In secret, behind locked gates, our Nation's Oldest City dumped a landfill in a lake (Old City Reservoir), while emitting sewage in our rivers and salt marsh. Organized citizens exposed and defeated pollution, racism and cronyism. We elected a new Mayor. We're transforming our City -- advanced citizenship. Ask questions. Make disclosures. Demand answers. Be involved. Expect democracy. Report and expose corruption. Smile! Help enact a St. Augustine National Park and Seashore. We shall overcome!
Update, April 1, 2025: "Joy" Andrews never called me to discuss. County never supplied any documents. Are County staff spying on Commisssioenrs' privileged communications with our Commissioners? On what theory? Do ask, do tell.
In 1929, Republican Henry Lewis Stimson, then U.S. Secretary of State, later Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Secretary of War, said, "Gentlemen do not open each others' mail."
On March 3, 2025, I wrote to our St. Johns County Administrator, "Joy" Andrews, inquiring about our secretive County staff opening and reading citizen mails to our County Commissioners. Do citizens have a right to confidential communications? When we write our elected officials it is privileged, First Amendment protected activity. Are County staff nosy parkers? You tell me. Here's my e-mail:
On Monday, March 3, 2025 at 02:41:15 PM EST, Ed Slavin <easlavin@aol.com> wrote:
To Ms. "Joy" Andrews, St. Johns County Administrator:
1. What policies, procedures and legal basis is there for our County staff reading citizen communications with County Commissioners?
2. Please send list all staff who to perform "mail covers" on County Commissioners?
3. Please send me all staff reports on such "mail covers?"
4. Would staff kindly refrain from such "mail covers" if citizen communications said "CONFIDENTIAL?"
5. How would an employee whistleblower or other citizen raising concerns with their Commissioner know that their e-mails or letters are being opened surreptitously?
6. Who has permission, and from whom, to open citizens' electronic and paper communications to our County Commissioners?
7. May our Commissioners "opt out" from surveillance on First Amendment protected activity? Please provide any legal research or opinions today.
8. How many times have St. Johns County staff members opened e-mails or other mail to Commissioners 2022- 2025 before Commissioners read them? Please send Excel spreadsheet today,
9. Has anyone ever filed any federal or state complaints, whether civil, administrative or criminal about County staff reading First Amendment protected activity from citizens to Commissioners?
10. Please include all communications about staff reading communications to Commissioners, including putative justifications for such violations of our fundamental rights to privacy.
11. Please provide all documents authorizing such "mail covers" and any notices to employees or citizens about them. I find nothing on our County website disclosing the "mail covers" by staff reading citizen reports and disclosures to Commissioners.
12. Please provide any BoCC vote authorizing such "mail covers" without alerting employees or citizens that their privileged communications may be read about the persons about whom they might be complaining.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an anti-labor organization founded by President William Howard Taft in the White House, was angsty and angry about Ralph Nader and public interest law. An uncritical corporate cat's paw, PHILLIP MORRIS tobacco company director LEWIS FRANKLIN POWELL, Jr. wrote a secret memorandum proposing to fight the public interest. Two months later, President RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON nominated Virginia corporate lawyer LEWIS POWELL to the United States Supreme Court. POWELL was a passionate defender of tobacco companies, who claimed tobacco did not kill people. Our courts and legislatures are haunted by the mean spirit of this memorandum. Be not afraid. Ask questions, demand answers, expect democracy. Reject Big Business power grabs and grifts, and all their works and pomps. Yes we can! From Wikipedia:
The memo called for corporate America to become more aggressive in molding society's thinking about business, government, politics and law in the US. It inspired wealthy heirs of earlier American industrialists, the Earhart Foundation (whose money came from an oil fortune), and the Smith Richardson Foundation (from the cough medicine dynasty)[16] to use their private charitable foundations−which did not have to report their political activities−to join the Carthage Foundation, founded by Richard Mellon Scaife in 1964.[16] The Carthage Foundation pursued Powell's vision of a pro-business, anti-socialist, minimally government-regulated America based on what he thought America had been in the heyday of early American industrialism, before the Great Depression and the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.
Powell argued, "The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism came from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians." In the memorandum, Powell advocated "constant surveillance" of textbook and television content, as well as a purge of left-wing elements. He named consumer advocate Nader as the chief antagonist of American business. Powell urged conservatives to undertake a sustained media-outreach program, including funding neoliberal scholars, publishing books, papers, popular magazines, and scholarly journals, and influencing public opinion.[24][25]
This memo foreshadowed a number of Powell's court opinions, especially First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, which shifted the direction of First Amendment law by declaring that corporate financial influence of elections by independent expenditures should be protected with the same vigor as individual political speech. Much of the future Court opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commissionrelied on the same arguments raised in Bellotti.
