what the private sector forks over to CEOs, corporate executives, fraud artists, scammers, cheats, quacks, stupid celebrities, and assorted mountebanks and desk-warmers whom they hire to turn a buck. As a society, if we really valued what teachers do we'd pay them accordingly. Instead, we pay Corporate America like royalty but expect teachers to work for love of the job.

Second, where do the parents fit into this picture? Sad to say, over the decades we've heaped more and more responsibilities onto the schools while parents -- many forced to become two-earner families because of the growing gap from top to bottom in private sector employment -- abandon their responsibilities to give vital educational support in the home.

All that said, the political reality is that Koenig is right. "Son of S.B. 6" is coming soon to a legislature near you. Florida teachers need to come up with their own detailed, rational answer to it. Call it a "pay-incentive" plan, if you have to, but make it as real as possible.

Then challenge the legislators to fund it.

Dept. of Related Blogistry

Governor Crist Does 'The Right Thing'
April 15, 2010
Florida's 'Disappear the Teachers' Bill
April 9, 2010
The Christian Student Veto Bill
March 19, 2010
Lying to Our Kids
March 2, 2010
Teacher of the Year
January 30, 2010
Crazy People and School Administrators
Sept. 8, 2009
The One and Only Faith
Aug. 5, 2009
Suffer the Little Children...
Feb. 21, 2009
School Super 'Censured'
Jan. 28, 2008
Florida Fraud Files
Dec. 2, 2007
Minor edit 4-16 am

Governor Crist Does 'The Right Thing'

Today, Florida Governor Charlie Crist vetoed the miserable 'education reform bill' known as S.B. 6, or the 'Disappear the Teachers' Bill.'

Click here for the official veto letter.There, he says among other things:

Let me be clear; I veto S.B. 6 because the bill is contrary to my firmly held principle to act in the best interest of the people of Florida. * * * I know it is the right thing to do for the people.

Soon there will be a lot of speculation about the governor's supposed political motives. While we do not doubt politics entered into the calculus, the bill was so very terrible that his specific explanation of some of its more glaring insanities is entirely plausible.

S.B. 6 -- which was endorsed by every local state legislator in Northwest Florida -- almost surely would have caused a precipitous plunge in the quality of public education in the state. In reverse order, Crist singles out --

• As the bill was being written, state legislators excluded from all "meaningful input" "teachers, parents, superintendents, and school boards." In other words, they didn't want to hear from anyone who knew what they were talking about.
  
• The probability that the bill would place "in jeopardy of losing their jobs and teaching certificates" tens of thousands of elementary, middle school, and secondary school teachers "without a clear understanding of how gains will be measured." This bill would have washed a tsunami over the state's school system, leaving little but rubble in its place.
  
• The certainty that the bill would have punished excellent teachers along with the inadequate ones for circumstances "beyond the control of the teachers." Good teachers and bad would have been treated alike.
  
• The bill would have violated the state constitutional, statutory, and regulatory authority of local school boards with "overreaching...directives" and "requirements" and prohibitions against agreeing to teacher contracts of longer than a year. With its mandate that local boards develop as many as 125 new and different "assessment" tests, it also would have busted the budgets of every school district in the state.
  
• The bill imposed "arbitrary percentages" for calculating a teacher's effectiveness" (without any cognizable legislative standards). Only state legislators get to keep their jobs without being scored for "effectiveness."
  
• S.B. 6 failed to "appropriately accommodate" special education teachers "and their dedicated teachers."

Governor Crist has done the right thing. While Florida's public education system continues to suffer from the long-time, chronic neglect of the state legislature, at least he has saved it from becoming infinitely worse almost overnight, as was likely had S.B. 6 become law.

Dept. of Related Blogistry

Florida Teachers Beware: 'Son of S.B. Coming Soon'
April 16, 2010
Florida's 'Disappear the Teachers' Bill
April 9, 2010
The Christian Student Veto Bill
March 19, 2010
Lying to Our Kids
March 2, 2010
Teacher of the Year
January 30, 2010
Crazy People and School Administrators
Sept. 8, 2009
The One and Only Faith
Aug. 5, 2009
Suffer the Little Children...
Feb. 21, 2009
School Super 'Censured'
Jan. 28, 2008
Florida Fraud Files
Dec. 2, 2007

Florida's 'Disappear the Teachers' Bill

"Even hamburger flippers at McDonald's have better job security than this."

