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Beautiful Stockholm at night, looking west towards Gamla Stan

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Is Kristin Jacobs poised to become 'the last straw' and the cynical face for voters of the ever-expanding Broward candidate residency scandal? Yet MORE residency problems in Broward County per Media Tracker Florida: Jacobs wants to run for FL House 96 while living in House 93, even while convincing evidence suggests that at least 5 current members of the Broward Legislative Delegation may be knowingly breaking state law, practically daring Broward State's Attorney Mike Satz & Co. to actually do something; Videos by Local10 investigative reporter Bob Norman show he's NOT afraid to go after South Florida's unethical pols and ask the hard questions



Is Kristin Jacobs poised to become 'the last straw' and the cynical face for voters of the ever-expanding Broward candidate residency scandal? Yet MORE residency problems in Broward County per Media Tracker Florida: Jacobs wants to run for FL House 96 while living in House 93, even while convincing evidence suggests that at least 5 current members of the Broward Legislative Delegation may be knowingly breaking state law, practically daring Broward State's Attorney Mike Satz & Co. to actually do something; Videos by Local10 investigative reporter Bob Norman show he's NOT afraid to go after South Florida's unethical pols and ask the hard questions 
Could Kristen Jacobs really be dumb enough to think that she can get away with it, too?
Yes.


Media Tracker Florida
Florida House Candidate Kristin Jacobs Tries to Hide Residency Problems
By Tom Lauder 
July 1, 2013
House of Representatives District 96 candidate Kristin Jacobs asked state election officials to hide her address from the public in the wake of new evidence that suggests she lives outside District 96.
In an affidavit filed with the State of Florida, Jacobs asked state elections officials to redact her home address. The Florida elections website shows Jacobs’ paperwork for the District 96 seat, but her address is blacked out. Jacobs filed for the District 96 seat, but numerous public records show Jacobs actually lives in District 93, which is represented by George Moraitis (R-Fort Lauderdale).
Read the rest of the post at:

Anyone want to guess how many Broward state legislators actually LIVE full-time in the district they were elected to? Anyone?

 It's another one of Broward State's Attorney Mike Satz's lasting legacies to all of us as Broward citizens that he and his crew are unwilling to make an example out of someone breaking the law he is sworn to enforce and prosecute lawbreakers.

Maybe if Sazt & Company had actually gone hammer-and-tong after one of these legislative miscreants a few years ago who thought they could pull the rug over voters' eyes and knowingly violate the Florida Constitution -and told Broward County Commissioners that he'd 'no longer accept their wink-wink residency, too- and abandoned their See No Evil/Hear No Evil/Speak No Evil mindset, the problem wouldn't have mushroomed to the extent that it clearly has while he has been in charge and done NOTHING.

 Yes, Black & White carpetbaggers everywhere you look in Broward!

Unethical politicians hiding in plain-sight are Bob Norman's favorite kind of people to bring the hammer down on: Joe Gibbons, Perry Thurston, Jared Moskowitz, Hazelle Rogers, Maria Sachs...

 Local10 News video: 
 Broward Commissioner's residency claims don't hold up, 
North Miami mayor sued over city's residency rule
Bob Norman, Reporter, bnorman@Local10.com
Published On: Jun 25 2013 03:07:21 PM EDT   Updated On: Jun 25 2013 11:00:00 PM EDT, 
video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player, 
Related article at: http://www.local10.com/news/more-elected-officials-living-outside-districts/-/1717324/20709398/-/pok1gcz/-/index.html


Local10 News video: 
Florida Democratic leader caught living outside district
Author: Bob Norman, Reporter, bnorman@Local10.com

Published On: Jun 12 2013 03:34:55 PM EDT   Updated On: Jun 12 2013 11:00:00 PM EDT

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player

 Related article: http://www.local10.com/news/investigation-finds-elected-officials-with-houses-outside-their-districts/-/1717324/20516720/-/bwp40jz/-/index.html

