From early Spring of 2009 right through to the last days of the year, Florida's Attorney General and Republican candidate for governor, Bill McCollum, has been nothing - and I do mean nothing - if not consistent in peddling his self-serving, short-sighted, downright deceitful brand of politics.

                               (Bill Mccollum pushing edge of the envelope of political distortion)

Back in March, as he was preparing to abandon his current job and make a run for Governor, the state's leading law enforcement official doled out almost one-and-a-half million of our tax dollars to a former consultant-crony, to produce “public service” ads warning about online sexual predators - ads starring Bill McCollum as the heroic supposed protector of Florida's vulnerable children and endangered teens.

Forget about the ethical questions surrounding awarding of the contract itself. Forget about the fact that the ads were shameless self-promotion (including a $550 taxpayer tab for his makeup!). Forget about the fact that the actual severity of the problem of online sexual predators was so exaggerated by McCollum in the ad and in related publicity efforts.

Well, don't really forget any of that, not when election time rolls around. Rather, keep it in mind, then put it all aside for a moment and ask yourself:

What kind of politician - what kind of a man - would claim to be fighting to protect the health and well-being of our children in the Spring, only to spend much of this Autumn and Winter trying to derail health reform efforts, efforts that would for the first time give hundreds of thousands of Florida's uninsured, at-risk children the kind of health care coverage and care they should have had all along?

In September, McCollum joined the Republican drumbeat of deceit and disinformation about health reform, attacking the public option plan still on the table, lying about the importance and potential impact of medical malpractice reform on health care costs, and claiming his answer to health reform as governor would be creation of an advisory council.

In October, we had to suffer through the following divisive, borderline Joe McCarthy-esque attack by McCollum on health reform, cloaked even more dishonorably in a personal attack on his Democratic rival in the governor's race, Florida's Chief Financial officer, Alex Sink: "Sink is siding with the unions and their bosses – they know where she stands. On government-run health care Sink is with the left wing unions.".

Not long after that, McCollum went after health reform and Sink some more, challenging the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, who was attending a health care town hall in Florida, to call out his competitor Sink on her health reform positions.

But McCollum has saved his personal best of the worst for these last days of the year. This do-nothing Attorney General - the guy who has been in power, yet seemingly powerless during this infamous period of Florida political corruption and legislative lawlessness, during this period when so many Floridians have been bilked and duped and disowned by insurance companies and mortgage lenders and banks - this week, this servant of only the rich and powerful has announced that he is directing his staff to explore whether they can file a lawsuit declaring any new health reform bill that gets passed by the U.S. Congress as unconstitutional.

The McCollum cover story this time, the pretext for killing health reform, is that there ought not to be any requirement that uninsured people have to get health insurance. It would be like a tax - Boo! - and just unfair, doggone it. Forget that these uninsured, at-risk people, if they have difficulty affording insurance, would get subsidized under a new reform bill.

Forget that without such a mandate, all of us taxpayers will end up paying for their health care, at the most expensive levels, when they finally show up at emergency rooms seeking medical attention.

Forget that such a mandate, even as part of this very imperfect health reform bill now being finalized, will still help to quickly, finally provide proper health care access and coverage for nearly 800,000 uninsured children in Florida - the children McCollum claimed to be looking out for way back in...the Spring.

Forget that as Attorney General, Wild Bill is defending the state in efforts to maintain Medicaid reimbursement levels that are so low that poor, uninsured children can't find doctors who will treat them.

Forget that McCollum's extremist anti-government, anti-entitlement views were in evidence during his years in the U.S. Congress, when he voted time and again to cut Medicare and Social Security.

Forget that McCollum's extremist anti-government, anti-entitlement views not only pander shamelessly to, but in fact prey on some people's fear and ignorance, cultivating selfishness and inhumanity, rather than selflessness and humanity.

NO. Do not forget any of the above, not when election time rolls around. Keep it all uppermost in your mind, in fact, as you listen to and watch McCollum peddling his politics of hypocrisy and heartlessness, divisiveness and duplicity, throughout this 2010 gubernatorial campaign. He will cloak it all the while in the guise of being some kind of moderate conservative who's trying to keep big government out of your life. He will be lying to and trying to deceive and distract you. The facts are the facts. The record is the record. You can look it up.

Ask yourself.

What kind of politician - what kind of human being - do you want as Florida's next governor?

With unemployment still sky high; with For Sale signs and foreclosure notices as common on front lawns as Christmas decorations; with local youth shipping off to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and with health reform now an ugly mess, why should Floridians care about the United Nations Climate Talks in Copenhagen?