The Republican-dominated legislature in Tallahassee has just come up with a scheme to completely ruin public education for the state's children. Two bills passed yesterday. They are now on their way to the Governor for signature or veto. Both are classic examples of political hypocrisy mixed with rank stupidity.

Never mind how Horace Mann taught the world a hundred and fifty years ago that excellence in public education is essential to the health of a democratic republic. There is no better way than these two bills to drive away from Florida young working families with children and cutting-edge technology industries with high-paying jobs.

First, the legislature proposes to clear the way for increasing class size. Essentially, this bill would upend a voter-initiated constitutional amendment which passed over the objections of many Republican legislators just eight years ago.

The three-fifths vote by both chambers gets the measure on the ballot in November and reopens a passionate campaign that has long pitted public school teachers and parents against school administrators and Republican lawmakers who say current class-size limits are impossible to fund.
* * *
The constitution currently limits class sizes to 18 students in grades pre-kindergarten through third, 22 students in fourth through eighth and 25 students in high school. Superintendents have been allowed to meet those caps first by district and now by school averages, but the constitution requires a shift toward hard classroom counts starting in July.

The proposed amendment would forgo hard caps in favor of maintaining school averages and would increase the maximum class size limit by three students in pre-kindergarten through third, and by five in other grades.

As Andy Ford, president of the Florida Education Association, says, "They just don't want to pay for schools."

Second, legislators passed S.B. 6, or the so-called 'pay-for-performance' bill. It should be called the "Disappear the Teachers" bill. The St. Petersburg Times has a useful summary.

Under this horror:

• All public school teachers would serve a five year "probationary period." What this means is that even the very best of them would be assured of a job only on a day-to-day basis for five years. Any teachers could be laid off at any time for any reason or no reason at all, with no warning. Even hamburger flippers at McDonald's have better job security than this.
  
• Teachers who survive those five years then can be offered only "single-year contracts." Good grief! We give legislators better deals than that, and most of them don't know algebra from Albania.
  
• Regardless of a teacher's individual merit, half their pay would be linked to the results of student tests. Teachers assigned to chronically under-funded schools -- many of them in inner city neighborhoods or rural areas which have an abundance of families who devalue education or suffer economic hardship -- would suffer lower pay. Those with connections that get them into tonier schools -- where many students have sufficient intellectual support at home to teach themselves -- get the raises.
• As for those "student tests," every school district would be required to "find or create" a standardized final test "for every subject in every grade." As the St. Pete Times points out, "Many districts would need hundreds of new tests. And they'd be high-stakes, with teacher salaries and future employment riding on the outcome, beginning in 2014-15."
• One-time bonuses for those dedicated teachers who on their own study for and pass all requirements for National Board certification would be forbidden after 2013. How much sense does this make? A proven, nationwide teacher certification system often used for paying small one-time bonuses is thrown overboard for locally-developed tests, many of which don't even exist yet? This can only be understood as a mean-spirited poke-in-the-eye to public school teachers.
  
• Districts that don't comply with all this insanity would be penalized by state funding cuts and "requirements to raise local taxes." The legal implications of this are breath-taking enough; almost certainly, it won't survive challenges under the federal and state constitutions. But the notion that public schools, which are in many cases under-funded to begin with, would be "punished" for poor test results by cutting their funding is completely daft.
  
• Districts would be required to set aside "up to 5 percent of their budget" starting next year "for performance and differential pay increases." Or, for those districts headed by administrators just as pencil-headed as our legislature, they are authorized to use much of the money "to develop tests to determine student gains."

At best, what this bill does is load all of the incentives, parsimonious as they are, into the absolute worst kind of pedagogy: "teaching to the test." Tests which in most cases haven't even been developed yet! At worst, these two bills will drive all the good teachers and administrators away, leaving behind only those who are among the worst, the least imaginative, or completely unemployable.

Everyone knows that Florida's school system suffers from chronic sickness. It ranks very poorly in comparison with other states, especially those of comparable population. Past legislatures have a lot to do with that. They've starved the public schools of adequate funding for years while trying to lavish funds on mostly religious private schools.

Yes, the Florida school system is sick. But what this year's Florida legislature has just done is to fashion an "arsenic cure" that will kill it. As the Washington Post's Valerie Strauss puts it, Senate Bill 6 is a "disaster for teachers" and the damage done by both bills is "incalculable."

Both bills are a disgrace. Governor Crist must veto them. Then the voters should fire the legislators who flunked the test by voting for this abomination.

