In case your attention has been diverted for the last month or so, I feel duty-bound to point out that there is a general election in Miami-Dade County scheduled for November 5.
What? You didn’t know that? Well, consider yourself absolved if you read the rest of this post—especially those of you who live in the cities of Miami, Miami Beach, Hialeah, or Homestead, where municipal offices are at stake.
It’s too late to register to vote for this election, but if you’re already registered, you can request an absentee ballot as late as October 30. Early voting will continue until November 3. For other information, or to get a sample ballot, go to the county’s website here.
Jackson Bond Issue: For most of us in Miami-Dade, there is only one thing to vote on: Whether or not to approve an $830 million bond issue to fund repairs, upgrades, and new equipment for the public Jackson Memorial Hospital system. Hospital administrators say that now that Jackson is back on a sounder financial footing the funds are needed to make its services and facilities competitive with other hospitals in the area. They note, correctly, that Jackson is the primary provider of hospital care for the county’s uninsured residents (about 1 out of every 4) as well as Medicaid recipients.
So, should you vote YES? I’m still on the fence on this one. The bond issue has the endorsement of the Miami Herald. I generally support bonds that improve or maintain essential public institutions—particularly those that benefit the less-well-off members of the community, as Jackson clearly does.
However, others whose opinions I respect are urging a NO vote. Eye on Miami, who does a better job than just about anyone of keeping an eye on the money sloshing around this town, makes an argument for just saying no. I asked my neighbor, who just retired from Jackson’s medical staff, what he thought, and he said he might be inclined to vote no because he thought the system had over-expanded and needed to consolidate its operations.
I’m leaning toward voting yes anyway.
City of Miami. Up for vote are the mayor and two council positions: Districts 3 and 5.
On the council positions, the Herald has endorsed Frank Carrollo for District 3 and Jacqui Colyer for District 5.
There’s no real race for mayor since city Commissioner Francis Suarez dropped out as a candidate, leaving incumbent Tomas Regalado a virtual shoo-in. Three other candidates have filed for the office but have raised almost no money for a campaign.
The interesting thing is that only a few months ago, Suarez (son of former Miami mayor Xavier Suarez) had the backing of Miami-Dade mayor Carlos Gimenez and most of the city’s establishment and had raised more money than Regalado. Then, suddenly, in late August he announced that he was no longer running, citing his wife’s long-awaited pregnancy as the reason. However, the announcement also closely followed two of his campaign officers pleading no contest to absentee ballot fraud—the besetting sin of Miami-Dade politics.
For Regalado, this was a gift from heaven. The mayor has had his own problems since taking over in 2009, including an effort in 2011 by the police and firefighters union to recall him. The Miami New Times published an article listing 10 reasons why Regalado should be recalled. Regalado defended his positions (for example in this TV interview), and ultimately nothing came of it. But jeez, it’s hard to tell the bad guys from the good guys in Miami!
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter because Regalado will stay on as mayor.
The ballot also includes a proposal to revamp the Coconut Grove waterfront, which needs voter approval to proceed.
City of Miami Beach: At stake are the mayor and three council members, as well as several propositions including one adding a non-discrimination paragraph to the city’s charter. You can find a sample ballot as well as other voting information at the city’s website here.
For mayor, the Herald has endorsed Michael Gongora, who is currently the Group 3 commissioner. Gongora, who is openly gay, has also received the endorsement of the gay rights groups Equality Florida, which has also endorsed Sherry Roberts, Jorge Esposito, and Matti Herrera Bower for the three council seats. SAVE Dade, another gay rights group, has made a similar endorsement. Phillip Levine, however, claims Bill Clinton’s endorsement as well as that of Sen. Bill Nelson. Here’s Miami Beach blogger Random Pixels on Levine. Political Cortadito likes Steve Berke. The Miami New Times has a pithy rundown on the candidates here. Looks hard to choose, really.
City of Hialeah: Hialeah is electing the mayor and three council members. The city’s election information website is here. There is a link on the page to get a sample ballot, but when I clicked on it, I just got the Notice of Election, not a sample ballot.