Well, I don’t know about you, my fellow southeastern Sunshine Staters, but I don’t like to consider even the remote possibility that future generations of my family may have to deal with the potentially cataclysmic impacts of global warming on our region.

In Florida, it’s not just the efforts to avoid climate crisis by enacting carbon emissions standards like so many other states have already done that keep getting squashed by a Republican-dominated legislature - and abandoned by the GOP’s Governor turned Senate candidate who’s now more interested in pandering to The Right than he is in being a champion of what is right.

Republican political opportunism.  That, in a nutshell, is the Sunshine State’s worst and not so well hidden tax burden.

Two stories that broke in recent days help highlight the shameful mess that the Florida GOP has made of both the state’s economy, and its tax code.

Some will object to such finger pointing, claiming it’s the national economic crisis that put Florida in the financial pickle it’s in. That would constitute a half-truth, at very generous best – as would any attempt to argue that the Democrats are equally responsible for the state’s unfair, dysfunctional tax system and the havoc it has created for working and unemployed families.

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum's worst political nightmare is about to become a reality - and the news comes on Halloween, no less.

As reported in her hometown newspaper this morning, Lakeland State Senator Paula Dockery is about to join McCollum in the race for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, automatically injecting some life into what had been a lackluster - to say the least - GOP campaign to date.

Dockery has been a state legislator for thirteen years, the first six in the State House of Representatives, and was facing the prospect of being term limited right out of office in 2012, a year when unlike 2010, none of the juiciest State leadership spots will be up for grabs.

This is clearly the right window of opportunity for the 48-year-old conservative, originally from Queens, New York, to jump through in an effort to try wresting the brass ring right out of McCollum's wobbly grip.

Dockery is doing her best to continue basking in the glow of her legislative victory in the 2009 session, spearheading a successful effort to kill plans for an Orlando-based high speed rail line that would have run right through her home base of Lakeland.

But what else do we know about Paula Dockery and the kinds of positions and policies she might advance if elected governor?

For some frightening clues, one might start with the ratings she gets from key Issues advocacy & interest groups.  Low ratings on pro-worker/labor issues , very low ratings on pro-environmental issues, high ratings on pro-business/industry issues, very high ratings on pro-life/anti-choice issues, and stellar ratings on pro-gun issues.

This is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative here, one who is going to try to capitalize on the rail system victory to run as a "fighter for the people", as a fresh new face in the Florida Republican Party.  Compared to Bill McCollum's miserable, extremist record, she has a very good chance of getting away with it, and upsetting the carefully stacked apple cart that State GOP chairman Jim Greer and his crowd have been trying to steamroll  to victory.

In preparation for the possibility of a Dockery-Sink general election campaign, there's no time like the present for Democrats, Independents and open-minded Republicans to start taking a very close look at the Dockery political profile.

A good place to start would be the Project Vote Smart website.  This independent, non-partisan site sets out simply to provide all citizens and voters with factual information about candidates and elected officials - voting records, interest group ratings and the like.  They also ask every official and candidate to make clear statements about their positions on a wide range of issues in what they call a "Political Courage Test".  Here is their note about Dockery's responses:

"Senata Paula B. Dockery repeatedly refused to provide any responses to citizens on the issues..."

Hmmmm.

Get informed, and stay tuned.

After writing a series of articles and making a series of videos about the fight for real health reform, from a Florida perspective, I recently took a little end-of-Summer break to catch my breath and cleanse the old mental palate before coming back for more.

For me, Sports - Baseball, to be specific - New York Yankees Baseball, to be honest - has always helped that way, providing a refreshing and restorative change of cerebral scenery.

As Fate would have it, flying from Florida to NYC, visiting the impressive new Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and watching the Yanks play 3 games in 3 days against 3 different opponents proved to be both great escape, and apt allegory.

Quick note to all you head-shaking Red Sox fans and assorted other Yankee-haters: Give me a break, I was born and raised for the first 12 years of my life about a mile and a half away from Yankee Stadium.  It’s a cliché, sure, but it’s in my blood.

Also in my blood, passed down from politically informed and involved immigrant grandparents, to my activist/unionist mother, to my brothers and me, and to our children, is an acute awareness of the ongoing social struggle of working families for a better life.

So not so strangely enough, I left the Bronx after the last of my three-game set, heading back to The Sunshine State with a cloud of baseball and health reform thoughts swirling together in my noggin.

