Schoolhouse doors, and now voting booths

Florida Gov. Rick Scott's grandstanding defiance of a Department of Justice demand that he end his voter purge recalls another dark moment in  the nation's history.  It happened on June 11, 1963. when another southern governor, George Wallace, chose to "stand his ground' at the door of the University of Alabama's Foster Auditorium to block two black students from entering to enroll. (History has recorded it as the notorious "stand in the schoolhouse door") This, after all,  was the guy who had promised  at his inauguration "segregation now, segregation  tomorrow, segregation forever."

Inasmuch as Wallace figured that he had the majority of voters on his side, it didn't take as much courage as, say, that of the man who stood in the path of tanks in Tianamen Square to block their passage to an uprising. (He was pulled away from probable death by onlookers.)

In Wallace's case, he finally stepped aside so that the students could enter after he was confronted by federal marshals.  But he managed to create his self-absorbed moment of his choosing.  He even ran for president four times.

Today, Wallace isn't around to look at the faces of the University of Alabama's basketball coach and players.  They would have been barred  before the Feds moved  in a half-century ago.    

Like Wallace, Rick' Scott's 15 minutes of defiance will eventually be exhausted for all but the historians. His elections supervisors in all 67 counties have now  pulled out of the game.  Just one more example of how Tea Party Republicans are creating havoc wherever they go.  For Scott, it all depends on how he wants to be remembered when his politician days are behind him.  

Down among the not so sheltering palms

ON THIS SPECIAL DAY that we set aside for acknowledging fools, we need to look no farther than the sometimes-sunshine state of Florida. That's where the voters in November elected Rick Scott, a Republican, as governor. It either forgave him, or didn't know any better, for once running a company that morphed into the biggest private for-profit health care company in the nation. On the other hand, Columbia/HCA , where Scott had been forced to resign in the midst of a massive Medicare fraud scandal, pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and paid $1.7 billion in fines. As a candidate, Scott solved the problem by telling the voters that although he was a can-do businessman, he wasn't aware of what was going on in his company. (Some folks down there will believe anything. My father, who lived in Miami, was sure that Florida had such great weather that its inhabitants seldom died. Alas, he wasn't among the lucky ones.)

But more on fools: During a legislative debate in Florida on Republican hostility to unions and regulations that impact on corporations, State Rep Scott Randolph, a Democrat, declared that his wife could "incorporate her uterus" if that's what would it take to keep the GOP from demanding greater restrictions on abortion. Well, ladies and gentlemen, the Republicans were outraged that he had said uterus on the House floor. According to Randolph, he was told by them that they were concerned about young pages hearing the word. (I wonder where the R's think the young pages have been for sex education in their maturing years.)

Finally: Apparently not satisfied that there are more than adequate, if clandestine, channels to political campaign coffers, the Florida legislature recently passed a law reviving an old law that will permit political donors to dump their cash directly into what they call " leadership funds" but are nothing more than old-fashioned slush funds created by the very lawmakers who will benefit from them.. It will be all in the open with no questions asked about the propriety of the scheme. One thing it's sure do: It will clean up a lot of the laundering and lying to disguise the the revenue flow.

When truth is the victim of political nonsense

NOW THAT THE National Republican Governors conference has ended with huzzahs for all, it can be safely reported that there are presently 126 Republicans running for president. That figure will grow when my out-of-work cousin adds his name to the list in hopes of being the party's compromise candidate on the 43rd ballot. It's silly, I know, but you have never met my cousin.

It is also being reported by Matt Drudge, who heard it from an unidentified janitor in Rupert Murdoch's office, that Sarah Palin will be offered a new multimillion dollar contract to play Florence Henderson in a reprise of The Brady Bunch, the sweet domestic assembly sometimes known as the basic "blended" family. However, in the spirit of the blend, it was considered wise not to permit teenaged Willow Palin to refer to another student as a "faggot" on Facebook while demanding that people stop dumping "shit" on her family.

