America’s favorite swamp-gas-filled purgatory, the state of Florida, is now so corrupt that the FBI is taking out ads calling on citizens to report all of their dishonest politicians. Florida is the number one state in corruption, with over 800 politicians arrested between 1997 and 2007. Oh hey, isn’t the year 2000 somewhere between those years? Probably! The FBI is concerned that some of the state’s elected representatives think that federal stimulus dollars are free handouts for them and their families. But come on, those guys work hard, right? Just look at the important legislation they’re passing, trying to make sure those welfare queens aren’t running around using their free handouts to buy drugs. You are only allowed to buy rich people things with free government handouts.
Legislators trying to introduce two separate ethics bills have so far seen them die in committee this year.
From the Orlando Sentinel:
Few legislators wanted to crack down on public officials betraying the public trust. And the excuses were downright laughable.
State Sen. Gary Siplin, D-Orlando, argued that if we criminalize more political misdeeds, it might crowd the prisons.
Siplin, who was himself tried on felony charges that he robbed taxpayers of thousands of dollars, has a pretty good point. [Orlando Sentinel]
{ 159 comments }
It's all Jeb Bush's fault.
It goes back a lot farther than that. Perhaps not to Ponce de Leon, but at least to Hemingway.
It's the Cubans' fault. Hemingway included (he was a Cuban for a while, after all). Didn't Castro empty his prisons onto innertubes and send them our way a few years back? Clearly, we didn't catch all the ladrones and put them in jail. Some of 'em musta got elected to office in Fla.
Is rick scott a politician?
Politics is a sideline, when the Medicare fraud slows down.
Bingo.
Thank god they have Rick Scott in there now to straighten this mess out. Move along, nothing to see here.
Solution: Declare all state office buildings to be state prisons.
You're welcome, FLA.
It is a wrongem boyo.
PRIVATE prisons.
I knew that working together, our brilliant minds could come up with a solution that PAYS FOR ITSELF. Just like Tax Cuts.
(All you sub-100-p commenters, pay attention. This is how you reach the diamond elite.)
That's a splendid new smoking jacket you're wearing old chap. Saw you sporting at the club the other day. I say, another Armagnac to go with our Cohiba Piramides? That's the stuff, bully!
Where is that blast sub-100-p boy when you need him?
P-p-p-puhleeze, Sir, may I have another?
Trying to bring the funny, boss. Sorry I was a missin, boss. Can I shake a leg now, boss?
Speaking as one stuck on 90 something for months now (after the great P purge that has never been fully explained) thank you for this amazing insight. Tell me again about how fluffy the pillows are in your special cabin. And how Sara Benincasea gives you all special "turndown" service.
And how Sara Benincasea gives you all special "turndown" service.
I wish. You have to break 150 for that. Barb will get there first – I'm demanding video evidence.
I for one can't imagine why the BB has a sub-100 p-ness? you must have too many downfistin' trolls followin' you (accept the Jesus and you will be SAVED!)
Studiously making notes, and adding to your p-score, also. I should get my own owl, too.
Managed by corporations that just happen to have close personal links to the top leadership in the state government. Preferably including at least one or more children/spouses of legislators on the board of directors getting six figures to go to one vacation spot/board meeting a year.
Not that I have witnessed that sort of thing in and out of government agencies
I keep waiting for a hurricane to take care of that state for us.
Global Warming will get there first. By 2020, the florida peninsula will only be 3 1/2 miles wide. They'll be using gondolas to get around downtown Miami.
50years=equals beachfront property in Orlando.
You can't outsmart Disney. They think long term.
Excuse me, must be going: time to burn some fossil fuels, for Progress
If we outlaw political ethics, only outlaws will be ethical. Wait… what?
Legislators are public employees suckling on the sweet sweet breast of private enterprise I say cut their pensions, drug test them and don’t what ever you do let them assemble in groups bigger than three.
They'll just unionize themselves, occupy the capital building, trash it, and recall the citizenry of Florida.
wherever there are two or more gathering in MY name you can be sure to get fucked, and we all say AMEN!
Florida: America's semi-flaccid penis since 1845
But, remarkably, it'll still fuck the shit outta you. Re: Bush 2000.
States like Florida really challenge my motivation to combat global climate change.
My corner of Floridong is so dry that the weeds are dying. Today it's 102 degrees, with a dew point over 80.
On the positive side, a friend-in-law — an engineer who went to Georgia Tech! — was parroting Rush Limbaugh a few weeks ago about how water never leaves the planet, there's plenty of it, and we don't need to conserve or worry about it. A few days later, I heard from my wife that his well went dry. The Germans call this Schadentrockenfreude, I believe.
The whole state is on fire, also. too.