Venturing into the murky waters of Hialeah politics is not for novices like me. If you’re interested, check out the blog Political Cortadito, e.g., this post here. So far, I haven’t seen an endorsement from the Herald for anyone for the mayor’s race, but here’s one from the Examiner for Juan Santana, who looks like a very long shot.
City of Homestead: Homestead is electing a mayor, vice mayor, and one councilmember. For information and a sample ballot, go to the city’s election website here.
The incumbent mayor, Steve Bateman, was arrested in August and charged with illegal compensation.
The Homestead election comes with its very own absentee ballot fraud scandal involving campaign workers for mayoral candidate Mark Bell. Bell is the husband of Miami-Dade commissioner Lynda Bell, who is perhaps the most anti-progressive, anti-gay, anti-environment official in the county. Lynda Bell seems never to have met a developer she didn’t like, and led the opposition to a proposed amendment that would have added gender identity to the county’s existing anti-discrimination ordinance. In September, a recall effort was started against her, which has been joined by SAVE Dade, a gay rights organization.
Voting for Mark Bell would effectively make Lynda Bell mayor of Homestead as well as county commissioner. His opponent, Jeff Porter, looks like much the better candidate. Update: Eye on Miami endorses Porter; see his comments here.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio was one of a minority of 18 US senators–all Republicans–to vote against the Reid-McConnell deal to re-open the US government and avoid default on the country’s debt. He was joined in that vote by fellow Teabaggers Rand Paul and, of course, Ted Cruz, whose demagoguery created this whole sorry mess.
Rubio has definitively cast his lot with the radical Tea Party wing of the Republican party whose demented (and, in my opinion, racist) hatred of President Obama has led them to the point of being willing to shut down the US government and harm the creditworthiness of this country. Even with this episode now over, they have done great damage and wasted billions of tax dollars for absolutely no good reason. And they will probably try to do it again when this stopgap deal expires.
By the way, the two South Florida Republican representatives in the House of Representatives—Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart—both voted in favor of the Reid-McConnell compromise. Apparently, they decided that a “No” vote would not go over well in a part of the state that delivered Florida’s electoral votes for President Obama twice. However, ten of their GOP colleagues from Florida did vote NO (one didn’t vote) like the majority of the Republican representatives in the House, showing that they would rather plunge the country into financial chaos than…wait, what was it they wanted? Hard to tell, because it kept changing from minute to minute.
Rubio is an embarrassment, and the Democratic party should start now to defeat him for re-election in 2016.
A new poll indicates that Republican Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen trails in a hypothetical contest with a generic Democrat if the election were held now. This is a truly startling result, and suggests that public revulsion over the GOPs tactics may really be hitting home, since her re-election in Florida District 27 in Miami-Dade was generally considered a no-brainer (pardon the pun).
In 2012, Ros-Lehtinen ran virtually unopposed for re-election after the Democrats failed to come up with a real candidate. Yes, there technically was someone running as a Democrat—one Manny Yevancey—who somehow got on the ballot and then was never seen again. There was no information available about the elusive Mr. Yevancey, who might as well have been plucked from a Carl Hiaasen novel. There was no website and no campaign—it really looked like a joke. And of course, Ros-Lehtinen won in a walk.
The new poll was run by Public Policy Polling and sponsored by the progressive organization Move On as one of several done in selected districts throughout the country. See the full results here. (The poll was done October 8-10 among 620 respondents in the district.)
Basically, the poll gives an unnamed “Democratic Opponent” 47 percent over Ros-Lehtinen’s 45 percent if the election were held now. Even more interesting, after respondents were informed that Ros-Lehtinen supported the shutdown, the margin grew significantly: 53 percent for the “Democratic Opponent” to 42 percent for the incumbent congresswoman.
I’m no expert on polling methodology, but even considering that the survey was commissioned by a Democrat-aligned group, this is eye-popping. The Miami New Times, where I first saw this, noted several caveats about the poll—perhaps rightly. Even so, the Miami-Dade Democratic committee should be sitting up and taking notice and looking at potential candidates who might run a real campaign.
