The Florida Supreme Court will ultimately rule on the adoption ban making Florida the only state that bans gays from adopting children. The state does allow gay couples and individuals to foster children but does not allow them to adopt them. That’s at odds with Florida’s policy on “permanence” in which children are supposed to be moved as little as possible from one household to another.
A Miami-Dade County judge ruled the gay adoption ban unconstitutional in 2008 in the case of Martin Gill and his male partner, who adopted two foster children they have cared for since 2004.
Gov. Charlie Crist, whose Department of Children and Families appealed the adoption and the ruling, said recently he was considering dropping the appeal. But gay rights activists and the ACLU, which represents Gill, as well as DCF Secretary George Sheldon want the Supreme Court to make a final decision on the law to settle uncertainty for future adoptions.
Organizers canceled an Oct. 5 debate at the University of Florida between attorney general candidates Dan Gelber and Pam Bondi because Bondi won’t appear.
GOP hopeful Bondi, a former prosecutor from Tampa who’s never run for office before, has a “scheduling conflict” preventing her from participating in the debate hosted by Leadership Florida and the Florida Press Association, her campaign spokeswoman Sandi Copes said. Copes could not immediately say what Bondi had to do that trumped the debate.
State senator Gelber, a former federal prosecutor who also served as House Democratic Leader, earned a reputation as one of the legislature’s top arguers during feisty floor debates.
Palm Beach County’s nonpartisan Voters Coalition, whose endorsements are typically prized by candidates from both parties, is recommending independent Charlie Crist in Florida’s Senate race and Democrat Alex Sink for governor.
The group has a few hundred members, primarily in southern Palm Beach County. It regularly draws A-list speakers to its events. Attorney General Bill McCollum and Chief Financial Officer Sink both appeared at last year’s Voters Coalition dinner in West Palm Beach and Crist was the headliner in 2008.
Endorsements were determined after interviews by the group’s 10-member board, which includes Republicans and Democrats, said Voters Coalition Chairman Bob Newmark.
Read the complete list of endorsements after the jump….
Crist also tapped Julie I. Brown, a former city attorney for Tampa.
Balbis, 38, is an environmental engineer who has worked for West Palm Beach since 2008. He’s also a member of the Treasure Coast Regional Planning council and serves as chairman of the East Central Regional Water Reclamation Facility Board.
Brown, 35, is associate legal counsel for First American Corporation and also is the sole owner of J.T. Swann Realty Inc.
The new commissioners will fill the seats of current PSC Chairwoman Nancy Argenziano, a former state senator, and Nathan Skop, an engineer, attorney and MBA. Skop and Argenziano, whose terms expire in January, were outspoken critics of the PSC and were not among the candidates selected by the PSC Nominating Council for reappointment.
Crist passed over Sen. Lee Constantine, R-Altamonte Springs, who led the PSC Nominating Council until he resigned to apply for one of the PSC posts, and former PSC Executive Director Mary Bane.
Bane was in charge during a PSC scandal involving staffers sending secret BlackBerry messages to utility employees during rate increase hearings last fall.
The Senate must confirm Crist’s new hires. Last year, they refused to confirm two of his picks – Benjamin “Steve” Stevens, a Panhandle bar owner and accountant and David Klement, a newspaper editorial writer.
The nonpartisan League of Women Voters of Florida has released its pre-election voter guide, including summaries of those pesky ballot questions and a candidate Q-and-A section.
No-party governor candidate Michael E. Arth borrows from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Major-General’s Song and the D.A. Pennebaker-shot 1965 proto-video of Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues to promote himself as “the very model of a pragmatic humanitarian.”
There’s no Allen Ginsberg background cameo in the Arth video.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this blog post incorrectly reported that the anti-West mailer was sent by Democratic U.S. Rep. Ron Klein’s campaign. The mailer was sent by the Florida Democratic Party.
The Florida Democratic Party sent out a mailer last week detailing Republican congressional challenger Allen West’s 2005 tax lien and court orders to pay delinquent credit card bills. West is challenging Democratic U.S. Rep. Ron Klein.
The mailer includes a reproduction of the $11,081 tax lien filed against West in Marion County, Indiana, and paid off four months later. The document, pulled from public records, includes a column titled “Identifying Number” that shows West’s nine-digit Social Security number. Although the number isn’t specifically identified as a Social Security number, West campaign manager Josh Grodin said there is no mistaking what the number is.
West called the mailer “an unprecedented new low in American politics.”
Florida Democratic Party spokesman Eric Jotkoff responded by accusing West of “paranoia” and adding: “After making every effort to remove all of Allen West’s private information, unlike West who refuses to apologize to Florida’s taxpayers for not paying his taxes and his bills, we apologize for the oversight of not redacting this information from the public record included in the mailer. To end, while this mail piece does not explicitly identify any Social Security number, in order to stop the crazy West accusations, we will pay for identify theft monitoring for the next two years.”
Ken Feinberg, in charge of doling out billions of dollars in claims to victims of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, said he won’t hire more adjusters to speed up the process but acknowledged his system is not without problems.
“It is true that we’re not moving as fast as we should,” Feinberg said.
Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink and Gov. Charlie Crist this week asked Feinberg to appear before them at the next Cabinet meeting to explain why so many Panhandle business owners haven’t seen a dime since Feinberg took over BP’s maligned claims system on Aug. 23.
“We can do better. The criticism of the governor and Sink justifiable. But we’re making amends. And we’re improving the system,” Feinberg said.