Local10 News video: 
Senator caught on video staying outside district, Maria Sachs has home in Boca Raton, claims to reside in Lauderdale condo
Bob Norman, Reporter, bnorman@Local10.com
Published On: Jun 26 2013 04:45:07 PM EDT   Updated On: Jun 26 2013 11:00:00 PM EDT
video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player
Related article at http://www.local10.com/news/south-floridabased-state-senators-residency-debated/-/1717324/20726464/-/r2lhe4z/-/index.html








And as if there weren't already serious ethical issues involving her, Florida state Senator Maria Sachs sets a now LOW in unethical behavior among South Florida pols.
 Democrat Sachs, who defeated Ellyn Bogdanoff in 2012 and who was endorsed by the Miami Herald, is so lazy & unethical that she even failed to disclose her legislative salary on her required disclosure forms three years in a row.

Palm Beach Post

Editorial: Sachs case shows why ethics laws remain too lax.

Posted: 4:33 p.m. Sunday, June 16, 2013
BY ANDREW MARRA - PALM BEACH POST STAFF WRITER

For three years, state Sen. Maria Sachs, D-Delray Beach, skirted state law by failing to publicly disclose all of her financial assets on mandatory state disclosure forms. When questions were raised before her election last year, she brushed them off as “negative campaigning” and said she had not even bothered to go back and look at the reports.

The Florida Commission on Ethics was not so dismissive. Last week, it announced that it had found probable cause that Sen. Sachs had violated Florida’s disclosure rules for elected officials by not properly reporting her net worth or her ownership of a Tallahassee condo. According to the commission, she failed even to disclose her legislative salary.

These transgressions occurred from 2008 to 2010, and by 2011 Sen. Sachs had begun including the omitted information in her new financial reports. After the ethics commission began an investigation, Sen. Sachs also filed amended forms for the years in question. As a result, the ethics commission said it will not seek to impose fines or take further action.

The senator has said the omissions were unintentional. Accidental or not, she is hardly the first elected official to fail to properly disclose her finances as required by law. Indeed, last week the ethics commission faulted four other current and former legislators for similar failings.

Questions about Sen. Sachs’ financial disclosures were raised last October by Sid Dinerstein, then the chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party. His complaint to the ethics commission was baldly political, but Sen. Sachs was wrong to dismiss it out of hand. The requirement that candidates and elected officials disclose their assets reveals to voters any agendas that otherwise would be hidden, and is so fundamental a concept that it is included in the state’s constitution.

The Legislature passed a sweeping ethics reform package this year. But the bill actually makes it easier for officials to correct flawed financial disclosure reports without penalties, and it failed to give the ethics commission the much-needed ability to initiate its own investigations, even into disclosure reports that are obviously flawed. Until that authority is granted, one of the few ways for it to investigate omissions like Sen. Sachs’ will be politically motivated complaints.

Andrew Marra for The Post Editorial Board

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After her victory, 
"State Democratic Party Chairman Rod Smith sent out a statement congratulating Sachs on her campaign and called her a "rising star" in the state Democratic Party."


 The news directors at CBS4, NBC-6 and 7News and the editors at the Miami Herald need to wake-up from their summer coma and admit that they've been completely asleep on this scandal from the very beginning, and need to acknowledge that there are LOTS of people all over South Florida who HAVE noticed this failure.
And also noticed their complete failure to make a serious effort to catch-up.
Why?

 Why so much resistance to doing hard news?
Of pushing back against elected officials and putting them in their place?
Why are you in your job if you don't want to cover and investigate what people are genuinely interested in that is also important to society?

