Vice President Joe Biden will keynote the Florida Democratic Party 2011 State Convention dinner on Oct. 28 in Lake Buena Vista, the party announced this morning.

“Vice President Biden’s attendance sends a clear message about the importance of our state in this year’s Presidential Election”, Florida Democratic Party Chairman Rod Smith said in a press release. “Our state’s 29 electoral votes are crucial to ensuring this nation continues to move forward over the next four years. We are honored that he will attend and help us kick-off the 2012 election.”

The Democratic event is Oct. 28-30 at Walt Disney World.

U.S. Rep. Allen West, R-Plantation, didn’t think much of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ demand that he stop associating with figures the group considers anti-Muslim.

West’s response, on congressional stationery: “NUTS!”

CAIR South Florida Director Nezar Hamze (recipient of West’s “Don’t try to blow sunshine up my butt” admonition at a February town hall meeting) seemed puzzled by the response and told a Miami TV station that West should “stop the schoolboy insults.”

The Miami New Times reported today that West’s office “has yet to explain to New Times what the congressman meant.”

West watchers shouldn’t be surprised. The 22-year Army veteran regularly peppers his speeches with military references from ancient Greece to Vietnam. West referred to at least five Union generals by name in recounting a Battle of Gettysburg story to tea partyers Monday night.

And West frequently mentions World War II Army Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, who was immortalized during the Battle of the Bulge for his one-word reply to a surrender demand from the Germans.

McAuliffe’s response: “Nuts!”

With car insurance fraud skyrocketing in Florida, Gov. Rick Scott cited a need Tuesday to revamp the state’s four decade old requirement that motorists carry Personal Injury Protection (PIP).

Driven in part by widespread accident fraud, auto insurance premiums have spiked by more than $900 million over the past three years, Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty told Scott and the Cabinet.

McCarty blamed “fraudsters and hucksters” for much of the problem. The state’s Divison of Insurance Fraud reported Tuesday that PIP fraud referrals have more than doubled since 2007 to 6,699 this year.

Scott said it’s clear that the state’s PIP law is in need for an overhaul by lawmakers next year — with McCarty charged with coming up with proposals to put before lawmakers in coming weeks.

Motorists must carry $10,000 PIP policies. But business groups and insurance companies have long fought the requirement. PIP legislation collapsed last session in a predictable tug-of-war between insurers, consumers and medical organizations.

Scott, though, backed by Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater, said Tuesday that changes need to be made, although neither of the officials said they knew what steps should be taken.

“Are we doing things through regulation…that is allowing fraud to happen, that normally wouldn’t happen?” Scott said.

 

Despite a credit rating downgrade and more than 100 layoffs, Gov. Rick Scott said Tuesday he supported the dramatic changes occuring at the South Florida Water Management District, saying “absolutely the right things are happening.”

Legislation signed into law by Scott cuts property taxes across Florida’s five water management districts by $210 million. The South Florida district, the state’s largest, is slicing spending by $120 million, or about 30 percent of its property-tax collections, sparking scores of layoffs and buyouts.

The financial hit also led the ratings agency, Standard & Poor, to downgrade the district’s credit rating a notch, to AA+. Although the district has no immediate plans to issue bonds, S&P’s action could raise the future cost of borrowing by water managers.

“Why should they be out borrowing more money?” Scott said. “They should be doing what the state is doing…especially in tough times like this. What would you do in your own house? What do Floridians have to do now? They have to watch every penny.”

“That’s exactly what they should expect out of government,” Scott concluded.

 

Gov. Rick Scott overstepped his authority and violated the separation of powers by freezing state agency rulemaking, the Florida Supreme Court ruled today.

Shortly after he was sworn in as governor on Jan. 4, Scott suspended agency rulemaking and required the proposed rules be vetted by his office. He later created the “Office of Fiscal Accountability and Regulatory Reform” to review the rules, saying he wanted to make sure they did not slow down government, create barriers for businesses or cost taxpayers money.

But in a 5-2 ruling, the court found that Scott’s executive orders “infringe upon the very process of rulemaking and encroach upon the Legislature‘s delegation of its rulemaking power as set forth in the Florida Statutes.”