Crist and Sink also demanded that he immediately hire more adjusters to help speed up the process.
“I don’t need to hire more people. It’s not a resource issue. It’s an internal ability of us to process claims as fast as we can. Simply throwing more people at the problem won’t solve it,” Feinberg said.
MIAMI — Each of Florida’s three Senate candidates sought to differentiate himself from his rivals Friday in a one-hour debate on Spanish-language Univision taped this afternoon.
With a considerable portion of the debate focusing on immigration and issues of concern to Hispanics, the lone Hispanic in the race — Republican nominee Marco Rubio — staked out more conservative positions than Democratic rival Kendrick Meek or independent Charlie Crist.
Rubio said he supports making English the official language of the U.S. and opposes a Democratic bill that would let students in the country illegally become citizens if they enlist in the military or attend college. Both Meek and Crist support the DREAM Act.
Rubio also disagreed with Crist and Meek on a “path to citizenship” for the estimated 11 million or more people in the country illegally. He said the U.S. must secure its borders and beef up employment verification before attempting “modernization” of its immigration laws.
Two Florida Democrats facing tough reelection fights — U.S. Reps. Ron Klein and Allen Boyd — signed the letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this week. Another endangered Dem, Central Florida Rep. Suzanne Kosmas, is also on board, says Politico.
Republicans are largely united in favor of extending all the tax cuts, including those for upper-income earners. President Obama has called for letting the tax cuts expire for families earning more than $250,000.
Florida’s unemployment rate for August is 11.7 percent, a .2 percent jump from July, according to figures released by the state Agency for Workforce Innovation this morning. Another 16,000 jobs disappeared during the month.
The news isn’t all bad, however.
Although 1,084,000 Floridians don’t have a job – and those numbers don’t include those who’ve given up looking for work – the state’s annual job growth rate is up 0.4 percent, representing an increase of 29,800 jobs from last August.
UPDATE: Gov. Charlie Crist had this to say about the RPOF audit released today:
“I went to Disney World with my wife and my two stepdaughters and we paid for it ourselves.”
An audit of state GOP spending revealed that former party chief Jim Greer spent tens of thousands of dollars on lavish hotel rooms and trips unrelated to official business, including more than $5,000 on costs associated with his son’s baptism.
The audit, released to the public today, also found that the Republican Party of Florida picked up a $13,435.59 tab for a personal trip to Disney World Greer and his family took with Gov. Charlie Crist and his wife Carole and possibly her two daughters in June 2009.
Crist, who left the Republican Party this spring to run as an independent in the U.S. Senate race, said earlier this week he had no idea about possible misspending on travel after Thrasher threatened to take Crist to court to recoup the money if Crist didn’t repay it.
But the audit showed that Crist and his wife and the Greers spent more than $13,000 on a personal holiday at the Walt Disney World Contemporary Hotel.
Greer also charged $10,992.17 on his RPOF-issued American Express card for three personal vacations to Fisher Island, including one in which Crist participated, the audit found. Carole Crist owns a home on the exclusive enclave.
Crist’s campaign responded with a statement demanding that his opponent, former House Speaker Marco Rubio, release all of his credit card statements prior to the dates covered in the audit.
“Republican party bosses engaging in smear tactics to cover-up the wrongdoing of their own nominee? Shocking. Now that the bosses have ended their partisan charade, they must immediately release all of Marco Rubio’s credit card records dating back to when he was Speaker-Designate to determine the extent to which he charged the party for personal expenses like family reunions and real estate payments,” Crist campaign spokesman Danny Kanner said in an e-mail. (more…)
U.S. Rep. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton, was one of many Democrats who favored letting the Bush tax cuts expire for upper-income earners.
But Klein and 30 other Democrats have signed a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asking that all the Bush tax cuts be extended. Many of the signers, including Klein, face tough reelection fights this fall.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a veritable rock star among hard core GOP’ers, will join Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott on three campaign stops tomorrow.
Jindal earned praise for his harsh criticism of BP’s handling of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster that smothered Louisiana marshes in goo and left indelible images of oil-coated pelicans gasping for breath.
The pair will greet the public at private airports in Pensacola, Orlando and Jacksonville.
When Charlie Crist quit the GOP to run for the U.S. Senate as an independent, he walked away from lots of Republican Party cash. But, he also walked away from what some political watchers say is another key vote-getter: ballot placement.
Instead of the top spots enjoyed by GOP candidate Marco Rubio and Democratic candidate Kendrick Meek, the governor’s name will be No. 9 on the list of 10 senate candidates. His name will appear between other so-called NPA (no party affiliation) candidates Lewis J. Armstrong, of Jacksonville, and Rick Tyler, of Pensacola.
Panhandle Democratic U.S. Rep. Allen Boyd is endorsing fellow Dem Kendrick Meek’s Senate bid.
In a normal year, a Democrat endorsing a Democrat is strictly dog-bites-man story. But the fact that the Meek campaign is trumpeting Boyd’s endorsement reflects the oddities of this year’s three-way Senate race and independent Gov. Charlie Crist’s success at drawing many Dems from Meek.
Confirming the high national stakes attached to the congressional race between U.S. Rep. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton, and Republican challenger Allen West, President Obama will come to the Coral Gables home of former Miami Heat star Alonzo Mourning next month to raise money for Klein.
The Oct. 11 event is a joint fund-raiser for Klein’s campaign and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which means an individual can give up to $32,800 rather than the $2,400 limit to an individual candidate.
Where's the money? Use The Post's interactive database of who wants and who's getting federal dollars.
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