So, a funny thing happened on the way to appraising President Obama’s health reform address to Congress.  With my wife away on a business trip, I was home alone with our 4-year-old, cagily keeping her busy watching Disney’s “Earth” (stunning), while I shuttled back and forth to another TV to watch what I could of the President’s speech.

So I’m cheering, literally, as I hear Obama make the case for the public option plan, cheering and clapping enough to pique little Aliza’s curiosity in the next room.   I run in there and explain that I was cheering for Barack Obama -- she knows him by sight and name, and she’s a big fan.  After answering a few questions, including, I kid you not, “What’s John McCain saying?” (There’s back-story there that will just have to wait), she turned back to her movie, happily watching as a leopard was taking down a caribou in the wild.  I smiled and hurried back to the speech.

By the way, I took some pleasure in answering Aliza’s McCain question honestly enough, saying “He didn’t say anything, he just gave Obama a thumbs-up” -- which she laughed heartily at, adding “That’s crazy!” before turning her attention back to the harsh realities of Survival Of The Fittest.

So, Senior Citizens have all kinds of fears and reservations about supporting President Obama's push for meaningful, transformative health reform, eh?  Huh???

Yes, that's certainly what the coalition of health insurers, drug companies, bought politicians, compromised media hacks, and brainwashed extremists standing together in opposition to real reform want us to believe.

But no, that's not nearly the whole, or the real story.

In fact, many, many millions of seniors support real health reform.  But when they go show their support for the President's public option-based plan, like they did recently in Palm Beach County, Florida -- Palm Beach County, mind you, a symbolic epicenter of senior living, for crying out loud -- they do it with such class and composure that it doesn't make for juicy TV News coverage.  No screaming or shoving or dislocated hips.  Just concerned senior citizens anxious to hear the details of a reform effort most of them have believed necessary and actively supported for years.

That's supposedly Not News -- not mega-corporate owned, mainstream media news, that is.

The rationale, the "Journalism 101" cliche is, "Man Bites Dog", well that's a news story.  So by that standard, how do you think a ratings-driven network affiliate or major cable news outlet News Director is going to classify footage of costumed, disruptive, misinformed, citizens at important public forums?  Ooohhh, now that's News, that's Sam snapping at Spot's paws, Big Time.

The other way around -- retired working Americans from all corners and walks of life who have benefitted so deeply from Democratic-initiated, government-administered programs like Social Security and Medicare, now wanting to do anything they can to help extend those protections to other Americans?  Well, sorry, that is just Not News, not to the powers that be.  Too much time, effort and creativity required to make simple human drama, well, dramatic.

So the vast majority of good, compassionate people who only have or make the time to get most or all of their news from those giant media conglomerates, they only see...The News.  Not the...Not News.  So there's the maddening, self-perpetuating delusion of large-scale "opposition" to health reform, especially amongst Seniors.  The snowball of a con job just keeps rolling down the slippery slope of misinformation, getting bigger and bigger.  Coverage of  recent poll numbers showing that 3 out of 4 Americans support health reform is now replaced by poll numbers showing only one in five Americans now feels that health reform "would help them".

Call it the Mainstream Media Divide.  One can ony hope that President Obama has enough of The Right Stuff to look at those poll numbers not with an eye towards any degree of surrender or submission, but rather with great regret at his administration's failures in early, effective communication about how health reform will help seniors on Medicare, as it will all Americans -- and with renewed resolve that there still is time to be The Great Communicator, and to turn the tide in favor of the simple, collective, public good.

I do have reason for hope, based at least on anecdotal evidence.  I have a suspicion, based on conversations with strangers -- particularly seniors -- in supermarkets and airports, at movie theatres and gas stations and train stations, and yes, maybe even at an Early Bird Special I wandered into by mistake the other early afternoon.  I suspect that most Americans of all ages, outside of the anti-reform extremists trying so hard to make The News, are sick and tired already of "Warfare" as the central, ubiquitous metaphorical element used in coverage of this story.

It's simply a misrepresentation of fact, and it has also gotten very, very tired.

I really do think folks are fed up with the daytime tabloid TV approach to covering the health reform debate.  I think people are ready to hear about what their fellow, concerned citizens, along with our President, and those of honor in Congress, are fighting for.

Now that Summer's over, one can only hope that seniors and all Americans are ready to reject the sideshow elements of coverage of this extraordinary national debate, ready to put the pressure on major network and cable TV outlets to cover more of the substance of the story, ready to look a little harder for and at the whole truth, and most of all, ready to attend to the serious business at hand.