 And don't think we forgot about you down in Miami-Dade, Frank Artiles, and the way blogger Elaine de Valle caught you a few years ago still living at the home you said you would move out of if you got elected.
My April 21, 20111 blog post on this subject was titled, Elaine de Valle's Political Cortadito blog channels Sherlock Holmes and catches the crook red-handed: FL Rep. Frank Artiles. Blogger 1, Lying Pol 0
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/elaine-de-valles-political-cortadito.html

 Speaking of how many of Broward's legislators live elsewhere, why is it that the website of the Florida Conference of Black State Legislators is managed by a company located in Spain? http://fcbsl.org/  http://www.arsys.es/
When you go to a list of members, on my computer Google Translate pops-up and asks you if you want to translate Spanish. http://www.fcbsl.com/#!/members 
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Sunday, June 30, 2013

Gettysburg, a place where you really feel the full weight of history all around you: the history we've experienced and the very different one we could've had instead; On the 150th anniversary of the battle, the continuing wonder that is MGM's Oscar-nominated 1955 documentary two-reel short, 'Battle of Gettysburg,' narrated by Leslie Nielsen; History Channel's 2011 documentary "Gettysburg" narrated by Sam Rockwell

If you've never been to Gettysburg yourself, much less, like me, visited after spending LOTS of time brushing-up on the various aspects of the 1863 three-day battle that you once knew pretty well, but which has since gotten a bit hazy, it's hard to fully comprehend what took place there. 
Even more so then when as a kid without much knowledge or context, I visited Shiloh around 1967, and actually met someone whose grandfather had fought there.

How so many different aspects of our everyday life -as Americans- we now take for granted that could've been completely different if this battle had turned out differently.

In some ways, the more you actually know in detail about what happened there before visiting, the even harder it is to imagine, since when you are walking around there on a very warm day, all the details just seem like... well, an unbearable weight.

Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg by tour guide Gary Kross

Little Round Top at Gettysburg by tour guide Gary Kross

Five minutes from disaster!

As far as I'm concerned, nobody should ever contemplate running for president of this country who hasn't spent some quality time there absorbing the atmosphere and the might-have-beens.
And talking about it publicly.

It's a genuine eye-opener in ways that you can't really imagine until you actually see it yourself, away from the tours, standing in the middle of an immense field.

The other thing that immediately is noticed by many first-time visitors are the large number of foreign visitors you meet there at the battleground, reminding you all over again -as if you needed reminding- that many other people far from this small Pennsylvania town realize its monumental importance, too.


Gettysburg - Pickett's Charge: The Plan

Video History Today video: Picketts Charge, Gettysburg, PA
-Gives present-day orientation of what took place and how it looks now.

Civil War historian Edwin Bearss - Receding Tide (National Geographic)


Gettysburg National Military Park homepage

See other present day video of Gettysburg and other historical events at

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Repeal1913 YouTube Channel video - MGM's 1955 documentary short: 'Battle of Gettysburg,' narrated by Leslie Nielsen. Filmed entirely on location at Gettysburg National Military Park, Pennsylvania. 
Director: Herman Hoffman, Producer/Screenwriter: Dore Schary, with Music Adapted and Conducted by Adolph Deutsch, Orchestrated by Alexander Courage.
1 of 3. Uploaded August 16, 2008. http://youtu.be/byG8wb1Pwzo
AcmeFilmCorporation YouTube Channel video: Gettysburg (2011).
History Channel Civil War documentary depicts the battle thru the eyes of eight men. Uploaded March 20, 2013. Director: Adrian Moat, Narrated by Sam Rockwell.
http://youtu.be/WEZrAmFSCEA
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Saturday, June 29, 2013

Claire Berlinski is our prescient eyes-and-ears in Istanbul, front-and-center on the battle between the past and the future -and what comes next- in a very important place: Turkey. With a smart and knowing Twitter feed that's exploding -and golden for journalists- she's now wrapped up the past few months in one great piece in The Tower magazine: "The Gezi Diaries: Can We Still Call Turkey Civilized?"; @ClaireBerlinski


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For months I've been closely following American writer Claire Berlinski's incisive writing from Istanbul, via her various online pieces and her very intensive and very popular Twitter feed, @ClaireBerlinski

 Berlinki's like a one-woman wire service the way the timely and useful information just flows in and out of her feed every few seconds for what often seems like hours at a time.
It's quite impressive in its scope in ways that Florida media websites and Twitter feeds aren't and never have been, but ought to be, given their greater resources.
Yet she's the one who pulls it off.