Chief Justice Charles Canady and Judge Ricky Polston, both appointed by Gov. Charlie Crist, dissented. Scott acted within his constitutional authority as the state’s chief administrative officer whose duty is “to manage, plan, and hold agencies under his charge accountable to State laws, including the APA. The actual facts before us do not demonstrate otherwise,” Polston wrote.

Canady called the majority opinion an “ill-conceived interference with the constitutional authority and responsibility of Florida‘s Governor.”

Scott also saw it that way.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me,” Scott said of the court ruling. “I don’t think it follows the constitution. It’s a disappointment.

“Think about it, the secretaries of these agencies report to me, they work for me at will, and I’m not supposed to supervise them? It doesn’t make sense,” he added.

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PALM BEACH GARDENS — Before speaking to a packed Palm Beach County Tea Party gathering here tonight, U.S. Rep. Allen West, R-Plantation, told reporters the door is open “a crack” to the possibility he’ll run for U.S. Senate. West first made that suggestion on WPTV Channel 5′s To The Point over the weekend.

“If people want to talk to me about something like that it would be very disrespectful and rude for me to slam the door in their face,” West said tonight. “So people have an opportunity to talk to me, I’ll hear them out, but my intentions are very simple — to run as a congressional representative, and that’s where we go forward.”

He added: “I cracked it open enough so that people can slip a note under the door and I can read the note. And I can write back on the note ‘probably not’”

West in the past has dismissed any suggestion of a Senate run. But, he said, “for whatever reason there are people here in the state of Florida that see me as a political entity and they are very trustworthy within the Republican Party structure. I’ll sit down and talk to them and listen but I don’t think people are really going to be able to move me.”

West declined to say who he has or will talk to about the Senate race. He also declined to set a specific time frame for making a decision, but said, “There’s a window that will close very soon.”

With the Legislature’s redistricting road show opening tonight in South Florida, Republicans and Democratic party bosses are doing their best to play the warm-up act.

Florida GOP Chairman Dave Bitner wrote his Democratic counterpart, Rod Smith, a stinging letter Monday, ripping him for claiming current legislative and congressional district boundaries make Florida “one of the most malapportioned states in the United States.”

Bitner pointed out in his letter that Smith, then a state senator, largely supported the map-making in 2002 that created the boundaries he’s now ridiculing.

Smith also was a member of a Senate Redistricting Committee that, like this year’s version, has failed to produce any proposed maps during its public hearing tour. Past news accounts produced by Bitner also place Smith – Zelig-like – behind moves that helped him win re-election, pulling Democrats from a fellow Democrat’s district and cutting adrift voters in Marion County who wanted to be included in the Senate district he served.

Instead, these Marion County voters were divided across four Senate districts in 2002. Such fracturing and incumbent favoritism would be outlawed under two new constitutional amendments approved by voters last fall and backed by Democratic allies.

“Chairman Smith, your hypocrisy is especially troubling because you are a former member of the Florida Legislature,” Bitner wrote. “You took an oath to uphold the constitution and the laws of Florida when you were sworn into office. You promised the citizens you represented that you would act in their best interest.”

Bitner concluded, “You can stop your boisterous partisan rhetoric that belies the documented legislative record that you undeniably possess.”

Smith fired back in a letter, noting that Bitner didn’t really refute how out of whack Florida district boundaries are, and that Republican lawmakers last year vigorously fought the constitutional amendment drive aimed at making districts more compact.

“Your letter is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to distract from producing the maps and the transparency Florida voters demanded,” Smith wrote. “Instead of writing letters, your party’s leaders should be opening the backroom door and sharing the maps.

 ”Let’s stop the political games,” the Democrat added. “Let’s make certain the will of the people is implemented by this very unwilling Republican Legislature.”

The Legislature’s current redistricting public hearing tour resumes tonight in Stuart, at the Blake Library, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Lawmakers move to Boca Raton Tuesday morning, for a hearing at Florida Atlantic University, scheduled from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Gov. Rick Scott is making doughnuts. He’s snacking with the press. He’s shed his button-down suit and sitting down with editorial boards.

Now the latest in Scott’s kinder, gentler metamorphosis is a new official photo.