Ros-Lehtinen is energetic and likable. She comes across as a reasonable, thinking person—something quite rare among Republican politicians these days. She has been willing to break party taboos on a few issues such as gay rights (she has a transgender child).
But when push comes to shove, she almost always votes the Republican party line, which now means the Tea Party line. On the government shutdown and impending debt ceiling limit, she has shown no inclination to deviate from the absolutist position of the GOP extremists. Basically, she gives a nice false face to her party’s destructive intransigence.
It’s time to replace her. If the Democrats get off their asses and find a decent candidate, it might actually happen.
I had been wondering what had happened to Marco Rubio since he helped Texas Senator Ted Cruz throw gasoline on the Republican Party’s fast-shrinking “big tent” and set it ablaze. I know, he really just wanted to blow up the US government and maybe the entire economy as well, but the biggest casualty of this disastrous game now is pretty clearly the GOP itself.
The latest polls released on October 10 shook political Washington like an earthquake, showing public blame for the government shutdown and threatened financial catastrophe landing squarely where it belongs—on the Republican party—and popular support for the GOP at a historic low. Suddenly, John Boehner and Eric Cantor stopped making hypocritical claims about how it was all really President Obama’s fault and seemed to realize that they were playing a bad hand that Ted Cruz and his groupies like Rubio had dealt them.
Through it all, the bad boys who set the blaze were oddly absent from the scene. Rubio, in particular, has been AWOL and appeared to be avoiding the media, which seemed to have forgotten about his role in creating this ridiculous crisis. Media attention focused on the adverse impact of the Republicans’ self-immolation on Cruz’s political ambitions, and on the abrupt plunge in support for Cruz’s other acolyte, Senator Mike Lee, in his home state of Utah (!), where it turns out the federal government is by far the largest employer.
I thought maybe Rubio had become the artful dodger and—realizing this was not a good time to be seen carrying around explosives–had decided to try to put some distance between himself and Cruz’s Tea Party Crew. But it appears that is not the case.
Today, Marco Rubio is a featured speaker at the Values Voter Summit as it convenes in Washington, DC. The line-up of speakers is a virtual Who’s Who of the Tea Party luminaries who engineered the sorry spectacle we have been witnessing: Ted Cruz, Ed Meese, Jim DeMint, Rand Paul, Glenn Beck, Michelle Bachmann, Louie Gohmert, even crazy Allen West—the list goes on and on. So it would appear that Marco Rubio has indeed gone all in with the gang most responsible for creating this unspeakable mess.
In case you’re not familiar with the Values Voter Summit, it was developed as a political vehicle for ultra-conservative Christian organizations like the Family Research Council to influence the political arena and the Republican Party in particular. It has become a rival forum to the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) after the latter in 2011 included the gay Republican group GOProud and the anti-gay religious groups walked out. Now it is a virtual Tea Party convention. This year’s speaker roster includes Brian Brown, President of the National Organization for Marriage, who has been advising Vladimir Putin and the Russian parliament on anti-gay legislation in Russia.
Maybe it’s just me, but I think this could be a window of real vulnerability for Marco Rubio. If I were on the Florida Democratic Committee, I would be commissioning TV and print ads holding Rubio accountable for his role in creating the shutdown crisis and highlighting the extremist views of the political company he’s keeping, which indeed appear identical to Rubio’s own views. I know it’s a long time until he’s up for re-election and voters have poor memories, but now is the time to brand him with the responsibility for his actions when the public is receptive to that message.
I’ll even draft the bumper sticker: SHUT DOWN MARCO RUBIO! I’d gladly put one on my car!
UPDATE POSTSCRIPT:
The Values Voter Summit held its presidential straw poll as usual, and unsurprisingly Ted Cruz blew away the field with 42 percent of the votes. Marco Rubio finished far back in the field at number five, with only 5 percent of the votes. Looks he will need to start hustling just to keep his gig as Cruz’s warm-up act. Must be tough to be thrown over for the likes of Mike Lee.
More than any other Florida politician, Senator Marco Rubio has made himself the face of opposition to the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare—yes, they are the same thing). Alas for him, he had to do this by playing second fiddle in Texas senator Ted Cruz’s grandstanding not-exactly-filibuster just before the Republicans shut down the federal government.
