Florida's 2010 Primary Race Heats Up

DOVER, Fla. -- Marco Rubio and Charlie Crist were beating each other up over the Republican Senate primary. That's all we heard for months. Now, Charlie is an Independent.

We still hear that Kendrick Meeks is running for the Senate and Alex Sink is running for Governor, both Democrats, with no campaign notices. We've also seen only a couple commercials from Bill McCollum for about two weeks.

We've noticed Jeff Greene running as a Democrat for the Senate whose commercials ran for about two weeks or so, and Rick Scott who's going against Bill McCollum for Governor, both are Republicans.

We can't hide from Rick Scott's commercials. They seem to compete with the regular programs for who gets the most airtime.

I researched the two wealthy, self-financed candidates, Rick Scott and Jeff Greene to see if their lives supported their statements. I also checked out Charlie Crist's current campaign to see if his statements or the statements of his opponent were closer to what he's doing now.

I looked into Rick Scott because of what I've heard about him and the accusations that he's been slinging at Bill McCollum. My research confirms what I've been hearing.

According to an article by Jim Meyers, Rick Scott and a partner founded a chain of medical facilities in 1987 and was fired from his own company ten years later. He wasn't just the CEO. He was the owner and founder. His hospitals provided abortion services and the morning after pill along with other medical services. And yet, he's stating in his commercials that he is very pro-life and that McCollum is guilty of this same thing when he was a lobbyist due to the firms he worked for apparently now support abortion.

In Maggie Mahar's Healthbeat Blog, they were shown to have perpetrated the hugest Medicare fraud in the history of our country to the tune of some 14 felony counts with fines of $1.7 billion.

According to Center for Media & Democracy's Source Watch, court documents and government statements
showed that the fraud was so far reaching that Scott had to have known about it. There was also evidence that he was actively involved in the criminal bribing of doctors for exclusive referrals to his facilities. This was done from the beginning of the company.

Joe Flower's 1995 article shows that Scott's company owned over 300 hospitals and related medical facilities, making his company this country's largest health care conglomerate and the largest private medical company in the world.

He tried to put the competition out of business and to be the only provider of medical services in any given area. He and his company put this into practice when they acquired the hospital in Destin, Florida.

Because it was functioning below capacity they closed it down, keeping the state license and certificate to prevent anyone from reopening or replacing it. Anyone who needed a hospital had to go off the island to one of their hospitals.

In theory, that drive might have been 20 minutes. But in Florida it could be over 40 minutes due to tourism or not at all because of stormy weather when access to our islands is often shut down during hurricane season.

This is the kind of decision making we often see from outsiders who don't understand Florida, because they don't understand the ecological effects on our community structure. Which is greatly impacted by those ecological considerations. Two examples would be the current oil spill and the sinkhole situation that happened this past winter due to over development in agricultural areas which overtaxed the resources.

The decision to close the Destin hospital was based on business considerations. But in Florida, decisions based just on business decisions usually adversely impact the quality of life in this state because so much is connected to the environment, for example closing the Destin Hospital could endanger the residents if the island must be closed due to hurricane or storm surge which isn't just an outside possibility.

The Panhandle sees more hurricane activity, per year, than the rest of the state usually does. we often see at least one or two island closings and evacuations per year, of a day or two in duration, at least, with an occasional year with no closings. But is that worth the risk?

According to John Frank, Scott's spokesman said that Scott would have voted against the stimulus and would not have used it to balance the state budget. Yet when asked by John Frank, Scott didn't answer the question and changed the subject.

This isn't the only subject that Scott is evasive about. When questioned about his time as CEO Columbia/HCA and his involvement with the fraud he repeatedly claims that he will claim responsibility for what was on his watch and that he couldn't possibly be aware of everything since it was just his job to oversee such a large corporation and to not be involved in the everyday operations.

This sounds like my brother who used to hit me when we were children. Whenever I'd protest being hit. His response was that it was his hand that hit me and that he didn't hit me.

Either Scott is evading telling the entire truth or he's not as competent as he would have us believe.

His ads say that he supports the Arizona law against illegal immigration. However, he's involved with MATT, Mexicans and Americans Trading Together. they are against the Arizona law. They're invested in a Latino social media company in Palm Beach.

He's also invested in Emida Technologies which facilitates transfers of money from migrant workers to Latin America, which is partnered with IPP which mainly helps illegal aliens transfer money out the United States to Mexico.

He's accused Bill McCollum of being against the Arizona Law. Which was true, until the law was changed to deal with possible profiling. McCollum now supports the law. Bill McCollum has also said that we don't need any new illegal immigration laws when we need to enforce the ones we already have.

