Former governors offer stern warning about Florida's futureAPFrom left, former Florida governors Charlie Crist, Bob Graham and Buddy MacKay chat during the UF law school’s Allen L. Poucher Legal Education Series on Friday. Crist said a “bipartisan approach is what we desperately need in Washington today.”By Mary Ellen Klas, Times/Herald Tallahassee Bureau
October 13, 2012
GAINESVILLE — Five of Florida's living former governors met at the University of Florida Friday and offered up a stern bipartisan warning about the future direction of the state.
The governors — Reubin Askew, Bob Graham, Bob Martinez, Buddy MacKay and Charlie Crist — lamented the loss of environmental protections, the dismantling of guided growth management, and the recent partisan assault on the Florida Supreme Court.
Absent from the panel was former Republican Gov. Jeb Bush. The "Conversation with Florida Governors" was sponsored by the UF law school's Law Review as part of the Allen L. Poucher Legal Education Series.
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Today's legislative leadership "is basically faced in the wrong direction" again, (MacKay) said, "blaming things on the federal government and basically saying we don't need a plan: let the hidden hand of the market take care of it."
He drew chuckles and applause from the crowd when he said Gov. Rick Scott also "believes in the hidden hand of the marketplace — which some people think is a fist clenched. Others believe it's a hand with the middle finger sticking up.''
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Oh, yeah,
Jeb Bush wasn't there.
He's too busy endorsing yet another
corrupt Republican from Florida for the U. S. House.... and tearing down the foundation of public education
in Florida and across the country via his multiple
"educational foundations", from which he and his cohorts
stand to gain from the wholesale privatization of public education.
The past fourteen years have ushered in one of the worst periods of engineered decline in Florida's history, fueled by the wanton greed of a few. And it is the work of
harshly fanatical, bullying right wing conservatives, who are interested only in grasping the levers of power to enrich themselves and their cronies.
We have had enough.
Voting for Democratic control of the state legislature is the only way to put a halt to the iron-fisted, barren wasteland of
well-funded ideological control that Republicans have held since 1998 over the state of Florida.
(Consequently, there
still may be time to
shut down JD Alexander's "legacy" university construction.)
All Republicans must taste defeat this November.