Yeah, I don't like to wish bad things to happen to people, but it does put a smile on my face when you see people like Rick Perry demanding Federal funds to help them out with wildfires. Or Bobby Jindal complaining that the Federal government didn't respond fast enough to stop a disaster that a private business caused.
Kudos on the eschewing of the alkohol, good sir.
Thank you, LHSD, but I'm not technically eschewing alcohol. I'm eschewing beer, and making do with stout and porter.
Oops.
'scuse.
AAAAAAAAAAGHHHH!!1` IHATETHISFUCKINGSTATEIWANTOUTNOWWWWWWW!
Be thankful for the fact that if you walk far enough in any of three directions, you'll find enough water to drown yourself in. Here in the desert southwest, I'd die of thirst just looking for a body of water. I guess the end result would be the same, the sweet release of death…
If I wanted the sweet release of death I'd move back to New Jersey.
I had planned to retire to Florida but they're just too many born again douche bags there for me. I plan on moving to Vegas, they may be douche bags but strippers and gambling sound much more tolerable.
Vegas is a true blue oasis in an otherwise crimson state. I'm in the weeds about 65 or so miles outside of Vegas, surrounded by asshats and exes. At least it's cheap to live here…
I think you have a country song title there. "Asshats and Exes"
Crap, we lost a good one in you, Beowoof. But you gotta know when to hold em' and when to fold em', you know?
I have less interest in going to Vegas since they've closed The Star Trek Experience exhibit. But strippers, yeah, ok, I'm with you there.
It's Vegas. Look hard enough you'll find a Star Trek themed strip club.
You can leave the state when you've finished your deep fried lunch and sweet tea, and not a second earlier, young lady.
Yes, sir.
/grudgingly takes bite of deep fried creamed corn nugget.
There you go again, FBI. Trying to punish people for their success.
funny how a state that looks like a dick would be run by dicks.
IRONICALLY funny!
"make sure those welfare queens aren’t running around using their free handouts to buy drugs…."
When welfare queens are outlawed, only outlaws will be welfare queens. With drugs. Or something.
Its just a way for the FBI guys to collect a little extra "protection" money from the politicians on the take, if ya know what I mean.
If we just build a "fence" along the northern border we can make Florida itself a prison. All problems solved!
That was the US's original idea, leaving it to the gators, Spanish and Seminoles, but then old Andy Jackson had to go and invade the damn place.
Good luck with that, FBI — and get ready for the Supreme Court to rule that investigating a governor who's as corrupt as Rick Scott is a form of entrapment.
So, you guys finally got a new picture of Bachmann I see.
Ha! I got it.
hahaha
Even if they can't clean up corruption, maybe they could appoint Carl Hiaasen as State Irony Comptroller. He'd definitely stay busy.
Rachel Maddow last week: Rick Scott, after bloviating about how horrible the federal stimulus and health care reform laws were and how FL would just say "no thanks" to that filthy fedrul money, submitted a budget with at least 60 line items funded by the stimulus package and by the health care reform law.
Have they arrested the question-mark-suit guy yet?
I think he lives in Kensington, MD. Really.
Dear Governor Scott: You want to keep scamming the state for Solantic, your
formerwife's corporation?You gotta cut us in on the action, know what we're sayin'?
-FBI
~
Say what you will, but he's a reticulate man.
Clean and reticulate.
No serpentine dialect.
I dunno, I have my doubts on that one
WIN!
Hey Florida. 2000 called. They want their presidential election back.
Too bad since Florida was a capital punishment state, they already hung Chad…
You are only allowed to buy rich people things with free government handouts.
I'm always amazed that so few people in America's Dinghus™ have a problem with Associated Industries of Florida throwing the legislators a big party at the beginning of each session to give them AIF's orders for that year. Big business runs this state and now we have a Governor who is going to make it more "business friendly" – i.e. lower wages, fewer workers' rights, and lower taxes on the rich.
And don't me started on South Florida, the nation's incubator of new and innovative criminal activity.
How could a state that elected a top level Medicare fraud operative as governor have a problem with corrupt officials?
Hard to believe this would happen under Rick Scott and Jeb Bush.
Their College Football based economy will carry them through these troubling times.
Jeeze, you'd think the Governor was mandating drug tests and had signed over his huge walk-in healthcare clinic, Solantic, that does drug testing, to his wife or something. I mean, DUH.
no.
Where is form Sec of State Kitty Harris when we need her? Only she can save the Sunshine State! Just look at her!
Wonkette Classic™ pic.
~
Time for a Wonkette Blingee Contest™
Nice hat.
Yep time to whip out the big guns.
Those guns have since been overshadowed, so to speak, by the McCain twins.
But I thought that the point of this Wonkarticle is that Florida needs LESS boobs?!?
Florida is a bunch of ugly buildings on a semi-tropical swamp with hurricanes blowing through a few times per year. Rednecks in the north, Mafia (Cuban and otherwise) in the south, all of them ready to steal from tourists, sell them drugs or lock them up.