 Berlinski reminds us again thru her hard work and diligence that the wonders of technology are useless unless the people using it are both savvy and energetic, not one-note town criers.

That Berlinski lives four blocks from Taksim Square and knows the ins-and-outs of everything, plus speaks the language and is NOT one of the many foreign correspondents there who are forever having to get everything second-hand even while they're eyewitnesses, gives her the effect of knowing things before they happen.
In my opinion, she's lapping the field, which is why I've sent multiple emails out over the past two months with links to particular tweets of hers that were prophetic and spot-on.

Now that she's been front-and-center for months on what's really going down in Taksim Square, and with Prime Minister Erdogan's imperious march to the past, just as Turkey finally has the well-educated and dynamic population it's long needed to take its full place on the stage, the West's fear of Turkey finally going a bridge-too-far -and a subsequent brain drain- is more than just an idle threat as she tells below in a great essay that captures what's really animating the push against Erdogan.

 Here's a taste:
According to legend, when the great historian Robert Conquest was asked if he wanted to rename the updated edition of The Great Terror, his history of the Stalinist purges, he replied, “How about, I Told You So, You F***ing Fools.”
And that’s what I’m saying now to every single lazy journalist and policy wonk, professional sycophant, diplomat and idiot pundit who’s never so much as visited this place, the duly-funded social scientists and craven Western politicians and everyone else who for years swallowed Erdoğan’s nonsense and helped to manufacture the fantasy that Turkey was getting more and more democratic by the day.

That's what I'm talking about!

The Tower magazine
The Gezi Diaries: Can We Still Call Turkey Civilized?
By Claire Berlinski
Some see it as a modern democracy with an Islamic tint, an improving, reforming country. But if you were in Istanbul during the last month and a half, you’d have seen something completely different: a violent, authoritarian, increasingly suppressive and brutal regime. Tales from the Dark Side, Turkish style.
I’ve always been a critic of armchair reporting. But when your armchair is four blocks away from Taksim Square, it has one of the best views of the uproar in Istanbul any diligent reporter could ask for. I’m now able to calculate with great precision the time between the beginning of the screaming, the sound of the shot, and the entry of the gas through my window. It’s two and twelve seconds respectively.
Read the rest of her great essay at 
http://www.thetower.org/article/the-gezi-diaries-erdogans-turkey-goes-medieval/
------

 The Tower, http://www.thetower.org/ You can see the whole Middle East from here

 Claire Berlinski, @ClaireBerlinski, https://twitter.com/ClaireBerlinski

 http://www.berlinski.com/
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How do you solve a problem like Marco Rubio? With lots of fact-filled Kaus-centricity! Mickey Kaus continues to write honestly about Rubio while Florida news media remains too cowed to report truth about him; After 19 days of Marco Rubio censoring his own Twitter feed, @MarcoRubio, just like the Miami Herald's two week #newsblackout of anti-amnesty, anti-Rubio news in-print and online, Rubio tweeted, well, more piety; @kausmickey, #RubiosFolly


Rush Limbaugh on reluctance of Republicans to openly criticize Marco Rubio for his pro-amnesty first position. Uploaded June 28, 2013. http://youtu.be/gaFXjKb7UYE.
Caller to Rush Limbaugh Show from El Paso, Texas area relates conversation he had with illegal aliens from Mexico about what they saw as the downside to Schumer-Rubio bill from their perspective: more competition for menial jobs from coming surge of people across border, people who don't want to become citizens. Uploaded June 28, 2013. http://youtu.be/HetlXjLrhqY
How do you solve a problem like Marco Rubio? With lots of fact-filled Kaus-centricity! Mickey Kaus continues to write honestly about Rubio while Florida news media remains too cowed to report truth about him; After 19 days of Marco Rubio censoring his own Twitter feed, @MarcoRubio, just like the Miami Herald's two week #newsblackout of anti-amnesty, anti-Rubio news in-print and online, Rubio tweeted, well, more piety; @kausmickey, #RubiosFolly
Unlocked! 
Now you can finally see for yourself what the Miami Herald has desperately trying to keep quiet about in Ryan Lizza's New Yorker column for the past two weeks, where never was heard a discouraging word -about Rubio (and the Herald's) pro-amnesty first policy.