There was Rubio playing the friendly face-licking Labrador to Cruz’s droopy-eyed alpha-dog bloodhound—a mere sidekick to the firebrand who has replaced him as the GOP’s Rising Star and Great Latino Hope. The irony!
No less an irony was the fact that the two states they represent—Texas and Florida—have the highest percentage of residents without health insurance in the country, and the Latino demographic they pretend to represent are the least covered of all.
It seems only yesterday that Rubio was being touted as a possible running mate for Mitt Romney, and—after Romney went down hard in November—was featured on the cover of Time as the GOP’s “savior” and likely next presidential candidate.
Rubio’s meteoric rise has been based on two qualities. Foremost is his ineffable cuteness. He has that sweet, clean-cut, well-scrubbed look of a young Mormon missionary who shows up at your door to try to persuade you to believe incredible things. (In fact, he was—briefly—a Mormon.)
Equally important, he has a soothing Reaganesque knack for convincing the very people his policies would screw over that they really should support him. You know—social security was fine for our deserving parents, but we really shouldn’t expect to have anything like that. He doesn’t yell, he lulls, and if you don’t pay attention to the actual words he’s saying, it all sounds kind of reasonable, especially coming out of that adorable face.
Rubio adopted all the correct views to make himself the darling of Florida’s Republican right-wing and caught the 2010 Tea Party wave that swept him into the Senate. But he really had no particular accomplishments to show except for getting elected. In an effort to remedy that—and to try to address the GOP’s dismal standing with Latino voters (other than Cuban-Americans)—Rubio became one of the Gang of Eight senators from both parties tasked with drafting a comprehensive immigration reform bill. He even came around to backing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and he quickly emerged as the Republican spokesman for the bill—upstaging senior GOP senators like John McCain.
Lo and behold, in June the bill was approved by the full Senate, though Rubio’s new BFF Ted Cruz voted against it (as did the other insurgent Republican princeling, Rand Paul). Once it was sent to the House, however, the Republican caucus—dominated by the Tea Party Taliban—hated the legislation, and it has languished ever since. Rubio’s star began to wane with the party’s right wing as Cruz’s rose in the heavens, and Rubio quietly moved to the background on immigration reform. Which brings us to his role in Cruz’s sorta-kinda-filibuster.
To be fair, Rubio has always opposed the ACA, but it’s hard to see his eagerness to act as Cruz’s wingman as anything other than an attempt to re-ingratiate himself with the Tea Party that put him in office in the first place.
Rubio’s polling numbers are now in negative territory—a big fall since a year ago when he was riding high. It’s certainly too soon to count him out, however. He has another three years of his senate term—plenty of time to decide whether he’ll run for reelection or another office. It’s also hard to predict how his recent wriggling will play out with voters, and whether popular blame for the shutdown—which seems to be falling heaviest on Republicans (and rightly so)—will fall on Rubio as well. In 2011, he voted against raising the debt ceiling. If the Republicans do precipitate a catastrophic fiscal crisis by failing to raise the debt ceiling this month, Rubio has clearly put himself among the crowd that will have caused the disaster.
Amidst all the sound and fury surrounding President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare), I think it’s worth pointing out that health insurance coverage in South Florida (and the state in general) is particularly bad compared to other parts of the country.
Nationally, about 15 percent of Americans are not covered by health insurance. That percentage had already declined slightly with the advent of the ACA’s inclusion of adult children under parents’ policies and other provisions before the roll-out of the health insurance exchanges on October 1.
For Florida as a whole, about 20 percent of the population—1 out of every 5 inhabitants—is uninsured. For South Florida, the numbers are much higher, reaching above 30 percent in some areas.
A study published in the National Journal analyzed health coverage by congressional district. The data for South Florida districts is shown in the graphic above. In two of the local districts (20 and 24– represented respectively by Democrats Alcee Hastings and Frederica Wilson) the numbers of uninsured top 30 percent. Both districts have large populations of minorities and immigrants, who typically have difficulty obtaining health insurance.
