Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will join GOP governor hopeful Rick Scott on a campaign stop in the Villages tomorrow.
Romney, who lost a presidential bid in the GOP primary two years ago, and Scott, who defeated Attorney General Bill McCollum in a brutal primary last month, will attend a rally and a meet-and-greet in the afternoon. Scott beat McCollum by about two percentage points in Lake County, where the Villages is located.
Romney is purportedly gathering steam for another presidential run in 2012.
The two businessmen have at least one thing in common. Romney spent about $45 million of his own money on his losing presidential campaign; Scott spent slightly more – $50 million – of his own fortune on his winning bid.
Uneasy Senate staff fearing possible pink slips can rest easy.
Senate President-designate Mike Haridopolos has finished cleaning house even before he officially takes over in November, he announced today.
In his latest move, Haridopolos tapped Gov. Charlie Crist’s budget chief Jerry McDaniel to “take a lead role” in the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, according to a memo Haridopolos sent to fellow senators today. McDaniel’s annual salary will be $150,000.
Haridopolos let go about a dozen top staff earlier this year around the same time or after hiring Steve MacNamara as his chief of staff and general counsel. MacNamara, whose annual salary is $175,000, was also chief of staff for former House Speaker John Thrasher, now a state senator and head of the Republican Party of Florida.
Haridopolos says the changes will save the Senate about $1 million.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink is touting her endorsements from nearly two dozen Republican elected officials, including Wellington Vice Mayor Carmine Priore and Riviera Beach City Council Chairwoman Dawn Pardo.
Pardo says she respects Sink’s background in business and government, and she says Republican candidate Rick Scott strikes her as too strident.
“As an elected official, governing and being fair to all people on all issues is best done with someone who is more moderate than extreme, as her opponent comes across,” Pardo says.
Priore, for his part, wouldn’t bash Scott. The former president of the Florida League of Cities, Priore says he has been impressed by Sink’s grasp of issues.
“She has never failed to attend when we’ve asked her to come and speak to our group, and her message has been consistent,” Priore says. “I think she understands our issues.”
Like Pardo, Priore says party distinctions aren’t important to him in state races.
“I don’t have any problem with crossing over,” he says. “I try to leave my partisan politics to the federal level, because there I can see a difference in policy and ideology.”
Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink has setup a web site to let disgruntled Floridians vent about their problems getting paid by BP claims czar Ken Feinberg.
Her new website – www.myfloridacfo.com/FloridaClaimsHelp/ – invites visitors to share their stories “if you’ve filed your claim and provided the documentation requested to the best of your ability but have not received a response or are getting the runaround.”
Feinberg, who took over the Gulf Coast Claims Facility on Aug. 23, this week promised larger, faster claims even as he tries to manage a backlog of more than 10,000 claims, many of them in Florida.
Thursday, September 30th, 2010 by Palm Beach Post Staff
Crist
Who is the real Charlie Crist?
The Palm Beach Post editorial board will be grilling Gov. Crist in our newsroom starting at 10 a.m. Friday, and you can see the live streaming video at PalmBeachPost.com.
The editorial board will ask questions such as:
Where do you really stand on the health care law?
Where do stand on the stimulus?
Which party would you caucus with?
With election day a month away, Crist comes for his candidate interview with The Post’s editorial board at a critical time for his campaign. (more…)
The results are similar to a CNN/Time poll released late Wednesday that shows Rubio leading Crist by 11 points and a Rasmussen poll released Wednesday that also has Rubio up by 11.
Obama
Quinnipiac’s Sept. 23-28 poll of 1,151 likely voters (margin of error: 2.9 percent) shows voters prefer a Senator who will oppose President Obama’s policies by a 53-to-41 percent margin and prefer Republicans to control the Senate by a 47-to-38 percent margin. Forty-eight percent of voters call themselves “angry” at the federal government and another 29 percent “dissatisfied.”
All but a baker’s dozen of GOP state House and Senate members are backing Republican gubernatorial nominee Rick Scott, who ran as an “outsider” in a brutal GOP primary against Attorney General Bill McCollum.