That makes a lot of sense to me. Why spend more taxpayer money to make another law that will just be added to the other unenforced laws. Instead, why not use the money that would be wasted making another law, on enforcement instead.

If we already have the laws then we need to put the money toward enforcement instead of make-work in the State House making our lawmakers look good at the expense of the welfare of those who foot their bills.

Scott accused McCollum of supporting illegal immigrant mortgages through his lobbying. But according to the site PolitiFact.com's Truth-O-Meter that wasn't true while he was lobbying for his bosses in the mortgage business.

According to Scott's campaign manager, Susie Wiles, on his website, McCollum has been airing attack ads.
We haven't seen them. But what we have been seeing are Scott's attack ads about McCollum's unseen attack ads.

That's rather clever. Accuse someone of something that they're not doing and framing the conversation according to those accusations about something that actually isn't happening.

I also find it interesting that McCollum is availing himself of the legally allowed funds for his campaign, which Scott could also be doing, and Scott's campaign manager, Susie Wiles is accusing him of "feeding at the public trough" and "being two-faced" when the only reason that her boss isn't needing those same funds is because he's financing his campaign with funds gained largely through taxpayer's money gained through that Medicare fraud when he was CEO. What's the difference? Except, one is legal and the other was not.

I'm not saying that Bill McCollum is innocent of Rick Scott's accusations, because I don't know enough about him. However, I find it very interesting that Rick Scott appears to be accusing his opponent of everything that he is guilty of. It causes me to question his motives and his dependability.

The other self-financed candidate running for Senate is Jeff Greene. This isn't his first political campaign. In 1982 he unsuccessfully ran for a congressional seat in Los Angeles as a Republican. Now he's running as a Democrat.

Even though he comes from a family of Democrats, he became a Republican in 1982 until 1992 and didn't return to his roots as a Democrat until 2008 when he registered to vote in Palm Beach, not long after he moved there according to Beth Reinhard of The Miami Herald.

According to Greene's website, he and his family moved to Florida forty years ago with the implication that he didn't really leave Florida. And yet according to Wikipedia he was born in 1955 and moved to Florida with his family in 1970. Then he attended Johns Hopkins and Harvard Business School, which are not Florida schools.
He then moved to California until 2008, when he and his new wife moved to Florida.

In everything that I've seen, he's not clear about the fact that he just recently returned to being a Democrat. Just as in the case of how long he's been in Florida, he gives an implication of being a life-long Democrat with a brief Republican hiccup as well as being a life-long resident of Florida with a short hiatus to California.

There's nothing wrong with his living in California, nor being a Republican for a number of years. However, his lack of clarity on the issue causes me to wonder what his motives are.

According to Greene's campaign website his primary opponent, Kendrick Meeks is guilty of hosting "homeownership fairs" for some of the major lenders in the subprime mortgage mess and of receiving campaign funds from the same sources.

In Lisa Gartner 's "Analyzing Jeff Greene's New Campaign Videos", he made his millions by investing against the housing market, betting that home owners would lose their homes, and is reputed as having perpetrated fraud against senior citizens.

I just don't understand why he's accusing Meeks of this involvement when it seems to me that he's guilty of the same thing, but just from a different angle. And it also seems to me that he more greatly benefited from that and is using that gain to define Meeks with what he should also be defined by.

He also ended up in court and having a judgment against him to the tune of $616,000 according to Alex Pappas in his article, "Ron Howard wouldn't 'relish the idea' of Jeff Greene in the Senate"

According to Ron Howard, and court records, that Greene defrauded Howard through damage of a rental that Howard was living in, in the 90's. He had to take our, candidate for the Senate, to court over the damage that was sustained in the home that he was renting from Greene.

All of these issues bring up questions about taking responsibility for one's actions and about dependability.

For my last bit of research, I caught up on what Crist has been doing since he left the Republican party.

According to and article by Allysia Finley, he went from supporting the Cuban embargo to opening up family travel to Cuba, supports Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court, has come out against off-shore drilling, has become supportive of unions and removed pro-life statements from his website.

Most of these new positions are exactly that, new. They are opposite of what he claimed that he stood for before, when he was running as a Republican.

Allysia Finley also writes that Democrats are supporting Crist, to defeat Marco Rubio, since they think that Crist would be more able to defeat Rubio in November than Greene or Meeks.

In another article by Steve Bousquet, Crist has gone from calling himself a "Jeb Bush Republican" to hobnobbing with union activists, Democrats and liberal attorneys, who are helping to fund his campaign.