Scott’s staff on Monday sent out the photo with the following instructions: “Please use this photo of Governor Scott, rather than any others you may have on file.”

He fumbled his golden opportunity to pin “Obamneycare” on Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney in a New Hampshire debate. His Iowa performance showed he wasn’t even the best-known Minnesotan in the race. Now former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty is dropping out of the 2012 GOP presidential contest.

Whatever his shortcomings elsewhere, Pawlenty had lined up some big-name backers in Florida, including former Jeb Bush campaign chairman Phil Handy as his Florida chairman, former Bush speechwriter and Internet aggregator Justin Sayfie as a Florida co-chairman and former Bush fundraiser Ann Herberger as a national senior finance adviser.

T-Paw also garnered endorsements from 14 state House Republicans, including the next three speakers-in-waiting: Reps. Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel; Chris Dorworth, R-Lake Mary; and Richard Corcoran, R-New Port Richey.

Herberger said she was looking for Pawlenty to get a boost from next month’s Republican Party of Florida “Presidency 5″ gathering in Orlando.

“I think his whole team in Florida absolutely wanted him to go on and take it to Presidency 5, but it just wasn’t to be,” Herberger said after a morning conference call with Pawlenty. “I think we could have been very competitive here.”

Striking a blow to the White House, a federal appeals court ruled Friday that President Barack Obama’s health care law requiring Americans to buy health insurance is unconstitutional.

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta also found that the remainder of the law can remain intact.

Florida former attorney general Bill McCollum launched the lawsuit against the federal government over the sweeping law. Twenty-five other states have since joined the suit, now likely headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Andrew Spark, one of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s assistants in her Tampa office, abruptly resigned Thursday – a day after releasing a 16-page memo harshly criticizing his boss’s administration.

Spark, an assistant state attorney general in the Tampa office of economic crimes, said his memo was motivated by the forced resignations of former state foreclosure investigators June Clarkson and Theresa Edwards.

Spark’s concerns include former Economic Crimes Division Director Mary Leontakianakos taking a job in June with the Law Offices of Marshall C. Watson – a firm that paid $2 million in March to settle a state investigation into its foreclosure practices. Leontakianakos resigned her director’s job in December with an effective date of Jan. 3.

Spark also mentions the resignation of former Deputy Attorney General Joe Jacquot, who went to work for Lender Processing Services – another company under investigation by the state – and concerns he has about his investigations of two companies that serve foreclosure summonses to home owners.

“The people of the State of Florida are entitled to fair and honest government, independent of personal connections and powerful interests,” wrote Spark, who has worked for the attorney general for about seven years.

After Spark’s resignation, Bondi said he was the subject of an ongoing investigation for using the services of a business he was investigating.

“It is exceptionally troubling for the people of Florida that Spark’s memo disclosed information pertaining to active investigations into foreclosure-related businesses that could compromise those cases,” Bondi said.

Read The Palm Beach Post writer Kimberly Miller’s story here.

Attorney General Pam Bondi is taking over a whistleblower’s lawsuit against a New York bank accused of skimming millions of dollars from the state’s pension fund in a foreign currency scheme.

Bondi’s office intervened Thursday in the two-year-old lawsuit filed against Bank of New York Mellon, which was among the investment firms handling the $129 million Florida Retirement System. The lawsuit claims the BNY Mellon bought and sold foreign currency for the FRS, but added mark-ups and other fake charges that cost the state when the investments were bought and sold.

BNY Mellon has denied wrongdoing.

Bondi, however, said Thursday, “Every penny that state and local employees entrust to Florida’s pension fund is hard-earned, and we will not allow Floridians’ money to be lost due to fraudulent activity.

“Overcharging for foreign exchange transactions is essentially stealing, and any company that does so will be held accountable.”

The Florida Medical Association will represent doctors in administrative complaints involving a new law that limits what health care providers can ask patients about gun ownership.

But the association’s House of Delegates also voted late last month not to join a lawsuit challenging whether the new law is a violation of doctors’ freedom of speech.

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence and several doctors’ groups, including the Florida chapters of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Practitioners and the American College of Physicians, filed the lawsuit in June against Gov. Rick Scott and his administration seeking an injunction against what they call the “Physician Gag Law,” already in effect. The groups, later joined by the Palm Beach County Medical Society and the ACLU, also want a federal judge to strike down the law as unconstitutional.