The 75 percent or more of Americans who support health reform with a public option have more to worry about than the Health Insurance and Drug companies, the lobbyists, politicians and "advocacy organizations" fronting for them, and the frightened, misinformed citizens manipulated into being anti-reform protesters.

Turns out that doctors may be having more of an impact on this whole national debate than we realize. Here in Florida, as is true around the country, many physicians who oppose President Obama’s vision of health reform with a public option are taking their case directly to their own patients -- often right in the middle of examinations and consultations.

You know how it goes, probably something like, "Okay, Mary, it’s just a mild Flu, so take two aspirin, drink plenty of liquids, and tell Congress to say No to Obamacare".

“Cockamamie” -- That’s what the Republican governor of Florida - a state where four out of eighteen million residents have no health insurance - has publicly called President Obama’s efforts to use the power and best experience of our federal government to provide coverage for them, and for nearly all of the other forty-three million uninsured Americans.

According to the Encarta World English Dictionary, cockamamie is an adjective with two meanings:

1. having very little importance or meaning

2. having little or nothing to do with reality

The irony here is as obvious as the shameless demagoguery exhibited by Governor turned U.S. Senate candidate, Charlie Crist, the ultimate political opportunist. In fact, which side is it in the health reform debate that has relied on relentless factual distortion and outright disinformation? It’s clear to anyone willing to do even a little digging that the opponents of health reform have largely made their case based on arguments having “little or nothing to do with reality”. And just how much “importance or meaning” this kind of opposition will have in the long run remains to be seen.

As the mainstream corporate media outlets that still dominate information delivery in America continue to spin a healthcare reform storyline built -- surprise, surprise -- around conflict, we in Independent Media must do what we can to tell the Real Story.

The real story is that all across our extraordinary country, families and friends and neighbors and strangers are coming together to share their stories of healthcare system victimization, and to brainstorm about how to win the battle to wrest control of our national healthcare system away from The U.S. Healthcare Conglomerate -- the unstated association of insurance companies, drug companies, for-profit institutions and providers, lobbyists, and those selected elected and appointed officials that have been induced to serve their, rather than the public's interests.

Follow the link below to watch a short film (just under 5 minutes) that exemplifies how Americans nationwide are uniting to get the truth told, and to force the lazy, gilded hand of Congress to enact the kind of sweeping, meaningful Healthcare reform -- centered around a new Public Option health plan -- that America needs to recover from the ills of for-profit medicine.

http://bit.ly/floridafightsforhealthreform 

If ever there was an era in which to slash away at all those money-green umbilical cords linking Florida's well-endowed Big Mamas of economic development -- the real estate and commercial development interests that rule the roost -- to their dutiful, mostly obedient offspring -- the state legislators and other officials still sucking on their cash-cow teats -- well hell, you'd think this would be it.

But just how widespread and effective such efforts will be, remains to be seen. 

Floridians of all stripes are going to have to demand that any politician whom they would even consider voting for, first publicly pledge allegiance to protecting and promoting the best interests of the state's working families, small businesses, and mismanaged natural resources, by growing a greener economy.

So let's all take the time to turn up the globally warmed heat on Governor Crist, on his two most likely successors, Alex Sink and Bill McCollum, and on all the other Florida politicians, officials and regulators who like to talk a good environmental game, without ever actually playing to win.

After all, wouldn't it make more than a little sense for the freaking Sunshine State to finally become a dynamic leader in supporting and promoting solar power and other Green business initiatives, like those featured in the 5-minute video, "Growing Green Jobs & Clean Energy in Sunshine State".  Now is the time to transition Florida to the 21st century, no?

Watching the flurry of bill signings and vetoes coming out of Florida Governor Charlie Crist's office in recent weeks has been akin to watching a confounding, if not outright conniving Republican remake of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Call this version, Gov. Crist & Mr. Candidate.

While Gov. Crist still gives every indication of doing the business of governing, his alter ego is already campaigning to be Florida's next Republican U.S. Senator.  To that electoral end, Mr. C wants and needs Gov. C to be viewed as a moderate Man Of The People, a Middle Class-friendly, bi-partisan vote getter.

And so, in the days since signing a much-maligned new state budget -- a budget that puts plenty of extra hurt on Florida's most vulnerable citizens without asking for any significant sacrifice from its more prosperous ones -- Gov. Crist has been playing a strategically savvy, oh-so-selective "I'll make it up to you" game with recession-battered working and struggling families.