It looks like Charlie Crist is doing exactly what he had been accused of doing which is flipping and flopping and possibly showing that perhaps he may have been a RINO when he was calling himself a conservative Republican. So, I wonder if we'll ever find out who the real Charlie Crist is.

I haven't written about Bill McCollum because I haven't found enough to write about him as yet. But when I do find some things that are written about him that don't come from his competitor I will write about it, the same for Kendrick Meeks and Alex Sink.

Even though I am getting campaign information from Marco Rubio, we're not seeing any commercials or hearing much about him since his major competitor is no longer competing against him right now.

The only reason we're hearing so much about Crist is because he is our governor and because he is trying to re-frame the conversation away from being a Republican to being an Independent with leanings toward Democrat.

I plan to keep listening and watching and learning what's really going on, so I can make the best decisions when it comes time to vote in the primary and in November.

All I can say, is that Florida's elections are never dull and there are definite choices. The polls may support one candidate over another and could prove true. But they could switch directions. This is Florida and we may see when the counting is done.

Sources:

Jim Meyers, 24 June 2010, Fla.'s Rick Scott Invested in Firm With Ties to Illegal Aliens,
http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/RickScott-invested-illegalaliens-McCollum/2010/06/24/id/362969

Allysia Finley, Anybody but Rubio?, June 19, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704122904575314822027355644.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines

Steve Bousquet, Trial lawyers, unions, loyal Democrats helping fund Crist in U.S. Senate race, June 24, 2010,
http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/legislature/trial-lawyers-union-and-democratic-loyalists-are-siding-with-crist-in-us/1104546

Maggie Mahar, HCA/ Columbia's Rick Scott - the Next Governor of Florida?, May 26, 2010,
http://www.healthbeatblog.com/2010/05/hca-columbias-rick-scott-the-next-governor-of-florida.html?cid=6a00d8341d843653ef0133eee6a5ca970b

Center for Media & Democracy, Rick Scott, Fraud controversy, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Rick_Scott

Joe Flower, Rick Scott and the Columbia/HCA Healthcare System: Icon of Greed or
Prophet of True Reform?, 1995, http://www.well.com/user/bbear/columbia.html

John Frank, Has Rick Scott been 'very clear' on stimulus position?, June 24, 2010,
http://blogs.tampabay.com/buzz/bill_mccollum/

Kimberly Miller, Monday Meeting with Jeff Greene, founder of Florida Sunshine Investments,
April 23, 2010, http://www.palmbeachpost.com/money/monday-meeting-with-jeff-greene-founder-of-florida-610314.html

Lisa Gartner, Analyzing Jeff Greene's New Campaign Videos, May. 18 2010,
http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/juice/2010/05/jeff_greene_campaign_senate_videos.php

George Bennett, Will Palm Beach billionaire Jeff Greene shake up Senate race even more?,
April 30, 2010, http://www.postonpolitics.com/2010/04/will-palm-beach-billionaire-jeff-greene-shake-up-senate-race-even-more/

George Bennett, Remembering billionaire Dem Greene's 1982 California GOP foray,
May 3, 2010, http://www.postonpolitics.com/tag/jeff-greene/

Susie Wiles, What the Rasmussen and Quinnipac Polls Mean, June 9, 2010,
http://www.rickscottforflorida.com/home/2010/06/09/what-the-rasmussen-and-quinnipac-polls-mean/,

Susie Wiles, Rick Scott for Governor: "Bailout Bill" McCollum Uses Tax Dollars
To Fund His Failing Campaign, June 22, 2010, http://capitalsoup.com/tag/rick-scott/

Beth Reinhard, In an earlier life, Democrat Jeff Greene ran as a Republican, June 18, 2010
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/06/18/1687091/in-an-earlier-life-democrat-jeff.html

Jeff Greene Campaign: Rep. Kendrick Meek Encouraged Floridians to Take Risky Unregulated Subprime,
June 2010, http://www.jeffgreene.com/news/item/2010-06-jeff-greene-campaign-rep-kendrick-meek-encouraged-flo

Jeff Greene, Why I'm Running, http://www.jeffgreene.com/why-im-running

Alex Pappas, June 25, 2010, Ron Howard wouldn't 'relish the idea' of Jeff Greene in the Senate,
http://dailycaller.com/2010/06/25/ron-howard-wouldn%E2%80%99t-relish-the-idea-of-jeff-greene-in-the-senate/

Wikipedia, Jeff Greene, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Greene