Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Tequesta: “Tonight I hoped to hear that the President has been listening to the American people over the past month. From the town hall meetings I hosted in August it is clear to me that Americans have had enough of the rapid expansion of government especially when it comes to an important issue such as health care. We need a plan that does not punish small businesses and tax individuals. Any type of government takeover of our nation’s health care system is not the answer and is unacceptable.”

Sen. Bill Nelson (D): (Reacting to pre-speech excerpts released by the White House) “I’m glad the president is proposing insurance exchanges that will help the nearly one-in-four Floridians who don’t have or cannot get affordable health insurance. Americans who are satisfied with their coverage should be able to keep what they have. And we ought to make coverage affordable for those who don’t have it.”

Rep. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton:“Like all Americans, I was glad to hear President Obama lay out a path ahead on health care reform. After listening carefully to South Floridians on all sides of this debate, it is clear that we all agree that we must make real changes to improve our health care system, increase competition and lower costs…. The most important thing is that we have a final product that lowers costs, improves the quality of health care and ensures that Americans cannot be denied coverage because they get sick.”

Klein on the public option: “I thought he made a very good case. The reason I support a public option in some form is competition.”

Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton: “The President is absolutely correct that all Americans must have security and stability in their health insurance, and I was pleased to hear him reiterate his support for a public insurance option. I enthusiastically agree with the priorities that President Obama outlined tonight, which include providing affordable and accessible coverage for all Americans, delivering real competition in the market to drive down costs, and helping seniors afford their prescription drugs. Congress is on the cusp of delivering historic change, and tonight President Obama provided the vision and initiative for us to get this done.”

Rep. Kendrick Meek, D-Miami, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate:
“Tonight’s speech was a game-changer. President Obama brought clarity to the health care debate. His objective is straightforward: offering stability and security in our health insurance system to Floridians with insurance and to Floridians who lack insurance…With over 80 percent agreement among various committee proposals, it is now time to pull together all components into a single piece of legislation. With skyrocketing health care costs bankrupting American families and businesses, doing nothing is not an option. In Florida alone, over 3,500 people lose their health coverage each week. We cannot afford to sit by and do nothing.”

At least five ACORN workers are behind bars and law enforcement officials are seeking six others for forging signatures on voter registration applications last year.

The workers were turned in by ACORN, Association of Community Organizations for Refom Now, supervisors in June 2008.

The arrests today in Miami-Dade County include a mother, her son and her daughter, according to Ed Griffith, spokesman for Miami-Dade State Attorney Katharine Fernandez Rundle.

The FBI, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and Rundle’s office scoured hundreds of suspicious voter registration applications provided by ACORN. The accused apparently created fake voters who did not exist, signed the forms and handed them in.

Conservatives have attacked ACORN, which targets low-income and minority populations in voter registration drives, publicly and in court for violating elections laws.

“Today’s actions vindicate our quality control systems and show that we took the preservation of the integrity of the voting process with the utmost seriousness,” said ACORN Florida spokesman Brian Kettenring.

“In addition, it also shows that ACORN has consistently been telling the truth about our voter registration work and it challenges the conservative lies that have been spread for years now about our good work,” he said.

The arrests served to confirm some conservatives beliefs about the organization, however.

“Today’s arrests of ACORN Field workers for voter registration fraud in nearly 900 applications further demonstrates how these community organizations with ties to the Democratic Party are corrupting the political process in Miami-Dade County while advocating for President Obama’s radical policies,” state Rep. David Rivera, who also chairs the Miami-Dade County GOP, said in a press release.

State Sen. Dave Aronberg, D-Greenacres, has picked up the endorsement of St. Lucie County Sheriff Ken Mascara in Aronberg’s quest for the Democratic attorney general nomination. Aronberg, who’s running against state Sen. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, in the primary, unveiled an endorsement from Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw a few weeks ago.

Says Mascara: “Dave Aronberg and I share the same commitment when it comes to law enforcement…zero tolerance for anyone who preys on any Floridian, young or old. We need someone in that office who wants to be Attorney General to protect the public from serious crimes including consumer fraud. “

State law enforcement officials arrested five voter registration workers today for forging voter registration applications last year. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement issued arrest warrants for five others.

The ten worked for the Association of Communities for Reform Now (ACORN) in Miami-Dade County last spring.

ACORN quality control workers suspected that something was amiss with the applications turned in by the ten and reported them to law enforcement.

FDLE and FBI agents found that 197 of 260 applications contained personal identification information that did not match any living person.

The investigators believe that the workers made up the information and forged the signatures, according to an FDLE press release issued today.

Those charged range in age from 19 to 45.

Public Service Commission Chairman Matthew Carter today banned the use of all communication or messaging by the utility regulators and their staff other than e-mail until an internal investigation is complete.