Although written confidentially for Sydnor at the Chamber of Commerce, it was discovered by Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson, who reported on its content a year later (after Powell had joined the Supreme Court). Anderson alleged that Powell was trying to undermine the democratic system; however, in terms of business's view of itself in relation to government and public interest groups, the memo could be alternatively read to simply convey conventional thinking among businessmen at the time. The explicit goal of the memo was not to destroy democracy, though its emphasis on political institution-building as a concentration of big business power, particularly updating the Chamber's efforts to influence federal policy, has had that effect.[26] Here, it was a major force in motivating the Chamber and other groups to modernize their efforts to lobby the federal government. Following the memo's directives, conservative foundations greatly increased, pouring money into think-tanks. This rise of conservative lobbying led to the conservative intellectual movement and its increasing influence over mainstream political discourse, starting in the 1970s and 1980s, and due chiefly to the works of the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.[27]
From Senator Sheldon Whitehouse:
05.27.21
THE SCHEME 1: THE POWELL MEMO
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, there is a scheme afoot, a scheme I will be talking about in weeks ahead – a long-running, right-wing scheme to capture the Supreme Court.
Special interests are behind the scheme. They control it through dark money – hundreds of millions of dollars in anonymous hidden spending. We will dwell in later speeches on how the scheme operates. This first speech seeks its origins. The scheme is secret, and because of its secrecy, it is hard to know exactly where the story should begin.
The one place you could begin is with a corporate lawyer – the Virginian Lewis Powell. An authorized biography of Lewis Powell by his fellow Virginian, renowned UVA law professor John Jeffries, reveals Powell to be a tough and incisive lawyer, willing and able to make sharp, even harsh, decisions, but a man of courtly and decent matters, well-settled in the White male social and corporate elite of Richmond, VA. There he developed his legal and business career through the 1950s and 1960s.
A successful corporate law practice often entailed joining corporate boards. Richmond was a home to Big Tobacco, and Powell's legal career led him on to Richmond's tobacco and other corporate boards. Richmond was Virginia's sibling rival to Charlottesville, which could boast of Thomas Jefferson's nearby Monticello, his renowned University of Virginia, and all the cultural and academic vibrancy bubbling around that great university. Richmond was the working sibling, hosting the State's capitol and its political offices and serving as its corporate center.
Powell was an ambitious Richmond corporate lawyer, and the turbulence of the 1960s was broadly distressing to America's corporate elite. The civil rights movement disrupted Jim Crow across the South, drawing out and exposing to the Nation the racist violence that had long enforced the social and legal norm of segregation and upsetting America's all- White corporate suites and boardrooms.
Anti-war protesters derided Dow Chemical Company's manufacture of napalm and scorned the entire military-industrial complex. Women's rights protesters challenged all-male corporate management structures. The environmental movement protested chemical leaks, toxic products, and the poisons belching from corporate smokestacks. Public health groups began linking the tobacco industry to deadly illnesses, and lead paint companies to brain damage in children.
Ralph Nader criticized America's car companies for making automobiles that were “Unsafe at Any Speed” and causing carnage on America's highways. America's anxious corporate elite saw Congress respond with new and unwelcome laws and saw courts respond with big and unwelcome verdicts. Something had to be done.
Powell's prominence in Virginia's civic, legal, social, and corporate circles had brought him attention in Washington, DC. A new client of his, the Washington, DC-based U.S. Chamber of Commerce, asked Powell for his help. The Chamber commissioned from Powell a secret report, a strategic plan for reasserting corporate authority over the political arena.
The secret Powell report, titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” was telling. It was telling, first, for the apocalyptic certainty of its tone. Powell's opening sentence was: “No thoughtful person can question that the American system is under broad attack.” By that, he meant the American economic system, but that assertion was footnoted with the parallel assertion that – and I am quoting him again – “The American political system of democracy under the rule of law is also under attack.”
This was, Powell asserted, “quite new in [American history].” “Business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble,” he wrote, “and the hour is late.”
The secret Powell report was an alarm.
The report is populated with liberal bogeymen: the bombastic lawyer William Kunstler; the popular author of “The Greening of America,” Charles Reich; the consumer advocate Ralph Nader, whom Powell said there should be, and I am quoting here, “no hesitation to attack.” Against them, Powell set establishment defenders like columnist Stewart Alsop and conservative economist Milton Friedman. Powell cloaked the concerns of corporate America as concerns of “individual freedom,” a rhetorical framework for corporate political power that persists to this day.