Under the law, doctors and other health care professionals will face sanctions including fines and losing their licenses if they ask patients about guns in the home without a direct belief that the inquiry is relevant to the patient’s safety or health. Pediatricians say the law keeps them from doing their jobs.

FMA general counsel Jeff Scott said the FMA’s House of Delegates rejected a proposal to join the lawsuit but later agreed to a substitute resolution calling for the FMA to help out doctors facing complaints related to the new law.

“We made kind of a policy statement that the doctor-patient relationship is important and to guide us going forward,” Scott said.

National Rifle Association lobbyist Marion Hammer, who pushed the legislation passed this session, worked with the FMA and eased off sanctions in an early proposal that would have slapped doctors with up to $5,000 fines and prison time for probing into patients’ gun ownership. Florida is the first state to pass such a law, Hammer said.

Under the amendment approved by the delegates late in July, the FMA will “legally support, to the greatest degree possible, any FMA member subject to disciplinary action based on enforcement of the Florida gun law … if the affected physician was acting based on the medical necessity and safety of the patient or others.” The organization will also be required to “actively oppose an attempt to restrict physician questions to patients or require questions of patients.”

Scott said he doesn’t think the resolution will be an issue because he doesn’t anticipate doctors breaking the law or patient complaints.

“I don’t think this will come into play,” he said.

Florida officials have opened the gates at a Panhandle prison to MSNBC‘s “Lockup” film crew for two months, according to a Department of Corrections press release.

A team from 44 Blue, the production company in charge of the series about life behind bars, began filming this week at Santa Rosa Correctional Institution in Milton this month, the release said.

DOC Secretary Ed Buss worked with the production company in his previous post as head of Indiana prisons.

“I have no qualms about them coming into our prisons. I’m proud of our staff and how well our facilities are run, and I hope this will help Floridians understand the challenges we face with our inmate population, as well as the benefits prisons provide to their communities through our programs and re-entry efforts,” Buss said in the release.

The film crew will have “unprecedented access” to inmates and staff who want to be on film, the release said. The prison houses up to 1,614 adult males of all custody levels, including some with mental health issues, according to the release.

The series is expected to go on the air sometime next year.

Gov. Rick Scott and Republican Senate hopeful Adam Hasner are among the “host of conservative rock stars” on the agenda for this weekend’s third annual RedState Gathering in South Carolina.

Texas Gov. and all-but-declared 2012 GOP presidential hopeful Rick Perry is part of the weekend lineup, as are Palmetto State conservative stars Sen. Jim DeMint and Gov. Nikki Haley. RedState’s Erick Erickson, an early Hasner backer, is the one conferring rock-star status on the event’s speakers.

The event includes a Saturday night screening of the new Sarah Palin pic The Undefeated with an appearance by filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon.

Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll will lead a “Team Florida” trade mission to South Africa in the fall, part of a global effort by Gov. Rick Scott’s administration to lure companies to the Sunshine State.

Carroll, a former state representative from Jacksonville, and the public-private Enterprise Florida economic development agency are hoping to expand the state’s exports during the nine-day junket that kicks off on Nov. 4.

The items the state sells to South Africa include airplane parts, machines, earth-movers, “coin,” and water, according to an Enterprise Florida press release announcing the trade mission.

Scott has traveled to Panama and Canada on similar missions and is headed to Brazil in the fall.

Palm Beach County GOP Chairman Sid Dinerstein, who has never been known for understatement, was particularly effusive tonight in his praise of U.S. Rep. Allen West, R-Plantation.

“He may all by himself just have saved Western civilization,” Dinerstein said when he introduced West at a Republican Executive Committee meeting in West Palm Beach.

Dinerstein said West’s decision to go against many in the tea party and support a debt ceiling compromise assured its passage in the Republican-controlled House and spared the GOP any blame for a federal default or government shutdown.