Scott released a list of campaign co-chairmen that included nearly all of the state legislature’s Republicans, some of whom backed McCollum in the primary and objected at the time that Scott, who spent $50 million of his own money in the primary, couldn’t be trusted.
McCollum has refused to endorse Scott in the general election against Democrat Alex Sink.
The list of GOP legislators who haven’t signed on either, according to the campaign document, include:
Senate Majority Leader Alex Diaz de la Portilla, Sens. Victor Crist, Nancy Detert, Rudy Garcia, Steve Oelrich, and Alex Villalobos, who publicly endorsed Sink this week.
Also missing was Ft. Lauderdale Rep. Ellyn Bogdanoff, who’s running against Democrat Rep. Kelly Skidmore in the race to replace Senate President Jeff Atwater. Atwater’s stepping down to run for chief financial officer.
A new CNN/Time/Opinion Research Corp. poll shows Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, a Democrat, and GOP opponent Rick Scott tied in the race for governor.
The survey shows Scott with the backing of 47 percent of likely voters and Sink with 45. The poll had a margin of error of +/- 3 percent.
The poll also showed Sink with a one percent edge among all voters, a drop of seven points from early this month.
Scott held a 13-point advantage with independents likely to vote, with 50 percent said they were likely to cast a ballot for the former health care executive compared to 37 percent who said they’d vote for Sink.
In the three-way U.S. Senate race, the poll found Republican Marco Rubio in the lead with the support of 42 percent of likely voters, independent candidate Gov. Charlie Crist with 31 percent and U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, a Democrat, with 23 percent.
UPDATE: GOP officials appear to be linking Attorney General Bill McCollum to billions of dollars in losses – on paper – to the state pension fund during the 2008 financial meltdown.
McCollum has steadfastly refused to join other GOP elected officials in their support for Rick Scott, who defeated the attorney general in the August GOP governor’s race primary.
The Republican Party of Florida paid for a series of ads attacking Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, the Democrat nominee for governor, for her role in the pension fund losses.
“Under current oversight, the fund has lost billions upon billions – and now Alex Sink is actually running ads on her questionable record overseeing SBA,” RPOF spokesman Dan Conston said in an e-mail in response to a reaction to McCollum’s pointed questioning yesterday to refute recent reports that the State Board of Administration made risky investments that endangered the pension fund.
Attorney General Bill McCollum may have finally put to rest speculation that he may eventually endorse Rick Scott in the governor’s race in the spirit of party unity.
Instead, he helped Scott’s opponent Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, the Democrat candidate for governor, debunk ads bashing Sink for her role in the state pension fund’s loss of billions of dollars in value during the financial meltdown in 2008.
McCollum, who lost the GOP primary bid in a brutal battle against Scott last month, sits with Sink and Gov. Charlie Crist on the board of trustees that governs the State Board of Administration, which handles the pension fund and other investments.
In a public meeting yesterday, McCollum repeatedly asked SBA chief Ash Williams about reports that the pension fund is troubled and that the SBA made risky investments.
Williams assured the trustees the $119 billion fund is sound.
“The SBA is stronger and different then it was only two years ago,” Williams said.
He also refuted allegations that the investments were risky.
“The truth is they are performing,” McCollum said. “They are assets that pay back.”
The Florida Democratic Party released two new TV ads today, one a hard-hitting attack piece bashing GOP gubernatorial nominee Rick Scott and the other a softer piece promoting opponent Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink.
The first ad, titled “Trust,” features clips from television news reports of Scott evading reporters asking questions about the $1.7 billion in fines Scott’s former company Columbia/HCA was forced to pay the federal government for Medicare fraud.
It ends with a reporter asking Scott “The question is how could you have missed such an abuse by your own company?” (more…)
UPDATE: It took just minutes for Loranne Ausley’s campaign to respond to opponent Jeff Atwater’s latest lob.