Or all three.
My folks lived on Big Pine Key back in the 90's, when there were several instances of tourists up in Miami getting gunned down as collateral damage during some drug war battles. My old man told me that shortly thereafter, he started seeing bumperstickers around saying "Tourists! Come back!! We weren't shooting at you!!!
Once again we are shown another reason that we should re-enact the Civil War, but this time let the South stay seceded. Maybe if we pay them an exit bonus?
welfare queens aren’t running around using their free handouts to buy drugs
Does this mean Kitty Harris has skipped-out and is now living in the Cayman Islands or somewhere similar where it is more difficult to secure extradition?
Florida gives Banana Republics a bad name.
El Salvador but with more gunplay.
In Miami, more Russian mob, less MS13.
Equatorial Guinea but with less rule of law.
Guatemala bit with more impunity.
Myanmar with less transparency.
Sierra Leone but with more cannibalism.
This thread has been approved by The Florida Board Of Tourism.
That would be the shits!
Rat weiners?
With music by Elmo James?
I had to type with both hands, for once,in order to be quick enough to find the obvious linky-dink.
Florida needs someone to go Skink on their elected officials.
'Zactly. Years ago you find things like "Official", or at least official looking, Botswana Lawn Bowling Team linen shirts at Banana Republic. Then they hired MBAs with surgically removed senses of humor. Now they are boring and overpriced the 'official' biz skool formula for 'Murican success.
Neither was Dave Barry.
Is that the Playtex Pocket Gopher Bra?
Oh, this should have been in the post with K. Harris. I am slipping.
does rick scott always look like voldemort?
He actually looks just like another famed corrupt businessman turned corrupt politician, Lex Luthor.
Don't insult Lex Luthor like that – he's my favorite baddie!
Which one? All of them, Katie.
Rick Scott IS Voldermort.
is it too late to call the fbi about a stolen election?
they'd do a better job than the supreme court i think.
Meh. There is no problem so bad that the feebs can't make it worse.
If the FBI comes for him, I bet Rick Scott retreats to his ugly nueveau riche mansion, loads up on blow and comes out of his office machine guns ablazing.
Say hello to all my little lobbyist friends!!!
After the SCOTUS's decision in Citizens United, I thought bribery and corruption are protected by the First Amendment.
Don't go giving them ideas.
Breitbart now posting topless pictures of Weiner, from "alleged" recipient.
You pretty much expect to be screwed over in Florida…afterall, it is the Penis state.
I'm from New jersey and I am sure we can top Florida in corruption.
Come on guys! Beat Florida!!!!!
Hold on Joisey, on a per capita basis Rhode Island would mop the floor with both of you. Don't believe me? Just call up Buddy Cianci's radio show, he'll tell you a thing or two.
http://www.630wpro.com/sectional.asp?id=18073
Nope, sorry. Louisiana is and will always be the Land of Corruption. Hell, we've been experts at it before we were even a damn state.
Hey! I was very careful. I said Jersey could beat Florida. I never said nothing about Rhode Island. I know better. True story, you guys had a Chief Justice who came home one time and found a body in is freezer. It was put there as a joke by some of his former clients.
AS to Louisiana, I'm not impressed. If Edwards or the Longs were still around, you'd be in the running. But Pyush Jindal???? No.
Well granted, Jindal is too stupid to be corrupt (or at least he hasn't been caught… yet). But really, we're so used to corruption everydamnwhere that we're actually shocked when somebody gets testy about a piddly little thing like vote buying.
Many, many moons ago, Owls (who was hatched just over the border in Mass), was in a bar when a couple of hoodlums/friends came in and shouted, "Luccini's is going up in 15 minutes." We swilled down what was left of our cocktails, dashed to the car and joined the other 20 or so vehicles parked across the street from the doomed restaurant and sure enough, whoosh, up she went. When the cops and firemen (who, by the way, were sold copies of the firefighters exam before taking it) showed up, all they had left to do was break up the belligerents.
We had a phrase for that sort of thing: Italian lightning.
Ok, with that Palin-sized caveat, the Rhodies will put down there cudgels. Another true story: back in the 70s, the FBI launched Operation Diogenes after they received credible reports that there was a high-ranking state official who was clean.
Well that's what my friend's cousin whose former brother-in-law was a statie said. I think. Or maybe I just thought that up on that last peyote trip.
More than one. See also: Barry, Dave; Dorsey, Tim; Hiasson, Carl.
I'm hoping to God I get into a medical school outside of Florida so I can leave this state forever.
Oh, and buttsecks.
OK. I may be missing something here. But FL doesn't sound all that bad. At least, it's not a fucking theocracy like UT.
Just sayin'.
If that's the case, I just want to meet the guy who had a weed-whacker for a hand.