“The first nationally recognized House figure that publicly said ‘I’m in’ was Congressman Allen West. And that was not just one vote, because Allen is the de facto leader of the freshman Republicans in Washington. And that allowed every one of them to go to their constituency and say ‘Guys, Allen West is in. This is a deal that we can live with.’ “

If the deal had failed in the House and any havoc had ensued, Dinerstein said, “it would have been on us. And ‘on us’ means the country would say ‘We don’t trust you to run the country in November 2012.’”

Former Boca Raton legislator and legal activist Barry Silver said Wednesday he is suing Gov. Rick Scott and the state Department of Education over legislation that revamps the way textbooks are chosen in Florida.

Silver, representing a nonprofit called Citizens for National Security, plans to file the suit Thursday in Palm Beach County Circuit Court. He contends legislation (SB 2120) that took effect July 1 changes the process the state uses to review school textbooks, narrowing a broad panel of experts who now can take a year to finalize selections to a handful of “state or national experts” expected to complete their task in a few months.

“At a time when religious fanatics pose a grave danger to our country, and when the separation of church and state is increasingly under assault, we should seek more oversight over textbooks, not less, in order to protect our children from religious indoctrination,” said Silver, an ordained rabbi, lawyer and ex-legislator. 

Silver is no stranger to the county courthouse or controversy.

He’s filed a lawsuit on behalf of a dog, organized a horn-honking parade to interupt a children’s deer hunt and, defending a hotdog vendor’s right to wear a thong, sent a bikini-clad woman deliver a subpoena to former Palm Beach County Commissioner Mary McCarty.

Last year, Silver also was ordered to pay $52,828 to lawyers who defended Jews for Jesus, an organization he sued for defamation.

One of the Capitol’s most potent business lobbies Wednesday was in search of a new leader.

Associated Industries of Florida President and CEO Barney Bishop resigned after seven years as the public face of the organization, effective at the end of the year. Bishop had been under rising pressure from AIF’s board of directors and his resignation precedes a scheduled meeting next week where his future with the organization was expected to be discussed.

“There are other things in life — other passions — that I wanted to pursue,” Bishop said. “Now is that time. I have always been a serial entrepreneur, having previously started two companies. I may start a third company or join another.”

Erika Alba, a Jacksonville lobbyist who chairs AIF’s board of directors, said, “Barney has accomplished great things at AIF by rebuilding our membership and enhancing our effectiveness in the halls of the Florida Capitol.”

Bishop, who earned more than $400,000 in the AIF post, drew some heat from board members in July, months after he caused a stir by declaring that the “number one job of our board (is) to defeat Bill Nelson.” 

AIF’s board is not publicly disclosed by the organization. But a member acknowledged that Bishop’s comment may have got him crossways with some influential corporate backers of Florida’s senior U.S. senator, a Democrat.

But AIF, whose membership is eclipsed by the Florida Chamber of Commerce as a business lobby, has always had outsized personalities at its helm. Preceding Bishop was Jon Shebel, a six-foot-six-inch, ex-Marine who led the organization for more than 30 years until his 2006 retirement.

AIF is also renowned for its annual pre-legislative session cocktail party, which draws thousands to the organization’s Georgian-styled headquarters a block from the Governor’s Mansion. But in an age of business consolidation, some lobbyists have questioned how long the Chamber and AIF, which have many overlapping members, issues and candidate endorsements, can endure as separate entities.

No successor to Bishop has been named.

 

 

 

 

 

Democratic congressional hopefuls Lois Frankel and Patrick Murphy — who are vying for the right to unseat U.S. Rep. Allen West, R-Plantation, in 2012 — have both blasted the bipartisan debt-ceiling compromise that Congress and President Obama approved last week.

On the afternoon of the House’s 269-161 vote for the debt deal, both Frankel and Murphy said they were still studying the legislation and hadn’t taken a position on it.

But Murphy on Saturday called the deal an “utter failure” and Frankel, in a fund-raising letter today, refers to the deal as “the same deal that is threatening to put our economy back into a recession.”

House Democrats split 95-95 on the debt deal, with much of party leadership joining West in voting for it. Yes votes included House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., U.S. Rep. and Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Boca Raton, and U.S. Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., who heads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Most Senate Democrats — including Florida Sen. Bill Nelson — supported the bill. Obama signed it Aug. 2.