“It’s nice to welcome Jeff Atwater to the campaign, if only to defend his refusal to follow the law and audit lobbyists. Now if only he had a platform, or a defense of his $2 billion in tax hikes, or his vote for the $48 million Taj Mahal, or the $110 million private prison to nowhere, or his RPOF AmEx card. I’m sure this will all be explained in detail at the debate that he refuses to have with the real fiscal watchdog in the campaign, Loranne Ausley,” Ausley’s campaign spokesman Kevin Cate wrote in an e-mail.
After weeks of getting hammered by Democrat Loranne Ausley, Senate President Jeff Atwater has gone on the offensive in the chief financial officer battle.
Atwater’s campaign issued a press release reminding voters that his opponent Ausley sponsored a measure two years ago that would have weakened (slightly) the state’s lobbying ban prohibiting lawmakers from accepting gifts from lobbyists.
Ausley, a former state representative from Tallahassee, sponsored a bill that would have allowed lawmakers to take food or drinks worth $20 or less at government-related functions and some other affairs.
“Whether a demonstration of unrivaled hypocrisy or a severe case of amnesia, Loranne Ausley’s record is clear: she wants free lunch and she wants big-money lobbyists to pick up the check,” Atwater’s campaign spokesman Brian Hughes said in an e-mail.
She’s gone after Atwater for a variety of big-ticket spending items during his tenure as senate president, including a controversial appeals court, dubbed the “Taj Mahal,” that is now the subject of a grand jury investigation.
Add state Sen. Dan Gelber, the Democrat candidate for attorney general, to the list of pols criticizing BP claims czar Ken Feinberg for his handling of payments to Floridians harmed by the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster.
Gelber, a former federal prosecutor from Miami Beach, sent a letter to Feinberg asking him to include the costs of preparing claims to payments to individuals and businesses. Feinberg said he won’t pay for legal or accounting fees associated with the filings.
“Citizens of our state are rightfully frustrated. They see promises from BP actors in commercials suggesting the company is prepared to do the right thing. Yet on the ground, they see obfuscation, and a process that is filled with more chutes than ladders,” Gelber wrote.
Gelber also joined Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, the Democrat candidate for governor; Gov. Charlie Crist, the independent candidate for U.S. Senate; and Attorney General Bill McCollum, the Republican who lost the primary bid for governor, in demanding that Feinberg pay damages to those located where oil never reached the shore. Feinberg’s consideration of proximity to the oil spill in paying claims has been a major issue of contention since he took over BP’s botched claims process on Aug. 23.
The Florida Police Benevolent Society released a 30-second TV ad today bashing GOP gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott’s plan to cut $1 billion from spending on prisons to trim the budget.
A corrections department spokeswoman said Scott’s proposal would wind up shuttering prisons. Shutting down prisons would, of course, result in pink slips for union workers.
The ad says that, under Scott’s plan, “tens of thousands of prisoners could be released early, including murderers, rapists, sex offenders, armed robbers and drug dealers.” It ends with a group of tough-looking men in stripes reciting Scott’s campaign slogan, “Let’s get to work!”
The PBA and the state’s other law enforcement union, the Fraternal Order of Police, are both backing Scott’s Democrat opponent, Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink.
Did one of indie Senate candidate Charlie Crist’s old Republican primary ads accidently get re-released?
Nope. But Democrat Kendrick Meek’s campaign and the Florida Democratic Party are happily replaying clips of Crist calling himself “about as conservative as you can get” and “a Jeb Bush Republican” who praised former President George W. Bush and Sarah Palin and declared himself willing to explore offshore oil drilling.
Not mentioned in the ad: Republican frontrunner Marco Rubio. Crist and Meek are grappling to become Rubio’s main challenger.
Pelosi and President Obama favor allowing the tax rates to increase for individuals earning $200,000 and couples making $250,000 a year.
Klein, facing a tough challenge from Republican Allen West, was also one of at least 38 House Dems who recently called for a short-term extension of the Bush income tax cuts for everyone, including wealthy filers.