One PSC aide was fired and two others, including Carter’s, were placed on administrative leave after it was revealed that the aides gave their Blackberry personal identification numbers (PINs) to a Florida Power & Light Co. lawyer.

PINs are messages that can be exchanged between Blackberry users without creating a public record.

The communication controversy is taking place against the backdrop of two hearings that involve FPL: a proposed $1.3 billion rate hike and a proposed $63 million increase to cover the costs of nuclear power plant enhancements not yet built.

“We are all aware of the controversy which has arisen regarding use of communications technologies within the Commission.  While we are currently conducting a review of these technologies and how they relate to maintaining public records, I am directing that pending the outcome of this review the Commission should disable all communications or messaging capabilities that are not captured through our existing e-mail system,” Carter wrote to the PSC commissioners in an e-mail sent today. 
 
Commissioner Lisa Edgar, who put her aide Roberta Bass on leave after it was reported that Bass gave her own and Edgar’s PINs to an FPL exec, requested the IT review. (more…)

Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw will formally endorse state Senate President Jeff Atwater, R-North Palm Beach, for chief financial officer at an event Thursday, Atwater’s campaign says.

Bradshaw is one of the most influential Democratic elected officials in Palm Beach County, though his office is nonpartisan and he has never been much for red/blue distinctions. Atwater and state Rep. Pat Patterson, R-DeLand, are the only candidates in the CFO race so far.

Bradshaw’s statement: “Through his years of service, Jeff Atwater has been an effective leader and a strong voice for Florida’s Sheriffs. He has made certain the men and women of law enforcement have the tools they need to keep our communities safe. I am proud to be a supporter of his campaign and, more importantly, honored to call him my friend.”

Heading into tonight’s address from President Obama, several of Florida’s U.S. House members say the dramatic moments from the August recess (here and here for just a couple examples) have served only to reinforce their positions heading into the break.

But the month off seems to have swayed at least two Florida Democrats.

U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Delray Beach, says his pledge to oppose a bill that does not include a so-called public insurance option (essentially a new government health care program that would compete with the private market), isn’t so iron-clad. More on that shift here.

Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Ron Klein seems to moving in the other direction.

(more…)

Seeing no need to wait for President Obama’s latest “make-or-break” speech on health care tonight, Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Marco Rubio weighs in today with a video statement accusing Obama and congressional Democrats of seeking “radical” overhaul that is “really just the architecture for what will one day become a single payer system in America.”

Former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley was scheduled to tape the first broadcast of a new radio show he’s launching from Palm Beach County. “Inside the Mind of Mark Foley” was billed by the station as a program that “will expose the inner workings of Washington D.C.” It will air for the first time on Sept. 22 at 6 p.m. on WSVU 960 AM.

“During these incredibly changing times, it’s important that we hear the voice of a true Washington D.C. insider,” WSVU GM Chet Tart said in a press release.

WSVU, owned by North Palm Beach Broadcasting, can be heard from Boca Raton to Port St. Lucie. It includes several CBS programs, including “Imus in the Morning.” It also broadcasts Boston Red Sox and Dallas Cowboys games.

The press release from the station mentions that Foley is a former member of the House Ways & Means Committee, but fails to mention his embarrassing exit from the House which was sparked by inappropriate e-mails sent to underage congressional pages.

Foley was recently spotted at U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings’ town hall meeting and has maintained a Facebook page filled with political observations, according to Page2live.com.

Public Service Commission staffer Ryder Rudd resigned this morning after an internal investigation found that he may have broken the regulatory agency’s ethics rules.

Rudd, who earned $92,000 a year, attended a Kentucky Derby party at the Palm Beach Gardens home of Florida Power & Light Co. vice president Ed Tancer although Rudd was involved in at least two of the utility’s rate filings.

Knowledge of Rudd’s attendance at Tancer’s gala was the first in a string of events, the latest including two PSC staff resignations and two commissioners’ aides being place on administrative leave.

Also today, Sen. Mike Fasano asked for a Senate Ethics and Elections Committee hearing into whether the regulators and their staff are too cozy with the utilities they oversee.

“After reading and hearing of what’s happening over at the Public Service Commission, it sounds to me like they’re ready to implode over there,” Fasano, R-New Port Richey, said.

In the meantime, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is also conducting an informal investigation into the same possible problem.

Two sitting PSC commissioners – Chairman Matthew Carter and Commissioner Katrina McMurrian – were included in the list of six nominees given to Gov. Charlie Crist last week. Fasano asked Crist to hold off on the appointments until the panel votes on a proposed $1.3 billion FPL rate hike.

Carter’s aide Bill Garner and Commissioner Lisa Edgar’s aide Roberta Bass were put on leave today after the Times/Herald reported that the aides had given secret Blackberry PIN numbers to an FPL attorney. Commissioner Nancy Argenziano fired her aide, Larry Harris, who is seeking reemployment elsewhere within the agency.

Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, the presumptive Democratic gubernatorial candidate, gave her likely GOP opponent Attorney General Bill McCollum a taste of his own medicine by calling him out on his Congressional voting record on health care.

Sink’s campaign issued a press release responding to McCollum’s challenge this morning to join him in opposition to President Barack Obama’s and Congressional Democrats’ health care plan.

“During his twenty years in Congress, McCollum voted eight times to cut Medicare by at least $650 billion, voted to raise the eligibility age for Medicare and Social Security, and voted to make it harder for government to crack down on health care fraud,” Sink’s campaign manager Paul Dunn wrote.

“Bill McCollum is in no position to question anyone else until he answers for his decades-long record undermining Medicare, Social Security, and affordable health care,” Dunn concluded.

U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio pilloried GOP primary opponent Gov. Charlie Crist’s recent interview on CNBC in which Crist said that nearly 60,000 Floridians leaving the state – the first population decline in more than three decades – is “not that big a deal.”

The former House Speaker features Crist’s interview in a web video attack released today.

As Palm Beach County commissioners prepare for a public hearing tonight on the 2009-10 county budget, the county Democratic Party is endorsing County Administrator Bob Weisman’s proposal to to increase the countywide property tax rate from about $3.7811 per $1,000 of appraised value to $4.344.

Because overall property values have declined, the 14.9 percent rate hike would generate roughly the same amount of revenue in 2009-10 as the county is getting this year and therefore wouldn’t meet the state’s legal definition of a tax increase. But homesteaded property owners, whose taxes have been relatively flat in recent years because of appraisal limits in the state’s Save Our Homes act, would see higher tax bills under the plan.

(more…)

President Obama’s grassroots group, Organizing for America, announced today it will bring its “Health Insurance Reform Now” bus tour to Florida.

The bus has made 10 stops between Pheonix and Raliegh since Aug. 26 and claims to have made contact with more than 12,000 supporters.

The bus is scheduled to stop Wednesday in Atlanta before Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress. Following the event, the bus will stop in Tallahassee, Orlando and Tampa during the next couple weeks.

The panel that regulates utilities seems like “it’s about to implode,” Sen. Mike Fasano said today.

Fasano, who chairs the Senate Transportation and Economic Development Appropriations Committee, asked Senate President Jeff Atwater to order an ethics investigation into whether the Public Service Commission and its staff are too cozy with the industry it regulates.

“You have a regulatory body that can’t even regulate themselves let alone regulate a multi-billion dollar utility company that’s asking for a 30 percent rate increase,” Fasano, R-New Port Richey said.

Attorney General Bill McCollum earlier today said his office is “looking into” problems at the regulatory agency and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is currently conducting an informal investigation.

The PSC is considering rate hikes for both Florida Power & Light Co. and Progress Energy and a proposed FPL natural gas pipeline that would altogether raise customers’ rates by more than $3 billion.

PSC staffer Ryder Rudd was pulled off all FPL cases after it was learned that he attended a Kentucky Derby party at the Palm Beach Gardens home of FPL VP Ed Tancer. An internal investigation found that he may have broken the agency’s ethics rules but could not prove it.

This weekend, The Miami Herald reported that other PSC aides had given secret Blackberry PIN numbers to an FPL attorney, prompting Commissioner Nancy Argenziano to fire her aide and Commissioner Lisa Edgar to put hers on leave.

‘From the Commission’s chief lobbyist attending a party with executives from Florida Power & Light, to the sharing of Blackberry PINs between commissioners, staff and utility executives, the appearance of impropriety has become impropriety itself.

‘If you throw into the mix the fact that two of the five sitting commissioners are up for possible reappointment in the midst of the rate case it becomes evident that disaster is in the making. I have publically asked the governor to not reappoint the two sitting commissioners until the rate cases have been disposed of,” Fasano wrote to Atwater asking for the Senate Ethics and Elections Committee investigation. The committee has to confirm Gov. Charlie Crist’s nominations for the commission.

PSC Chairman Matthew Carter last week denied the regulators were too close to the utilities.

Read Fasano’s entire letter to Atwater after the jump.

(more…)

Fans of the Florida House Republicans can follow the Majority Office on Facebook but it takes a little doing to find them.

Majority Leader Adam Hasner, R-Boca Raton, today sent out an e-mail inviting folks to become a fan of his office’s Facebook group. To join, simply enter “Florida House Majority Office” in the Facebook search bar.

“To get the Right point of view of what’s happening in Tally, follow the activities of the Republicans in the Florida House,” Hasner’s message read.

But an attempt to do that resulted in seven groups (none of them Hasner’s), including “Stop Horse Slaughter and Murder in Mexico!”

The search result also included the “Win with Alma” group, supporters of Democrat Alma Gonzalez, a union lawyer who ran for the Leon County commission. She lost.