Dept. of Related Blogistry

Governor Crist Does 'The Right Thing'
April 15, 2010
Florida's 'Disappear the Teachers' Bill
April 9, 2010
Lying to Our Kids
March 2, 2010
Teacher of the Year
January 30, 2010
Crazy People and School Administrators
Sept. 8, 2009
The One and Only Faith
Aug. 5, 2009
Suffer the Little Children...
Feb. 21, 2009
School Super 'Censured'
Jan. 28, 2008
Florida Fraud Files
Dec. 2, 2007

Sansom Out As "Speaker in Limbo"

The other day we suggested someone in Tallahassee needed to consult a dictionary to see the effect of state representative Ray Sansom's "temporary recusal" as Speaker. Looks like someone did. The Orlando Sentinel is reporting --

Florida House Speaker Ray Sansom’s unprecedented and “temporary” handover of power couldn’t survive the weekend.

House Republicans plan to caucus Monday evening in Tallahassee to name a new GOP leader under party rules – the first move in an effort to permanently sever Sansom’s grip on the speakership, according to numerous GOP legislators involved in the negotiations.

The Republicans came to their senses after Bill Gavano, the House Rules committee chairman, ruled that "to 'avoid any further ambiguity that the House should elect a new speaker and not allow Ray Sansom to remain as speaker-in-limbo.'" Republicans caucus today to elect a new Speaker.

Speakerless Florida House

Ray Sansom's clumsy attempt to slip into the shadows even as he tries to hold onto the reigns of power as Speaker of the House in Tallahassee has everyone confused. He didn't 'resign,' claims Sansom -- he 'recused' himself in writing:

I have decided to recuse myself from the exercise of my duties as speaker of the House of Representative,” Sansom wrote.

Recusal, we understand. It's done occasionally on a case-by-case basis in specific circumstances where a judge or other public official charged with decision-making authority is faced with real or apparent conflict of interest and therefore should avoid taking part.

It's not a vacation from the job altogether. It's not 'sick leave' or 'legal leave' or even 'grand jury subpoena leave.'

Someone in the Florida legislature ought to consult an English dictionary.

Merriam-Webster:

Recuse: Pronunciation: re·cuse. Function: transitive verb. Etymology: Middle English, to refuse, reject, from Anglo-French recuser, from Latin recusare

Definition: To disqualify (oneself) as judge in a particular case ; broadly: to remove (oneself) from participation to avoid a conflict of interest.

edited 2-2 am

Witness for the Prosecution

Ray Samson has said in a written statement that his "ongoing legal proceedings have temporarily created an inability for me to carry out my responsibilities as Speaker." What, then, are we to conclude about Bob Richburg, president of the Okaloosa-Walton Community College ... Oh, so sorry; we mean... Northwest Florida State College?

As Scott Maxwell of the Orlando Sentinel observes, the known -- indeed, the undisputed facts -- are that Sansom--

1) helped funnel millions of dollars to a small college; and
2) The college then offered him a $110,000-a-year paycheck.

And that doesn't even allude to the mysterious $6 million college airplane hangar and the top-secret "legislative briefing" that wasn't. Nevertheless, Maxwell says, "That's why he had to give up his speakership -- and why he needs to give up any delusions of returning to the post."

Richburg is a state employee, too. While an academic may not be as politically powerful as a Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, a state-paid college president is in charge of molding a lot of young minds and educating them to become better informed citizens of Florida.

No one else is asking, so we will: How easily can Richburg faithfully discharge his public duties when, as it appears, he was so deeply enmeshed on the other side of the same questionable transactions that have driven Sansom from the Speaker's chair?

If, as we know, a grand jury is investigating Sansom, isn't it inescapable that Richburg also must be facing possible criminal indictment? After all, it takes two to dance the bribery tango.

Richburg has a dilemma nearly identical to Sansom's. Both men are in charge of guiding important state institutions through parlous economic times. Both hold public positions that impose a high duty of loyalty to the public good.

The only difference is one of scale. Sansom as Speaker was expected to provide ethical and policy guidance to 119 other state representatives. Richburg to thousands of the next generation of Florida citizenry.

If Sansom can be compelledto give up the Speaker's job, shouldn't Richburg? Unless, of course, he's hoping for some sort of deal to save his own skin. For example, by becoming a witness for the prosecution.

Sansom Quits as House Speaker

Facing a grand jury investigation and a state ethics probe, embattled Speaker of the Florida House Ray Sansom (R-Destin) has stepped down, the Miami Herald is reporting.