The battle lines were drawn. Indeed, the language in the Powell report is the language of battle: “attack,” “frontal assault,” “rifle shots,” “warfare.” The recommendations are to end compromise and appeasement – his words: “compromise” and “appeasement”— to understand that, as he said, “the ultimate issue may be survival”— and he underlined the word “survival” in his report – and to call for “the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it.''
Well, for this, you had to have a plan, and the Powell plan was to go big. Here is what he said:
“Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”
Powell recommended a propaganda effort staffed with scholars and speakers, a propaganda effort to which American business should devote “10 percent of its total advertising budget,'” including an effort to review and critique textbooks, especially in economics, political science, and sociology.
“National television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance,” he said. Corporate America should aggressively insist on the right to be heard, on “equal time,” and corporate America should be ready to deploy, and I am quoting him here, “whatever degree of pressure — publicly and privately — may be necessary.” This would be “a long road,” Powell warned, “and not for the fainthearted.”
In his section entitled “The Neglected Political Arena,” Powell recommended using political influence to stem “the stampedes by politicians to support any legislation related to `consumerism' or to the `environment.'” And, yes, Powell put the word “environment” in derogatory quote marks in the original.
“Political power,” Powell wrote, “is necessary; … [it] must be assiduously cultivated; and … when necessary … must be used aggressively and with determination.” He concluded that “it is essential [to] be far more aggressive than in the past,” with “no hesitation to attack,” “not the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas,” and no “reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose” the corporate effort. In a nutshell, no holds barred.
And then came the section of the secret report that may have launched the scheme to capture the court. It is called “Neglected Opportunity in the Courts.” This section focused on what Powell called “exploiting judicial action.” He called it an “area of vast opportunity.”
He wrote: “Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court” – I will intervene to say, of course, we have today, as a result of the scheme, the most activist-minded Supreme Court in American history, but back to his quote – “especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.”
Powell urged that the Chamber of Commerce become the voice of American business in the courts, with a “highly competent staff of lawyers,” if “business is willing to provide the funds.'” He concludes: “The opportunity merits the necessary effort.” The secret report may well have been the single most consequential piece of writing that Lewis Powell ever did in a long career of consequential writings. The tone and content of the report actually explain a lot of decisions in his future career. Yet this secret report received no attention – not even a passing mention – in Professor Jeffries' detailed, authoritative, and authorized Powell biography.
The secret Chamber report was not disclosed to the U.S. Senate in Senate confirmation proceedings when, shortly after delivering his secret report to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Lewis Powell was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon.
The secret report was dated August 23, 1971. Two months later, on October 22, Nixon nominated Powell to the Supreme Court. Lewis Powell was sworn in as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court on January 7, 1972, less than 6 months after this secret report was delivered to the Chamber.
To be continued. I yield the floor.
---------
Full text of Powell memo here, sent on August 23, 1971 two months before angry corrupt President RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON nominated its author, LEWIS FRANKLIN POWELL, JR., a partner in HUNTON & WILLIAMS, to the United States Supreme Court.
Three other-directed St. Johns County Commissioners voted against joining a lawsuit that would remedy this outrage. Wonder why? From Bradenton Times:
"Time Running Out": Local Leaders Call on House to Fix SB 180
Manatee County Commissioner George Kruse testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee in favor of Senate Bill 840, on Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2026.
THE FLORIDA CHANNEL
Posted
by Dawn Kitterman
TALLAHASSEE — Earlier this week, Manatee County Commissioner George Kruse joined two other elected officials to discuss the fading opportunity for state lawmakers to pass a legislative fix to SB 180. The officials spoke during a Zoom press conference organized by 1000 Friends of Florida that included representatives from the City of Deltona and Orange County. Signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis in June, SB 180 is a broad emergency management bill that has limited local governments’ ability to enact new or updated development codes and regulations. The legislation was intended, in part, to ensure that residents recovering from hurricane-related damage would not be subject to newly adopted local ordinances imposing stricter requirements. However, its language regarding “more restrictive or burdensome” rules has been applied to a wider range of development applications, including new construction, not just storm-damaged properties. The provisions of the law apply retroactively, restricting local land-use, development, and zoning regulations from August 1, 2024—before the law was passed—and remain in effect through at least October 1, 2027.
1000 Friends of Florida, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on smart-growth policy, organized Wednesday’s press conference, bringing together Orange County Commissioner Kelly Martinez Semrad, Deltona City Commissioner Dori Howington, and Manatee County Commissioner George Kruse, along with 1000 Friends Policy and Planning Director Kim Dinkins and land use attorney Richard Grosso. The commissioners joined the discussion to highlight how SB180 has negatively impacted their communities and smart growth efforts, and the need to fix the bill’s broad language.
