Florida's republican governer elect, a real winner....

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You cannot seem to grasp that a person never convicted of a felony is not legally a criminal. He may be a scoundrel and a knave and a thoroughly base person, but that does not make him a criminal. What makes a criminal is being convicted of a felony in a court of law.

ruveyn

Technically, committing a crime makes one a criminal whether one is convicted of it or not. I suppose the debate here is twofold though:
1) Whether US law as it stands has a basis for prosecuting Mr. Scott or other people who behave similarly to him.
2) Whether US law is "fair" in the extent that wealthy "scoundrels, knaves, and thoroughly base persons" are able to be prosecuted for their misdeeds, compared to the extent to which that the poor and powerless are prosecuted for offenses that are (in comparison) relatively minor.

So I live in a state which is about to see a Republican governor who, shall we say, has not always acted ethically or perhaps even legally. I grew up in a state where my former Republican governor was indeed a convicted criminal (he accepted bribes and violated other ethics laws) and yet he suffered no serious ill consequences. He had to pay some piddling fine and go on TV to read a scripted apology. The crimes of which he was duly convicted could have carried a prison sentence with them (not to mention being grounds for impeachment under our state constitution), and lower-down folks in the state government had been ignominiously fired for far lesser transgressions in order to show how serious Taft was about corruption. But Governor Bob Taft just made a BS "apology" on TV where he claimed to be ignorant of the law he himself pushed through and then went on being governor.

I'd rather get away from all the talk of assassinations and punishment. The topic is really about the hypocrisy of the republican party that put him in the governor's chair. They claim to be for patient rights and against medicare "rationing", yet the crap that happened under Rick Scott is a direct threat to the program. They have the gall to rail about wasteful government spending while at the same time putting a person in office who allowed a corporation to raid the government coffers for private gain.

As far as the Republican Party is concerned, the public coffers exist to be looted by the holy private sector.

All persons are legally innocent until proven guilty. Since this Cross guy was never proven guilty in a court of law he is technically and legally innocent therefore legally not a criminal. And legally is all that counts in terms of penalties.

ruveyn

I'm with ruveyn on this one. The presumption of innocence is more that empty words.

And I'm not sure that either of your issues is central to this question. Whether or not prosecutors have brought charges against Mr. Scott and what their reasons might have been for not doing so is incidental to the question of whether this man is fit to serve the public as an elected official.



It renews ones faith in democracy, and the wisdom of the electorate, doesn't it? [/sarcasm]

The unpalatable truth, of course, is that the electorate, like the marketplace, is not particularly wise.

Many individuals certainly are wise. Small caucuses of people generally are wise, too. But millions of people marking an "X" no longer seem to produce the sober, considered decision that they once did.

Or maybe I just imagine that it once did.

Only if, like ruveyn, you are referring exclusively to technical legal eligibility to hold office. There are a couple hundred million people in this country who are legally eligible to hold office, but whom I would not regard as fit to serve.


Taft actually hit record low approval rates as a result (possibly the lowest ever recorded for any politician) and the scandal contributed to surprise Democratic victories across the state in '06. Of course, the Democrats were equally useless when they came into power.


As far as I can tell, elections now are basically the same as they have been since the 19th century. There was plenty of mudslinging in the 1800s too. http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/ has TV campaign ads going back to Eisenhower-Stevenson 1952, and they're basically the same every election. The main difference is that candidates used to have their own jingles. That's something I think we really need to bring back.

if you had some kind of magic device enabling a transfer function of civic intelligence/philosophy, that would let you transform american voters into canadian voters, would that mean that such transformed americans would stop voting against their own best long-term interests, or are [typical] canadian voters on the same level as americans?

Oh, I think the Canadian electorate is no wiser than any other, and less so than some.

One need only look at the rabid partisanship that has settled over the House of Commons for proof. Politicians respond to public opinion the way Pavlov's dogs responded to bells. If the Canadian electorate demanded substance, then the politicians would deliver. But our electorate responds to partisanship.

And the liberal "progressive" see the public coffers as funds to be redistributed to the undeserving poor. With a certain percentage sticking to the palms of the "progressive" burocrats who move the finds. Think of it as a service fee.

In reality the public coffers are filled with money earned by the productive and taxed by the government for god knows what ends.

ruveyn

Seniors and low-income people who get sick are undeserving of treatment? What about people with illnesses and disabilities that stop them from working? They don't deserve treatment? That's "redistribution"?

You know what. I wish more of the mainstream conservative politicians would show their true colors like you do. I can't stand right winger who pretend they are compassionate human beings while supporting a political order that justifies the existence of capricious suffering for the unfortunate, suffering that would be preventable in any other modern civilized society. Meanwhile the "productive" speculators, hedge fund managers, and other paper pushers shouldn't have contribute a dime to diminish the injustices of the world.

He won by a very small margin. There was a great number of Floridians, including Republicans, who voted for the competent and experienced Sink who actually had a real political platform. Scott's election win was a result of paying record high prices to campaign for the governor seat. He bought his way in. If he'd run a sane campaign that didn't rely on his wealth, he would have lost.

As a Floridian, I'm scared as hell of what's going to happen under his charge. We need him out of Tallahassee NOW.

Ain't Democracy wonderful?

ruveyn