But three other local districts have more than 1 in 4 people uninsured: District 25 represented by Republican Mario Diaz-Balart (29.7 percent); District 27 represented by Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (27.7 percent); and District 26 represented by Democrat Joe Garcia (26.9 percent). ALL of the local districts have numbers of uninsured residents that are higher than the national average.
All of this makes it even harder to understand why South Florida’s Republican representatives continue to rant against the Affordable Care Act and have consistently voted with their party’s unceasing efforts to derail, defund, or repeal this legislation.
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is often considered one of the more sensible (or at least, non-crazy) Republicans in the House, but she has supported Tea Party efforts to sink the ACA at every step and has not made a peep in opposition to Ted Cruz’s strategy of holding the US government hostage to defunding Obamacare.
Mario Diaz-Balart has a similar record and even co-sponsored the so-called “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act”.
One can only assume that they’re fine with nearly a third of their constituents lacking health insurance. Neither they, nor anyone else in their party, have proposed an alternative to Obamacare. They just want to destroy the legislation that promises to provide coverage to the uninsured.
If anything, the record of their Republican colleagues who run the state government is even worse. Florida is, of course, one of the states that opted to refuse federal money to expand Medicaid coverage for the poorest, even though federal funds would cover 100 percent of the cost for the first three years, and 90 percent thereafter.
Florida did not create its own insurance exchanges for the ACA, leaving that to the federal government. Moreover, Governor Rick Scott and his Republican colleagues have done everything possible to even prevent the dissemination of information about the ACA to Floridians who will potentially benefit from it. As the Miami Herald has pointed out, their record on this is nothing short of shameful.
It’s worth remembering that Rick Scott used to be CEO of a Texas-based private for-profit healthcare company called Columbia/HCA which in 1997 was brought up on federal charges of massive Medicare fraud and eventually admitted to 14 felonies. Since very narrowly being elected governor, he has consistently attempted to undermine the ACA, while trying to privatize Medicaid and failing to disclose his multimillion dollar investment (technically in his wife’s name) in a medical service company called Solantic which was founded by him and his wife. Is it any wonder that he opposes Obamacare?
Maybe our Republican politicians are perfectly comfortable with a large proportion of our neighbors lacking access to affordable health care, but I think it’s a disgrace.
By the way, if you’re wondering which state has the lowest number of uninsured residents, it’s Massachusetts. That’s where the state government in 2006 under the governorship of one Mitt Romney instituted healthcare reform that became the model on which the ACA was based. FYI, the percentage of uninsured residents in Massachusetts is less than 5 percent.
To me, that’s pretty good proof that Obamacare will work—especially if the Republicans will stop trying to destroy the federal government to prevent that from happening.
I have had to take a lengthy hiatus to deal with some pressing family issues which just didn’t leave enough time to do any worthwhile blogging. Thankfully, those are resolved for now, so I intend to resume posting as I feel inspired. Hope those who have visited this site will find something interesting, or at least provocative.
I’m feeling good about tonight. Obama won, and better yet, it looks like he won Florida, thanks to the voters of South Florida. Evidently you can’t lie and buy your way into the White House. Not yet, anyway.
And we helped! (At least a tiny bit.)
Also it looks like the most noxious of the proposed constitutional amendments lost as well.
The three supreme court judges get to stay.
And David Rivera is toast!
The US Senate remains Democratic, and Bill Nelson won.
Elsewhere, gay rights won in Maryland and Maine on a popular vote! Tammy Baldwin will be a senator from Wisconsin (and still an out lesbian!).
Nate Silver called it almost exactly right.
And Romney is still being a prick. It’s almost 1:00 a.m. EST, and he still hasn’t conceded. [Okay, 1:00 a.m., and Romney just conceded. Not a very gracious speech, but it’s something.]
I knew I would have to be away from home on election day, so I voted absentee three weeks ago. I had never voted absentee before and had misgivings about doing that because of the rampant fraud involving absentee ballots in South Florida and because I have always liked the experience of actually going to the polls on election day.