The deadline for action approaches, as Florida House of Representatives has failed to act, while St. Johns County Commissioners voted 3-2 against joining a lawsuit by local governments. Wonder why? From Bradenton Times:
Window closing to roll back Florida SB 180 home rule limits
By Alice Herman Suncoast Searchlight February 28, 2026 5:50 AM
Read more at: https://www.bradenton.com/news/local/article314866475.html#storylink=cpy
Views of the development along El Conquistador Parkway on Sarasota Bay called Aqua. Manatee and Sarasota counties have seen rapid development in the last decade. Tiffany Tompkins ttompkins@bradenton.com
The Florida Legislature has just days in the current session to kill controversial provisions in a state law limiting local jurisdictions from regulating growth. Senate Bill 180, which passed with nearly unanimous approval last year, limits cities and counties from advancing any measures deemed more “burdensome or restrictive” on development in the wake of major storms. The law spurred backlash from local governments that had spent months — in some cases years — crafting planning policies, only to see them struck down by the state.
“When a local government doesn’t have the ability to respond to things like hurricanes in a meaningful way, we just continue to make the same mistakes,” said Kim Dinkins, the policy and planning director of 1000 Friends of Florida, an advocacy organization focusing on growth management and conservation that has sought to reverse parts of SB 180. In Manatee County, where voters elected a slate of commissioners in 2024 who ran on a platform of curbing sprawl, SB 180 had immediate impacts. When commissioners advanced measures to restore wetlands protections and raise impact fees on developers, the Florida Department of Commerce threatened litigation. Citing fears that Gov. Ron DeSantis would remove them from office, commissioners backed off. A similar fight played out in Orange County, which joined a lawsuit alongside Manatee, Fort Lauderdale, Naples and other local jurisdictions challenging the law. The issue has spurred blowback across civil society groups, including environmental and conservation-focused organizations, good government groups and libertarian activists.
Now, the state Senate has passed a bill largely reversing that preemption on local planning. But the Florida House of Representatives has not moved on a companion bill — with the end of the legislative session looming. If they do not advance a bill, the Senate’s measure, which narrows the geographic scope of SB 180 and would end its post-storm preemptions in June 2026, will die. Dinkins spoke with Suncoast Searchlight this week about the group’s efforts to overturn aspects of SB 180 and how the law has impacted local governments. Suncoast Searchlight: Can you tell me why 1000 Friends got involved with the fight over SB 180 and what that has looked like in the past year? Kim Dinkins: Senate Bill 180 was an emergencies bill that had those two sections that really chilled the ability for local governments to do any meaningful planning on the heels of three very severe hurricanes — and then moving forward, in any future storm, prohibiting them from doing any sort of planning within 100 miles of a storm for a full year. The tenets of what we work on are community planning, land conservation and water quality issues … It didn’t make sense to us that we were learning all of these lessons from these storms but then not being able to implement any of those lessons in our community planning. Kim Dinkins, policy and planning director of 1000 Friends of Florida. Provided photo Courtesy of 1000 Friends of Florida
What are some of the lessons that you see towns and counties learning from storms and how has SB 180 has hampered them? I think probably the most high-profile, or the things most directly impacted, are areas where flooding occurs, so where storms come through and citizens are flooding or having stormwater issues. A lot of times that’s because those are historic neighborhoods that don’t have the stormwater infrastructure. As we learn more about how important it is to be able to provide adequate storage for storms, and as we get more intense and frequent storms that result in more rain, as well as dealing with all of the water quality impacts from our increased population and trying to address water quality issues, we have learned new best management practices and higher summer standards that could be implemented at the state, at the county level or at the local level. 1000 friends and other local jurisdictions have gotten involved with a lawsuit over SB 180. Can you tell me about that? There were two lawsuits — the lawsuit [brought by local jurisdictions] is separate from the 1000 Friends of Florida lawsuit, and the one that we’re in is with an individual citizen who was impacted by the inability of her community to implement a rural boundary, which was a voter referendum in Orange County. What did that mean for her? It was the inability of the local government to set a higher standard for development in what they call in Orange County “rural settlements.” So she had moved to this rural settlement that was a development outside of a major urban area and, without that rural boundary, the sprawl was kind of continuing on. And so she was concerned about development proposals in the area that had been denied previously, but then would be able to be fast-tracked without those protections under SB 180.