Time will tell how much of this is owing to pressure from fellow House members and how much is because Sansom has word of worse news to come.

Spacy Florida

A couple of days ago, Orlando Sentinel reporters Aaron Deslatte and Robert Block broke the news that Florida governor Charlie Crist is ordering a state ethics investigation into one of his own former staff employees.

The newspaper is claiming that Brice Harris used his position in the governor's Office of Tourism, Trade and Economic Development to arrange a half million dollar contract for the Andrews Institute of Gulf Breeze. Then, he "resigned his $70,000-a-year state job -- to take a job overseeing the project for the company he had helped get it."

Crist was more or less forced to run for the political cover of a typically toothless ethics investigation after the newspaper obtained "e-mails and other documents" showing that Harris engineered the grant to the Andrews Institute. Then he got waist-deep in the details of running the place by negotiating "minutae down to the design of the logos and shoulder patches the would-be space tourists would wear." And only then did he resign to take the "private sector" position of running the program himself.

That the hog trough is open for all public employees in Florida to self-deal with taxpayer money should not be surprising. After all, former governor Jeb Bush set the tone when he shagged the people of Florida by giving away millions of state money to Lehman Brothers (R.I.P.) and was rewarded soon after leaving office with a cushy consultant contract.

The majority leader of the statehouse, Ray Sansom (R-Destin), also knows a good scam when he sees it. He shoveled tens of millions of taxpayer funds at the once-obscure Okaloosa-Walton County Community College (now, with its ill-gotten wealth, re-christened "Northwest Florida State College"). For his troubles? He was given a $110,000 a year job for which he didn't even have the required advanced degree.

Never mind the absurdity of spending half a million dollars in Florida "tourism and development" money on "space tourism." Space tourism! Here along the Gulf Coast we can't even say that without giggling.

What really gets us is that the news media persist in referring to these all-too-common bag jobs as "potential ethics violations." They are to ethics what bank robbery is to a late payment to your credit card company.

The facts as reported spell out potential crimes. Rod Blagojevich-type crimes. Anyone -- including an elected official or someone who works for one -- who abuses his public position and deploys taxpayer money to secure a cushy job for himself should be indicted. Just as surely as Blagojevich will be.

Sansom's Hiding Place

Florida newspapers from Miami to Tallahassee are ganging up on state representative Ray Samson (R-Destin) for his painfully obvious pay-for-play politics.

The way it worked was simple: Bob Richburg, the president of Okaloosa County Junior College... sorry, now it's Northwest Florida State College, thanks also to pay-for-play hanky-panky .... handed Samson a $122 million wish list and Sansom got a cushy $110 thousand job in return for funding most of it.

Worse, some of those funds supposedly earmarked for "education" turn out to have been designated to build a customized airport hanger suspiciously identical to one wanted for personal use by a Sansom campaign finance contributor. Wink-wink. Your scarce taxpayer dollars at work.

Here's more, from the News Herald:

Since 2006, when he became House budget chairman, Sansom helped the college get $35 million above what the Department of Education recommended. This year, while the Legislature was attempting to close a $6 billion shortfall, he secured $25.5 million for the school, which was $24.5 million above what had been initially budgeted. That was the single-largest public education capital outlay for community college projects this year.

Today's PNJ joins in with an editorial summarizing how Sansom is now avoiding all questions about the recent revelations. It's titled "Sansom Has No Place to Hide."

The thing is, he does have a hidey-hole. It's in the U.S. Attorney's office for the Northern District of Florida. We're still living in the Bush era, after all.

Northern Illinois U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald may see pay-for-play politics as an indictable offense -- it's called bribery and extortion in his book. Apparently, however, North Florida's acting U.S. Attorney, Thomas Kirwin, doesn't have a book.

Quite a few Florida newspapers, pols, and good-government types are demanding that Sansom resign as speaker of the state house of representatives. There's even a web site called SackSansom.com.

What? And leave him sitting there, a free man, in the Florida House of Representatives? We don't get that. If a publicly-paid politician in Illinois, or just about anywhere else, abuses his position to feather his own nest, we'd expect him to be indicted. If a publicly-paid politician does it in Florida, he should get a mere job demotion?

And what about Sansom's publicly-paid academic accomplice? He should testifying in front of a grand jury right now.

Difference Without a Distinction

What's the difference between the "pay to play" schemes of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who tried to trade on his public office to enrich himself with a new job, and Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives Ray Sansom (R-Destin), who actually succeeded in doing that?