After weeks of taking heat from GOP opponent Marco Rubio (and Democrat candidate U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek) in his quest for the U.S. Senate, independent Gov. Charlie Crist said Rubio can’t seem to make up his mind where he stands on the issue.
Crist said the former House Speaker changed his stand “three or four times in the past four months” about privatizing Social Security.
“It’s hard to keep up. But obviously he’s all over the map as it relates to Social Security,” Crist told reporters this afternoon. “The seniors of our state deserve to have somebody who will protect and will preserve Social Security. I’m the only candidate in the race who is committed to doing so.”
UPDATE: A spokesman for Rick Scott’s campaign responded to Alex Sink’s rant about her GOP opponent Scott’s attack ads, paid for by the Republican Party of Florida.
“As the St Petersburg Times reported, CFO Sink never declared a potential conflict and supported a no-bid contract to her former employer. Instead of looking for a correction from the St Petersburg Times, Sink is trying to draw attention from valid questions over her integrity and competence,” Scott campaign spokesman Joe Kildea said in an e-mail.
As far as her accusation that Scott is scaring pensioners, Kildea wrote: “She is trying to draw attention away from the facts (as reported in the St Pete. Times)”
Chief Financial Officer and Democrat governor hopeful Alex Sink went on a rant in response to questions about her GOP opponent Rick Scott’s attack ads accusing her of benefiting from a no-bid contract that went to her former employer and being responsible for the state pension fund’s $23 billion loss three years ago.
“You know that’s ridiculous,” Sink, a trustee along with Gov. Charlie Crist and Attorney General Bill McCollum of Florida’s State Board of Administration, which handles pension funds for state and municipal workers.
“The whole market almost collapsed. Everybody’s 401K took a dive. And the good news is that independent authorities call the Florida pension fund one of the strongest investment pension funds in the country.
We are one of the strongest public pension funds in the country. He is out there scaring our retirees into thinking that their pensions are at risk. He’s irresponsible and shouldn’t be doing it.”
Sink was even more incensed over an ad accusing her of voting to give former employer Bank of America a no-bid contract when she may have held stock in the company. The Republican Party of Florida paid for both of the television ads.
Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink used an update this morning on Florida’s response to the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster to blast BP claims czar Ken Feinberg for paying too little, too late to Panhandle businesses and causing at least one company to close its doors.
“I’m kind of of the mind set that enough is enough,” Sink, the Democrat candidate for governor, said at this morning’s Cabinet meeting. “I don’t know about you all but I’m sick and tired of this. These desperate people through no fault of their own having to shut their business down? That’s horrendous!”
Sink said the owners of Harmony Beach Vacations in Destin sent her an e-mail yesterday telling her they were going out of business because their claim for lost revenues has languished under both BP and Feinberg, who took over the oil giant’s maligned claims process for individuals and businesses on Aug. 23.
Rubio in Boynton Beach Monday with supporter Pat Haden at Duffy's Sprots Grill. That's Palm Beach County GOP Chairman Sid Dinerstein to the left. GARY CORONADO PHOTO
Republican Senate nominee Marco Rubio, who once favored giving younger workers the option of investing a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes in private accounts, says he abandoned that view at least six months ago after concluding the idea “doesn’t work.”
The Senate President is a powerful man, but who knew he had control over items as far-reaching as lobbyists’ earnings and courthouse buildings?
Former state Rep. Loranne Ausley, apparently.
In her continuing strategy to defeat outgoing Senate President Jeff Atwater, Ausley, a Democrat, has accused him of failing to rein in spending on a controversial appeal court nicknamed the “Taj Mahal” nearing completion in Tallahassee and a private prison that cost dozens of corrections workers their jobs.
In her latest attack, Ausley bashes Atwater for failing to audit lobbyists’ compensation reports, something that lawmakers have been required to do for years but have failed to follow through on.
The lobbyist gift ban law, passed in 2005, 2005 law, requires lobbyists to file quarterly reports telling how much they earn. (more…)
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