The Majority Office also launched a Twitter site: FLGOPMajority.

Attorney General Bill McCollum bashed the “public option” included in President Barack Obama’s and Congressional Democrats’ proposed health care reforms, saying it would ration health care.

McCollum, the presumptive GOP candidate for governor, held a campaign event this morning in which he trashed the government-backed option to health insurance and challenged his presumptive Democratic opponent Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink to do the same.

McCollum, who served in Congress for more than two decades, announced the creation of a health care advisory board and dragged out a six-year-old report issued by businesses and the insurance industry as a guideline for health care fixes in Florida.

The best way to fix health care maladies in the Sunshine State, according to McCollum: more tort reform.

Medical malpractice premiums are the main cause for the state’s escalating health care costs, he said.

He asked Sink to join him in opposing the health care reforms now being considered by Congress if the plan includes:
- the public option or any government-run insurance;
- a $500 billion reduction in Medicare that would be passed on to the states;
- any expansion of Medicaid.
McCollum also asked her to reject the plan if it does not include significant tort reform.

McCollum showed more tolerance towards Obama’s speech to schoolchildren, which Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer has publicly pounded on national television.

“I have no problem with the president addressing schoolchildren,” he said when asked about it. McCollum also said he would allow his own children to watch it if they were school-age.

President Obama’s controversial speech to the nation’s school children is today at noon. Schools in Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties have the green light from administrators to show it and parents who object can get their children excused from participating.

Our Kimberly Miller breaks down the local situation here.

Many conservatives and Republicans were critical of the speech last week, with Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer accusing the president of trying to indoctrinate America’s youth with “socialist ideology.”

Redistributionist economic policies are nowhere to be found in an advance copy of the speech released by the White House. The “birther” movement, however, might pounce on the fact that Obama mentions his childhood years in Indonesia. And those who oppose an expanded government role in health care might find significance in the leader of the free world advising students to wash their hands to minimize the spread of flu.

Read the entire text after the jump….

(more…)

In an industry known for its prevailing liberalism, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and Boca Raton resident Dion DiMucci is truly The Wanderer.

DiMucci — better known simply as Dion from his chart-topping Teenager In Love/Runaround Sue/The Wanderer days — turned 70 this year and is a registered Republican who has developed an admiration for conservative GOP congressional hopeful Allen West. West lost a challenge to U.S. Rep. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton, last year and is gearing for a 2010 rematch.

In a type of gig Dion says he hasn’t done before, he’s scheduled to introduce West at a Boca Raton Republican Club meeting this month and then perform a not-yet-determined number after West speaks.

Dion was part of Buddy Holly’s ill-fated 1959 Winter Dance Party tour (he skipped the doomed plane ride with Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson), and his likeness is included in the iconic crowd shot on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover (he’s right behind Tom Mix and Oscar Wilde).

To the extent he’s ever been identified with politics in the past, it’s for his 1968 recording of Abraham, Martin and John, which associated him with the folky progressivism of the era.

“I still believe in it,” Dion says of the song. But in other ways, he says, he doesn’t understand the dominant liberalism of the recording industry.

“It’s puzzling to me because I’m a rock ’n’ roller and rockers believe in truth and freedom. I don’t believe a lot of them know what the two words mean,” says Dion. “I think a lot of them have confused it (freedom) with license — giving you permission to do anything you want without regard to the consequences.”

Dion describes himself politically as “kind of an independent. … I’m liberal with my love but conservative with my thinking.”

* * *

West Boca Community Council President Sheri Scarborough is said by well-placed sources to be considering a run for the school board seat of 21-year incumbent Sandra Richmond. One of the council’s vice presidents, Frank Barbieri, was elected to the school board last year.

As attentive readers of the Politics column undoubtedly recall, Democratic activist and former teacher/principal/school administrator Marcia Andrews is also looking at a run for Richmond’s seat. Richmond hasn’t opened a campaign, but has said she’ll “probably” seek reelection next year.

***

College student Gary J. Lew is one of three candidates who have filed for the Democratic nomination to succeed term-limited state Rep. Carl Domino, R-Jupiter, in 2010.

But Lew is a registered Republican. He says he signed up with the GOP because of an interest in libertarian-leaning Ron Paul, but avers that “I have never in my life voted Republican.”

He says he’ll switch his registration to Democratic.

An article in Politico.com says the GOP has recruited “an unusually diverse crop of serious statewide candidates” across the U.S. from demographic groups Republicans lost in 2008.

But not in Florida, at least as far as national GOP leaders are concerned.

“In Florida, where the GOP’s lone Hispanic senator is stepping down, national Republicans have already made clear that Gov. Charlie Crist is their preferred candidate over former state House Speaker Marco Rubio, a Cuban American.”

Click here to read the entire article.