Seriously. Is there any real difference? Other than the fact, of course, that Sansom doesn't live within the jurisdiction of a tough U.S Attorney and presumably hasn't had his phones tapped; at least, not until some time after January 20, 2009, when president-elect Obama gets to replace all of them.

Well, yes, there is a difference. Sansom got himself the job he wanted -- a part time $110,000 a year taxpayer-paid unadvertised job for which he wasn't even qualified. Blagojevich hasn't managed that, yet.

The Sansom Mistake

Speaking of amoral crooks, as we just were, it seems to us the question is not whether state representative Ray Sansom (R- Destin) should be removed as State House majority leader, as the Pensacola Newsletter editorializes today. Nor is it whether he should resign his leadership position as some Democrats are saying.

The better question is whether Ray Sansom should be removed from office altogether for abusing the public trust for his own private gain.

We recall that a couple of Pensacola Beach resident association leaders got to know Mr. Sansom back in the late '90s and early 2000's when he was first running for office. He assured them that if he won he would sponsor a bill to allow a referendum on whether Pensacola Beach would be allowed to incorporate as a self-governing municipality.

Sansom won. No bill was ever introduced. In retrospect, the mistake beach residents made was that they didn't offer him some cushy, high paying job on the side. Turns out, that's the traditional quid pro quo you're supposed to give Northwest Florida legislators.

Judicial End Run

Bill Post, who has become the authority on the history of Pensacola Beach lease taxation issues, has a new Viewpoint article in the Independent Sun. The weekly newspaper titles it "Ignoring 1987 Ruling."

Among other things, Mr. Post has unearthed a nugget of legislative history about the key Florida statute (Florida Statute chapter 196) that no court, so far as we can recall, has ever mentioned:

The current legislative statute's intent was clearly explained in the June 3, 1980 written state senate staff Analysis that said the leaseholds will no longer be "assessed and taxed as real property" as if leaseholders were owners, but "shall be taxed only as intangible personal property." Please again take note of the word "only."

As Post observes, this expression of legislative history rather directly undermines an argument Escambia County property appraiser Chris Jones has been trumpeting through the legal system: that the legislature was "silent" about taxation of leaseholds insofar as the alternate theory of "equitable ownership" is concerned. It is not an act of silence when a legislature says this is the "only" tax intended.

If one were able to summon faith that Florida's courts, as presently constituted, truly judge cases based on proven facts and law rather than, say, politics or power, Post's historical nugget might loom large. On the other hand, to borrow Finley Peter Dunne's famous epigram, there are some courts that "follow the election returns." In which case, of course, the facts become as inconsequential as legal precedent.

We're still waiting to see which kind of court is judging the Pensacola Beach residential leasehold tax dispute.

Guns, Guns, More Guns

This month, for the third year in a row, Republicans in the Florida legislature passed a bill making it a crime for an employer to prohibit employees from bringing guns to work. If only the bill passes the state senate, we can all rest easy; the workplace will become safe hunting ground for the 26.2 percent of all Americans 18 or older who "suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year."

That's a whopping 57.7 million adults. And it doesn't even take into account the 80 Americans who die every day from gun violence. We shouldn't really count them. They were shot dead. Some of them probably were even guilty of something.

The "Shoot Up The Workplace" bill is one of those genius proposals of Northwest Florida representative Durrell Peaden, among others. Peaden apparently sees no more pressing need for improving life in Florida than to make the workplace in America a free fire zone.

Makes perfect sense. After all, where else are you more likely to want to kill someone? A recent Gallup poll found 77% of all Americans hate their jobs. As the blog at My Two Cents reasonably points out --

[I]f you have a hammer, all your problems look like nails.
If you have a gun, all your problems look like targets.

The bill is opposed by business interests "who think an employers' private property rights should be deemed at least as sacred as their employees' right to come to work armed." So it seems, as one south Florida newspaper editorialized, the debate is being framed as a clash between a Second Amendment right to carry guns versus a Fifth Amendment private property right.

What we'd like to know is why has the gun-lover's lobby stopped at undermining the Fifth Amendment? What weenies! Why not undermine Article I, Section 4 by prohibiting polling places from banning voter guns? Or, the Sixth and Seventh Amendments, by requiring that jurors carry guns?

Or that granddaddy of them all, the First Amendment? Let's make it a crime for churches to ban guns in the nave, the chancel, the entire sanctuary. And, cover Sunday School, too, and church-sponsored preschools.

Arm 'em to the teeth! After all, if guns are banned, only nuns and atheist kids will have guns!