If SB 180 stays on the books, are there other means for local jurisdictions to regulate growth? Section 28 [of SB 180] looks back to August 2024 and forward through October 2027, so any new policies can be implemented after that, as long as there’s not another storm in those areas. So basically, the local governments are stuck with what’s on the books today until 2027, and then the next time a storm comes in, they have to wait a full year to respond. So they basically have to cross their fingers that there’s not another major storm. Right, and take that maybe potentially small window and pass all of their regular new standards during that time. Local governments have spent millions of dollars to update their comprehensive plans and held public hearings and all of those things. And in some cases, they had already sent their amended amendments or requests to the Department of Commerce. And then the Department of Commerce said, ‘Yeah, this all looks good.’ But then when they came back after adoption, they said it was null and void because it had a couple of provisions that were more restrictive or burdensome. When you’re not able to respond to the will of the people, it just puts local governments in a difficult position. Is there anything that you feel like the public should understand about SB 180 that they might not already?
I would like to just throw out there that this is a pause in community planning, it’s not the end of it. So, continuing to work on those plans to make your community better, to be more resilient, to address local concerns, is still a worthwhile process. Because even though the legislature has put a pause on it, it’s still our best and only way to plan our communities into the future.
The Plaza Level Rotunda in the Florida Capitol. (Photo by Michael Moline/Florida Phoenix)
It’s just past midway through Florida’s legislative session, and things appear to be going at a slow, but not remotely stately, pace.
What have the people’s representatives accomplished, you ask?
Well, let’s see: Out of 1,800 bills filed, at least two have passed. Might be some more sneaking in by the time you read this.
Come on, legislators can’t be expected to spend their valuable time on frivolities such as improving the lives of Floridians.
The Florida House has voted to name his local airport in Palm Beach County after President Donald Trump. March 28, 2023. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Not in the face of urgent matters such as renaming the Palm Beach International Airport for the Current Occupant of the White House.
It’ll cost $5.5 million, and county residents aren’t necessarily thrilled to bits, but who cares? It’s all about the branding.
As ever, the Legislature is laser-focused on education — mostly how to keep kids from reading books and thinking for themselves.
According to House Republicans, school libraries teem with smut, material “harmful to minors.”
They mean “sexual content” which is apparently the same thing as “pornography.”
The House has passed such nonsense before, and would have gotten away with it if those pesky free-speech advocates and their co-conspirators in the judiciary hadn’t thrown the First Amendment at them and claimed works by Toni Morrison (slavery!), Shakespeare (cross dressing!), James Baldwin (gay!), and Kurt Vonnegut (anti-American! Anti-war!) are actually “great works of art.”
Well, HB 1119‘s sponsors, annoyed the law from last year (and the year before that) was “improperly bypassed,” have declared “artistic merit” irrelevant.
Frightened school boards across the state have responded by yanking many of the literary glories of Western Civilization (which I thought we liked) off library shelves, including Milton’s mighty Christian epic, “Paradise Lost.”
Adam and Eve have sex in Eden. Filth!
Naming rights
Another big bill on the horizon is SB 420, which mandates all schools display portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in a “conspicuous place,” along with “In God We Trust.”
This is part of a “patriotic education” initiative to instill in children reverence for the United States, whether they like it or not.
As George Bernard Shaw (probably) said, “Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.”
At the same level of significance to the well-being of the citizenry: What to call the illegally occupiedterritory, the heart of a future Palestinian state, on the western side of the River Jordan?
The Florida House does not want you to call it the “West Bank.”
They even have a bipartisan bill to, as Rep. Mike Gottlieb, D-Davie, says, “right a wrong,” claiming not calling it Judea and Samaria is “a ban on Jewish heritage” and the Florida Legislature must “restore the history and dignity of the people who are indigenous to the region.”
There are a couple of problems with this, problems which could have been avoided if only somebody in the Florida Legislature actually bothered to learn something:
“The people indigenous to the region” include Palestinians, descendants of the Canaanites who established cities there 4,000 years ago.
Palestinians and Israelis are not divided by ethnicity, or genetics, but culture. While many Israeli Jews also have European ancestry, they are more closely linked to the people their government keeps bombing.
In a now-retracted2001 article available on the National Institutes of Health site, scholars point out that “archaeologic and genetic data support that both Jews and Palestinians came from the ancient Canaanites, who extensively mixed with Egyptians, Mesopotamian, and Anatolian peoples in ancient times.”
Birds and pistols
Never mind. We have plenty of other big issues here in Florida, such as who will win the coveted title of state avian?
The House has approved a measure to replace the mockingbird with the American Flamingo.
It’s now up to the Senate.
Very dramatic. We await the vote with anticipation and excitement.
Almost as dramatic, a passionate effort to protect our cruelly oppressed firearm manufacturing friends.
Sig Sauer needs relief from careless cops and others objecting to the way their P320 pistol fires without them touching the trigger or even removing the gun from their holsters.
Zachary Seldes, an Indian River County sheriff’s deputy, was badly injured by his P320, which went off just as he removed his body armor.