But after seeing the stories on television and the Internet about the outrageously long lines at the early voting sites in Miami and elsewhere, I have to say—a little guiltily, perhaps—that I’m glad I took the absentee option. Honestly, I don’t know if I would have the sitzfleisch to wait in line for four or five or nine (!) hours in order to vote.
Perhaps the situation tomorrow will be a little better since there will be many more polling stations open, but I fear that it will be just as bad on election day. Ever since I saw what the ballot looked like—all ten pages in Miami-Dade—it seemed obvious that we were in for yet another FUBAR Florida election. I had done considerable homework to figure out what the proposed constitutional amendments and local questions and other semi-obscure issues really meant, and it still took me upwards of 20-25 minutes to make sure that I had completed the ballot as I intended. I can only imagine how long a naïve voter might ponder over this monstrous ballot if presented with it for the first time.
I can’t help thinking that this is by design. First, sneak a dozen politically loaded (and mostly meritless) amendments (often obscurely or misleadingly worded—my “favorite” is the “Religious Freedom” amendment) past voters who very likely have no idea what they’re actually voting on and therefore would be inclined to check the “Yes” oval. Second, make the very act of voting so onerous that people would be tempted just to say “Fuck it” and go home or back to work without casting a ballot. Tedium may be the ultimate form of voter suppression.
I wish I thought that the shameless office holders who created this situation would suffer from public outrage for making the most basic civic duty an exercise in tenacity and boredom. But that probably won’t happen.
Instead, I just hope that voters will stick it out and make simply voting an act of defiance of the cynicism and mendacity of the people who are now running this state.
Yeah, I know…easy for me to say, since I’m not standing in line.
There is no vote for US Representative from Florida District 24 in the November election, because that was determined in the August primary. The Republican party did not put up a candidate, so the primary became a “universal primary” which meant that members of both parties could vote for the Democratic candidates, and incumbent Frederica Wilson won—overwhelmingly—over Rudolph Moise (also running as a Democrat), thereby determining the outcome.
The redrawn District 24—which, full disclosure, is my district—is unusual in South Florida because it is majority black and therefore presumptively a “safe” Democratic seat. It runs from downtown Miami through the historic black neighborhoods of Overtown, Liberty City, and Brownsville through Opa-Locka and Little Haiti and includes North Miami, North Miami Beach, and Miami Gardens (all of which also have large numbers of Haitian-Americans) into far southern Broward County as far as Miramar. About 55 percent of the voting age population is black. Another 30 percent are Hispanic (only about one-fourth of them Cuban), Only about one-eighth of the residents are Anglo whites—mostly in the neighborhoods east of Biscayne Boulevard like Morningside and Belle Meade and in largely white municipalities like Miami Shores and Biscayne Park.
Frederica Wilson gained the seat in 2010 when Kendrick Meek resigned to run for the Senate against Marco Rubio. As a freshman representative, she lacks a substantial legislative record and is probably best known for her flamboyant hat collection, but she has been a reliable supporter of President Obama and his policies, and she gained some prominence by demanding a fuller investigation of the Trayvon Martin killing this past spring. I think she deserved a second term, and almost certainly I would have voted for her if she had had an opponent in the general election.
There is, in the redistricting business, something called “packing”, where districts are drawn in order to put as many of a given ethnic or political group as possible into the same district. The positive effect is that it all but guarantees that that group will have some representation in Congress. The negative effect is that it tends to minimize the influence of the same group in surrounding districts, and therefore is sometimes a subject of controversy. (The opposite—and more nefarious—practice is called “cracking” and consists of splitting a coherent community among several districts in order to dilute its influence.) I suppose District 24 could be viewed as an example of packing, but all things considered, I think the way the district is drawn is defensible.
However, as happy as I am that my own district will be sending a Democrat to Congress, in a larger sense it does concern me that out of the five congressional districts that include parts of Miami-Dade County, three of them (24, 25, and 27) are essentially or actually uncontested in the general election. That means that most of the residents of Miami-Dade really have no choice over who represents them in Congress. Maybe people are okay with that, but it just doesn’t seem very healthy for democracy.
TrumpWorld for Beginners 