I saw him talking about the guy who couldn't get the pit bull off his arm and the guy cutting the dog's head off to get away.
The FBI should just put together a "GOP Trap" to track and capture corrupt politicians. Like say a bunch of marked bills in a little boy's underpants.
At least Memphis elects corrupt assholes that give money away instead of hoarding it for themselves.
If by "giving money away" you mean "funneling money to your political cronies and/or shady land developers" or "having to pay exorbitant amounts of child support for the 13 kids you've fathered out of wedlock," then yes, I agree totally.
Undoubtedly.
Hey, Feebs, just how hard is it to find a crooked politician in Florida? Do we get polished little junior investigator badges if we help? J. Edgar's rotting corpse is rolling over in his sequined evening gown.
Hiaasen is one of my favorite authors. He writes a colunm once or twice a month for the Miami Herald.
This goes here.
Horrible state is horrible.
Pffft! This is nothin' that couldn't be solved by more tax cuts.
And cutting unemployment bennies down to a good pat on the back for the lucky duckies…
ahem, when did Floridionions elect Skeletor??
We did that years ago in Warshington, twice even. Was a douche by the name of Slade Gorton, but we tossed his bonez out 'bout ten years back.
Rick Scott might make a great modern-day Faust, if he had a soul to sell.
I'm guessing you'd hear the wheezing and panting long before the feet, given the whole need to haul out a limo to move his larbutt 100 yards from the chopper to the baseball field last week.
Yeah, but the problem is that he makes them seem charming half (or more) of the time. Or at least human and therefore not worthy of being condemmed out of hand. It is like "The Wire" and Balmore – you know they are doing terrible things, but you don't hate them the way you should.
Love Hiaasen, by the way.
Ein Busch Gurke?
Make them triremes. It could be a Jobs Program as you chain 50 slaves, errr, unemployed persons, into the rowing positions.
Not equally, as I recall. For some reason my pee only went down 8 points, but I remember some of the real superstars here getting cut almost in half.
Chilling times, those, when all we hold dear seemed to hang in the balance, waiting for an ill wind to cast the first stone, knocking the bird in the hand out of the black pot and into the fire.
Count me among those whose fortunes were dashed that nightmarish day. Chilling times indeed, for sterling souls with their bootstraps on the good soil who are the backbone of a shining city in the meeeel where John Edwards pere cast his lot with seven year's of bad luck that came before the egg.
Hey, I'd turn in a corrupt Florida politician if the FBI would give me a coupon for healthcare…
It's like Craigslist, but it's printed on paper…
What's not being reported in this story is that the FBI also has placed an ad on Craig's List:
You: Knows how to show a man with a large bulge in his pocket where all the dirty places are.
Me: Will pay for your time and a hotel room – and has several well-dressed and well-equipped men who will join us.
"At least its warm in Florida"
It's not the heat, it's the stupidity….
I just saw the headlines, going over to TMP, now.
Tim Dorsey also has a clue, although he's fond of bad puns and serial killers. Still, that's what makes him authentic.
And why MUST they persist in wearing those dreadful inexpensive clothes?
I came across a site that had that fish picture as the main topic of conversation half a year or more ago, and almost every commenter thought it was real. Saying it was a "baboon skull in a fish skin" ruined their make believe world and pissed them off. Republicans, sheesh.
I miss the old days my dear – when there were standards.
A byword in local law enforcement circles in the 60's; still true today: three most overrated things in America, home cooking, home fucking and the FBI.
An investigation needs to be done on the internet stings being performed throughout the country because they are illegal and amount to nothing more than the creation of crime and entrapment. Manufacturing crime is a perfect way to cover-up corruption because the crime that is created appears to be legitimate as long as the media helps spread the lies of law enforcement.
There was an FBI investigation over the bribery of legislators to approve the construction of the “Blackwater River Correctional Facility”. The prison was built even though prison populations were expected to shrink, I have not heard anything else about the investigation, and police are performing internet stings like it’s the only thing they can do in an effort to increase felon statistics to cover-up the bribes and justify the construction of a new prison that we did not need. I have emailed the FBI to try to get into contact with someone that could hear my complaint that would help with the investigation but have been unsuccessful. I believe this to be because the FBI are also performing illegal stings so they know exactly what I am talking about but are covering it up too.
What are the citizens of this country supposed to do when the very people that are in charge of protecting us are actually using us to make the politicians rich who invest money into crime that does not exist so then they just create it? Visit the blogs at http://floridascandal.blogspot.com for supporting case law and other information proving these stings are illegal. Here is a link about the investigation: http://my.firedoglake.com/mt6112a/2011/06/23/fbi-….
next line: "At least we ain't in Texas"
Perhaps, though I'm sure the irony would be lost on both the asshats and the exes.
SILENCE, PEASANT!
Comments on this entry are closed.