The New Yorker
GETTING TO MAYBE
Inside the Gang of Eight’s immigration deal
By Ryan Lizza
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/06/24/130624fa_fact_lizza

Here's what Rubio wrote after 19 days of nothing on Twitter:





















































































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Friday, June 28, 2013

More intentional Hallandale Beach City Hall misdirection & deception re HB CRA - Media Trackers Florida has more proof of the unseemly behavior at City Hall that HB citizens recognize on sight from past experience: "Hallandale Beach Officials Failed to Document Contacts with Florida Lobbyist"

The chickens are finally coming home to roost in Hallandale Beach and they want an honest audit done on the city's scandal-plagued Community Redevelopment Agency, (CRA), so citizens can finally find out where all the millions of dollars really went. Above, a scene from North Beach, Hallandale Beach, FL. February 14, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier. © 2013 Hallandale Beach Blog, All Rights Reserved.
For reasons that I hardly even need explain to most of you regular readers of the blog at this point in the continuing controversy that is the scandalous Hallandale Beach CRA, and the efforts of the city's elected officials and top administrators to suppress any effort by Hallandale Beach citizens to get an honest audit of the CRA, this email of mine was sent this morning to lots of interested parties throughout Florida with an interest in making sure that South Florida taxpayers are not intentionally made monkeys of forever. 

 Besides the trustworthy and hardworking elements of the local press corps -a diminishing number to be sure- lots of Broward's most well-informed citizens, civic activists, bloggers and a few selected elected officials, were Florida Governor Rick Scott, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Florida CFO Jeff Atwater and Florida state Senators Jack Latvala, Jeremy Ring and Joseph Abruzzo, as well as Broward Inspector General John W. Scott.

 Most of you reading this already know perfectly well why the state legislators who are supposed to represent the best interests of Hallandale Beach's citizens in Tallahassee, state Senator Eleanor Sobel and state Rep. Joe Gibbons, are NOT part of the list.

 Certainly things would be easier if they were anything but the colossal failures they've proven themselves to be over so many years on so many issues of interest to this community.
Not just unhelpful, but actual obstacles.

No, our small community's collective misfortune is that Gibbons and Sobel's perfectly dreadful track records in office, individually and collectively, over SO many years, consistently shows that they DON'T put our community's best-interests first, but rather their own, especially their own political futures.
That dismal track record makes them completely untrustworthy in every important respect that counts, especially when it comes to getting the truth for HB's beleaguered citizens out of a City Hall led by their imperious pal, Joy Cooper.

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Hallandale Beach Officials Failed to Document Contacts with Florida Lobbyist
By: Tom Lauder 
June 27, 2013

Just to confirm the validity of this post above, not that any is needed, since the facts are crystal clear, as of 5 p.m. Thursday, I'd still NOT received the copies of the text messages sent between lobbyist Judy Stern and Hallandale Beach Mayor Joy Cooper and HB City Manager Renee Miller that I requested in writing on June 12th.

Text messages that had one central goal in mind: preventing an honest and accurate audit of the Hallandale Beach CRA so that HB residents, taxpayers and small business owners could FINALLY find out where the millions of CRA dollars really flowed all these years with no genuine oversight or follow-up by officials.
Officials who were, in theory, supposed to do that as part of their official responsibilities -but didn't.

But as we have all learned the hard way, oversight and follow-up were simply words that did NOT exist in their lexicon for YEARS, with important files missing left-and-right and many documents missing or inaccurate in the files that actually were present.