SIG P320 full size 9mm Pistol (photo from Sig Sauer’s website)
But Florida lawmakers would rather they didn’t. You can’t go dragging decent gun makers into court just because their pistol doesn’t include an external safety and a loaded chamber indicator.
Bill sponsor Jay Turnbull, R-Panama City, said such fripperies are merely “a matter of consumer preference, not product safety defects.”
Indian River County Sheriff Eric Flowers (along with the many law enforcement departments who no longer use Sig Sauer products) begs to differ, saying it’s “scary” that “there are guns going off without manipulation.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee doesn’t care: The bill passed on a bipartisan vote, sending it along its merry way through the process.
At this point, you may be saying SURELY the Legislature is looking at the high cost of insurance in Florida, the lack of affordable housing, polluted water, diminishing wildlife habitat, school funding, climate change, and healthcare.
We poor, naive voters think such things are “important.”
Clearly, we don’t understand what’s important is increasing the government’s ability to use our money to undermine our rights.
No succor for sojournors
Take the $5 billion slush, er, “emergency fund,” the Legislature granted the governor in 2022.
They were largely thinking of hurricanes, fires, floods. DeSantis is largely thinking of rounding up anyone and everyone who looks “wrong,” including legally present asylum seekers, people accused of traffic infractions, even some American citizens, and building detention camps such as the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz,” now polluting the Everglades.
The fund was also used for private jets. And vitamins. And tacos.
You, taxpayer, coughed up for a $2,170 bill at Pedro’s Tacos and Tequila Bar, paid $479,000 for private jet flights to and from the Everglades, and shelled out nearly $93 million to Doodie Calls, a port-a-potty company.
DeSantis, naturally, wants another $500 million to play with.
The Senate is happy to shovel another $250 million at him; the House balked at first, wanting to restrict how the governor can use the money. The chamber backed down, but still wants to review his declarations of “manmade” or “technological” disasters (like immigration).
We’ll see who wins.
Even worse — assuming you take seriously being a citizen of a representative democracy — the Legislature wants to make it harder for you to vote.
Sen. Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, is sponsoring a bill that would demand proof of citizenship to register, although it’s already illegal for non-citizens to vote.
You’d need a REAL ID driver’s license, a birth certificate, or a valid passport; you’d need to prove residency in Florida, too.
For starters, non-citizens do not vote. Between 1999 and 2023, only 77 even tried.
That’s nationwide, not just Florida: 77 out of about 150 million.
(By the way, that number comes from the Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database.)
Illegal opinions
But Grall wants to gin up hysteria over illegals stealing our elections, never mind — say it with me — that THAT DOES NOT HAPPEN.
A cynical person might say this bill is designed to make it hard for the poor and the old, those who may not have a driver’s license or passport and can’t afford or otherwise can’t access a copy of their birth certificate.
Or those who live in Florida as students.
The law says students don’t need a permanent address in Florida: They can use a campus address and register to vote here.
Maybe the real problem is that students don’t vote “correctly.”
Sen. Grall is not crazy about students. Her SB 1632, “Ideologies Inconsistent with American Principles,” allows FDLE to define groups as “domestic terrorist organizations” and mandates that if a student gets involved in one of these organizations, the student will be expelled.
This is the state of our state, y’all: The Legislature wastes your time and money on nonsense such as what to call airports or debatable land thousands of miles away, which bird represents us best, or which books should be banned — stupid stuff that would be funny if only our government wasn’t attacking our liberties.
Which brings us to the worst bill so far, a truly sinister measure to create a secret surveillance agency to spy on Floridians.
HB 945 and its companion SB 1712 would “criminalize dissent,” instituting a counterintelligence outfit within FDLE, dedicated to clamping down on anyone “whose demonstrated actions, views, or opinions are a threat or are inimical to the interests of this state and the United States of America.”
Look carefully at that wording. It’s not just “threatening” actions: Everyone wants to be protected from terrorism.
It’s also “views and opinions.”
Creepily Nixonian
Who decides what “views and opinions” are unacceptable here in the not-so-free, not-so-sunshiny State of Florida?
Who decides what “ideologies” are inimical to “American principles” (whatever those may be)?
If I say we should have universal healthcare, or that the United States is not the best country on earth — all protected speech — will the state Stasi come knocking on my door?
Who decides what the “interests” of the state and the nation might be?
Erin Grall? Ron DeSantis? Donald Trump?
By the way, this isn’t the usual D versus R divide — many Democrats support these bills.
The Florida Trident reports that Florida has been spending a lot of taxpayer dollars on an Israeli outfit called Cellebrite, which, the Trident says, employs “veterans of the country’s elite cyberwarfare unit,” agents who specialize “in data extraction of cell phones and accessing data without the user’s knowledge.”
Perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but this creepily Nixonian business strikes me as profoundly “inconsistent with American principles,” not to mention unconstitutional.
We’re in trouble. And if you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention.
Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our website. AP and Getty images may not be republished. Please see our republishing guidelines for use of any other photos and graphics.
Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee, which probably explains her unhealthy fascination with Florida politics. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
The Plaza Level Rotunda in the Florida Capitol. (Photo by Michael Moline/Florida Phoenix)
It’s just past midway through Florida’s legislative session, and things appear to be going at a slow, but not remotely stately, pace.
What have the people’s representatives accomplished, you ask?
Well, let’s see: Out of 1,800 bills filed, at least two have passed. Might be some more sneaking in by the time you read this.
Come on, legislators can’t be expected to spend their valuable time on frivolities such as improving the lives of Floridians.
The Florida House has voted to name his local airport in Palm Beach County after President Donald Trump. March 28, 2023. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Not in the face of urgent matters such as renaming the Palm Beach International Airport for the Current Occupant of the White House.
It’ll cost $5.5 million, and county residents aren’t necessarily thrilled to bits, but who cares? It’s all about the branding.
As ever, the Legislature is laser-focused on education — mostly how to keep kids from reading books and thinking for themselves.
According to House Republicans, school libraries teem with smut, material “harmful to minors.”
They mean “sexual content” which is apparently the same thing as “pornography.”
The House has passed such nonsense before, and would have gotten away with it if those pesky free-speech advocates and their co-conspirators in the judiciary hadn’t thrown the First Amendment at them and claimed works by Toni Morrison (slavery!), Shakespeare (cross dressing!), James Baldwin (gay!), and Kurt Vonnegut (anti-American! Anti-war!) are actually “great works of art.”
Well, HB 1119‘s sponsors, annoyed the law from last year (and the year before that) was “improperly bypassed,” have declared “artistic merit” irrelevant.
Frightened school boards across the state have responded by yanking many of the literary glories of Western Civilization (which I thought we liked) off library shelves, including Milton’s mighty Christian epic, “Paradise Lost.”
Adam and Eve have sex in Eden. Filth!
Naming rights
Another big bill on the horizon is SB 420, which mandates all schools display portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in a “conspicuous place,” along with “In God We Trust.”
This is part of a “patriotic education” initiative to instill in children reverence for the United States, whether they like it or not.
As George Bernard Shaw (probably) said, “Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.”
At the same level of significance to the well-being of the citizenry: What to call the illegally occupiedterritory, the heart of a future Palestinian state, on the western side of the River Jordan?
The Florida House does not want you to call it the “West Bank.”
They even have a bipartisan bill to, as Rep. Mike Gottlieb, D-Davie, says, “right a wrong,” claiming not calling it Judea and Samaria is “a ban on Jewish heritage” and the Florida Legislature must “restore the history and dignity of the people who are indigenous to the region.”
There are a couple of problems with this, problems which could have been avoided if only somebody in the Florida Legislature actually bothered to learn something:
“The people indigenous to the region” include Palestinians, descendants of the Canaanites who established cities there 4,000 years ago.
Palestinians and Israelis are not divided by ethnicity, or genetics, but culture. While many Israeli Jews also have European ancestry, they are more closely linked to the people their government keeps bombing.
In a now-retracted2001 article available on the National Institutes of Health site, scholars point out that “archaeologic and genetic data support that both Jews and Palestinians came from the ancient Canaanites, who extensively mixed with Egyptians, Mesopotamian, and Anatolian peoples in ancient times.”
Birds and pistols
Never mind. We have plenty of other big issues here in Florida, such as who will win the coveted title of state avian?
The House has approved a measure to replace the mockingbird with the American Flamingo.
It’s now up to the Senate.
Very dramatic. We await the vote with anticipation and excitement.
Almost as dramatic, a passionate effort to protect our cruelly oppressed firearm manufacturing friends.
Sig Sauer needs relief from careless cops and others objecting to the way their P320 pistol fires without them touching the trigger or even removing the gun from their holsters.
Zachary Seldes, an Indian River County sheriff’s deputy, was badly injured by his P320, which went off just as he removed his body armor.
SIG P320 full size 9mm Pistol (photo from Sig Sauer’s website)
But Florida lawmakers would rather they didn’t. You can’t go dragging decent gun makers into court just because their pistol doesn’t include an external safety and a loaded chamber indicator.
Bill sponsor Jay Turnbull, R-Panama City, said such fripperies are merely “a matter of consumer preference, not product safety defects.”