Michele Bachmann reportedly is preparing a lengthy mea culpa for gossiping that President Obama's trip to the Far East was costing $200 million a day. She will confess her error, saying it was more like $400 million a day.

Mitch McConnell will finally concede that all of his talk about balancing the budget by cutting taxes has been a ruse to disguise his singular reptilian goal of burying Obama in 2012.

Actually, except for the trash-talking Willow Palin, none of the above is true. But it doesn't have to be, does it? As the recent campaign so vividly demonstrated, there are words flowing from the lips of the pols and their hustler friends that are so Pavlovian that they would give

Barnum even greater reason to shout "sucker".

If the past election proved anything it's that many voters don't hold candidates to account for their sins, even though the Christian Right claims the higher moral ground when it sends its people to the polls. Try, for example, the Florida election that elected Rick Scott governor. He's the fellow whose private career included a run-in with the Feds of biblical proportions. His health-care company, Columbia/HCA (from which he was forced to resign) paid a $1.7 billion fine for Medicare fraud. He insists that it wasn't his idea to raid the Federal treasury and promises to run Florida as a business.

You might understand now why I told you my cousin is running for president. I was only kidding. But so are all of those Republicans who say they can lower taxes, balance the budget and create jobs. What will they think of next? The fun house has gotten quite crowded, don't you think?

A woeful opera in too many nasty acts

WE'RE LIVING with the myth that the "debate" over health care reform is all about what's best for ordinary citizens. But there's nothing very ordinary about the nasty narrative that's in our face today. Americans might just as well be taking sides on whether Silvio Berlusconi should be running around his luxurious Sardinian estate with tempting young girlfriends. It really doesn't matter what ordinary Americans think. (Nor does the Italian premier care about what Italians think!)

In this country the luxurious estate is the fortress set up by huge health insurance companies to protect their tidy investment in your health and mine. They are, of course, servilely aided and abetted by their beneficiaries within the ranks of both parties. Besides, we've learned rather quickly that there are few self-described "ordinary" folks at the disrupted Town Hall meetings. They are scripted in how to hack a reasoned discussion of the issue with their Democratic congressmen.

And who is the inspiration for the hackers who have been crafted with behavioral patterns that riotously break up these sessions? One is, of all people, Rick Scott, who has put up millions to fight health care reforms as head of Conservatives for Patients Rights. I love these benign sounding front groups with titles that have little to do with their line of work. They might as well be called Concerned Foxes for Chickens' Rights. This, after all, is the same Rick Scott who once headed Columbia HCA, a for-profit hospital system that chiseled so much money from the Feds that he finally had to pay a $1.7 billion fraud settlement. That's billion. Among other things, he closed unprofitable hospitals and cut back services to the patients who were unlucky enough to land in the profitable hospitals that made the cut. I'm obviously missing something here, folks. Where are the patient's rights that this conservative wants to protect?

Another who has cast a big shadow on the "debate" is former Texas congressman Dick Armey, who is one of the heavy hitters at "Lobbyists, Central" in D.C. His outfit is a warm and fuzzy number called DreamWorks. He's also the Co-Chairman of the Alliance for Retirement Prosperity, another straight-faced cover job? By now, I'm ready to accept the validity of Concerned Foxes for Chickens' Rights.

But some of the paint on these well financed civic enterprises is starting to flake. One woman who went bananas at one of Town Halls later told a network that she was "just a mom" from down the block who had arrived to express her frustration. She lied. When reporters checked her background, it turned out that she was a soldier for the Republican Party in her state. The script for these well organized assaults of public sanity also remind the shouters to spread out across the hall so that a speaker might conclude that everybody is up in arms against health care reform.

And didn't Rep. John Boehner, the House minority leader, referring to the town meetings, declare that it was going to be a long, hot summer for the Democrats? This raucous opera obviously won't be over until - unlike the fat lady - the woeful chorus of Boehner, Scott, Armey and The Mom, stop singing.