In this most-recent case, Cooper, Miller and Stern were aghast about a June 4th public request to the entire Broward County Commission requesting an audit of the CRA performed via Broward County Auditor Evan Lukic's office.

Well, you already know what transpired, who said what and who did nothing at all to help HB residents get that long-overdue public accounting that's been denied us all these years by the same powers-that-be at HB City Hall who didn't want any more public scrutiny.

But then this isn't even the first time all year that public disclosure of public information has been a quaint and abstract idea in Hallandale Beach.

Yes, as previously mentioned, the same poorly-run city that DIDN'T publicly disclose its legally-required official Contacts list for well OVER two months, even while city officials, elected and administrators -inc.  the Mayor, City Manager and CRA Director- were meeting with real estate developers, at least one of whom, Stephen Riemer publicly admitted at a March 18th CRA meeting that he wanted the city to (illegally) use its power of eminent domain to buy-out small businesses near properties he  already owns near the FEC tracks, in order that he can build a large development there.

Presumably, after he and the city have chased-out all other existing businesses, however they can to help him personally, no doubt using CRA funds.
That's illegal in this state, of course, as the FL Legislature has made clear, but then lots of federal, state and local laws are routinely ignored in Hallandale Beach with the current crew in charge the past few years, with my blog an accurate chronicle of their years of mendacity and anti-democratic fervor.

As you might well imagine, those small businesses owners resent NOT knowing what's going on and NOT being able to get honest and forthright answers from the very people who are supposed to be working for them, not against them.

But here's what they see with their own eyes, right in front of their businesses: promised, overdue road improvements by the city delayed several times without any sort of public explanation, and after hearing Riemer declare war on them at a public meeting, they can't help but wonder if it's being done intentionally by the city to drive the businesses out, just as Riemer wants, using CRA funds.

Lots and lots of curious coincidences that always turn out the same way, eventually add-up to an interesting fact pattern that's hard to ignore.

There was deception everywhere when Riemer spoke at that March 18th HB CRA meeting against the city's long-promised funding of that CRA-funded road improvement program, which took place without the public knowing anything at all about those private meetings he'd held with city officials because the city didn't post them.

Though they had the opportunity to do the right thing, albeit, after-the-fact, and publicly disclose to the public that they'd met privately with Riemer, the city officials who met with Riemer never disclosed it. 

They acted like this was the first time they were hearing anything at all about Riemer's plans or concerns.

Yes, disingenuous is the word that comes to mind. 
But that's how things continue to roll routinely in a city where the spirit and letter of Florida's  Sunshine Laws are routinely ignored by the very people in charge of following the laws and enforcing them.

In case the link within the story above proves hard to pull up, it's at

 -----
Not in email:

 Among the many recent predicates for the email above that help explain it, especially the situation on the city's Fashion Row area -N.E. First Avenue- that has, unfortunately, pitted small business owners against the City of Hallandale Beach, whose employees and elected officials have been arrogant, deceptive, and intentionally duplicitous to them, while blaming others for their own actions, are the following:

TUESDAY, MARCH 12, 2013
Future of Hallandale Beach's Fashion Row Arts District on N.E. First Avenue to be discussed at an important 5:30 p.m. meeting on Wednesday at Dekka; What, if any, are insurance executive and developer Stephen L. Riemer's strategic plans for the future of the N.E. First Avenue area, alongside the F.E.C. tracks?; More cases of déjà vu on Hallandale Beach's woeful website


FRIDAY, MARCH 15, 2013
Entrepreneur Luciana Preguerman and other Fashion Row shop owners in Hallandale Beach draw a line in the sand over the City Commission/CRA threatening to sabotage an already-approved and budgeted plan for street improvements they've been desperately waiting for, and are livid over the new CRA Director's inability to logically articulate why they're considering such a move. They want answers before Monday night's important CRA meeting at 5 p.m.

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