Indian River County Sheriff Eric Flowers (along with the many law enforcement departments who no longer use Sig Sauer products) begs to differ, saying it’s “scary” that “there are guns going off without manipulation.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee doesn’t care: The bill passed on a bipartisan vote, sending it along its merry way through the process.
At this point, you may be saying SURELY the Legislature is looking at the high cost of insurance in Florida, the lack of affordable housing, polluted water, diminishing wildlife habitat, school funding, climate change, and healthcare.
We poor, naive voters think such things are “important.”
Clearly, we don’t understand what’s important is increasing the government’s ability to use our money to undermine our rights.
No succor for sojournors
Take the $5 billion slush, er, “emergency fund,” the Legislature granted the governor in 2022.
They were largely thinking of hurricanes, fires, floods. DeSantis is largely thinking of rounding up anyone and everyone who looks “wrong,” including legally present asylum seekers, people accused of traffic infractions, even some American citizens, and building detention camps such as the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz,” now polluting the Everglades.
The fund was also used for private jets. And vitamins. And tacos.
You, taxpayer, coughed up for a $2,170 bill at Pedro’s Tacos and Tequila Bar, paid $479,000 for private jet flights to and from the Everglades, and shelled out nearly $93 million to Doodie Calls, a port-a-potty company.
DeSantis, naturally, wants another $500 million to play with.
The Senate is happy to shovel another $250 million at him; the House balked at first, wanting to restrict how the governor can use the money. The chamber backed down, but still wants to review his declarations of “manmade” or “technological” disasters (like immigration).
We’ll see who wins.
Even worse — assuming you take seriously being a citizen of a representative democracy — the Legislature wants to make it harder for you to vote.
Sen. Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, is sponsoring a bill that would demand proof of citizenship to register, although it’s already illegal for non-citizens to vote.
You’d need a REAL ID driver’s license, a birth certificate, or a valid passport; you’d need to prove residency in Florida, too.
For starters, non-citizens do not vote. Between 1999 and 2023, only 77 even tried.
That’s nationwide, not just Florida: 77 out of about 150 million.
(By the way, that number comes from the Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database.)
Illegal opinions
But Grall wants to gin up hysteria over illegals stealing our elections, never mind — say it with me — that THAT DOES NOT HAPPEN.
A cynical person might say this bill is designed to make it hard for the poor and the old, those who may not have a driver’s license or passport and can’t afford or otherwise can’t access a copy of their birth certificate.
Or those who live in Florida as students.
The law says students don’t need a permanent address in Florida: They can use a campus address and register to vote here.
Maybe the real problem is that students don’t vote “correctly.”
Sen. Grall is not crazy about students. Her SB 1632, “Ideologies Inconsistent with American Principles,” allows FDLE to define groups as “domestic terrorist organizations” and mandates that if a student gets involved in one of these organizations, the student will be expelled.
This is the state of our state, y’all: The Legislature wastes your time and money on nonsense such as what to call airports or debatable land thousands of miles away, which bird represents us best, or which books should be banned — stupid stuff that would be funny if only our government wasn’t attacking our liberties.
Which brings us to the worst bill so far, a truly sinister measure to create a secret surveillance agency to spy on Floridians.
HB 945 and its companion SB 1712 would “criminalize dissent,” instituting a counterintelligence outfit within FDLE, dedicated to clamping down on anyone “whose demonstrated actions, views, or opinions are a threat or are inimical to the interests of this state and the United States of America.”
Look carefully at that wording. It’s not just “threatening” actions: Everyone wants to be protected from terrorism.
It’s also “views and opinions.”
Creepily Nixonian
Who decides what “views and opinions” are unacceptable here in the not-so-free, not-so-sunshiny State of Florida?
Who decides what “ideologies” are inimical to “American principles” (whatever those may be)?
If I say we should have universal healthcare, or that the United States is not the best country on earth — all protected speech — will the state Stasi come knocking on my door?
Who decides what the “interests” of the state and the nation might be?
Erin Grall? Ron DeSantis? Donald Trump?
By the way, this isn’t the usual D versus R divide — many Democrats support these bills.
The Florida Trident reports that Florida has been spending a lot of taxpayer dollars on an Israeli outfit called Cellebrite, which, the Trident says, employs “veterans of the country’s elite cyberwarfare unit,” agents who specialize “in data extraction of cell phones and accessing data without the user’s knowledge.”
Perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but this creepily Nixonian business strikes me as profoundly “inconsistent with American principles,” not to mention unconstitutional.
We’re in trouble. And if you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention.
Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our website. AP and Getty images may not be republished. Please see our republishing guidelines for use of any other photos and graphics.
Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee, which probably explains her unhealthy fascination with Florida politics. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
DIANE ROBERTS