The Fall Season is upon us and because that also includes elections this year, we may lose track of the really important things to which we should pay attention.

It’s that time of the year when the Professional Firefighters and Paramedics of Palm Beach County start their annual boot drive to raise money for muscular dystrophy.

Muscular dystrophy is a devastating disease that affects children and adults.  There are many subtypes of this disease and symptoms vary making it often very difficult to diagnose.  There is no known cure for this disease at this time but with money for research in no small part due to the efforts of dedicated individuals such as our firefighters and paramedics a cure may be found and benefit future generations.

So, when you see the boots in our community, please remember it’s not how much you give; since every penny counts in fighting this devastating illness.  There are over a quarter of a million kids and adults living with this disease so chances are you may know someone who has it or who may develop it.

For more information on muscular dystrophy see web sites below:

US National Library of Medicine

Muscular Dystrophy Association

Teens Health and Muscular Dystrophy

When Governor Reubin Askew took office in 1971, he was one of the driving forces behind changing the process to be followed when selecting judges to fill vacancies.  Judicial Qualifications Commissions were established to recommend judges to fill vacancies on the bench.  In 1972, the Florida Constitution was amended to include this change.  Following multiple scandals involving the Florida Supreme Court during the 1970’s, an additional amendment establishing “merit retention” was added to the state constitution and established that judges would run for retention based on their records every six years.

In the mid-1970’s, the Florida Supreme Court was in turmoil.  Not because they had decided a case that the Governor disagreed with, but because multiple members of the court were being investigated for improprieties while serving on the bench.  No one disagrees that improprieties while serving on the bench are proper grounds for removal from the bench.

Two of the justices, Hal Dekle and David McCain, resigned during the investigation, which halted the impeachment inquiry.  A third justice of the court, Joseph Boyd, was forced to undergo complete mental and physical testing to retain his seat on the bench.

Justice McCain was accused of lobbying a lower court to overturn a bribery conviction of one of his supporters and accepting a $10,000 bribe to do so.  He resigned the day before the Florida House would have voted to impeach him.  He was eventually disbarred from the practice of law.  While the Florida Supreme Court was considering a decision involving a multimillion dollar utility lawsuit, Justice Boyd was accused of soliciting a memorandum from counsel for the utility company, sharing that memorandum with Justice Dekle and using that memorandum in rendering the opinion for the court.  The JQC investigated the accusations and recommended Justices Boyd and Dekle be removed from the bench.  Another panel reviewed the findings of the JQC and recommended in a 6-1 vote to publicly reprimand Justice Boyd rather than remove him from his seat on the Court.

Importantly, the singular vote for removal was made by retired Supreme Court justice Alto Adams and as part of this dissenting opinion he wrote, “…his misconduct was so great and continued over so long a period of time as to show a complete disregard for the dignity and welfare of the office which he occupies.”

That is the type of behavior that should cause voters to want to remove someone from the Florida Supreme Court and these scandals serve as the most poignant example of why judges and justices should be removed from the bench.  Disagreeing with the Governor, or the party in power, quite simply is not.

Three Supreme Court Justices are up for retention in November:  Barbara Pariente, Fred Lewis and Peggy Quince.

The GOP has announced a plan to unseat these three Supreme Court Justices in order to gain control of the Florida Supreme Court.

It is clear that the intention of extremist political groups, such as Restore Justice 2012, is to slander the superior reputations of these Justices, thus paving the way for Republican Governor Rick Scott to replace them.

Voters should educate themselves about these Justices Barbara Pariente, Fred Lewis and Peggy Quince.  Don’t be fooled or mislead by the current campaign to unseat these three Justices.

I feel confident the voters in the State of Florida will see that the retention system they put into effect in 1976 will be upheld and not undone by any Grass-Roots group on behalf of extremists manipulation of one party.

The voters will surely see the “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Who wants to go to a sporting event, where it is predetermined which team wins and loses?   Imagine a baseball game where a select group of people get together behind closed doors, and decide the score before the first pitch is thrown.  Such a “bought and paid for” game is not fair. While people may root for their home team, an impartial umpire must call the shots. Our judiciary is not any different.  Just as you can’t have the same person act as coach and referee, you can’t have a judge spearheaded by special interests make the law.

Restore Justice 2012, a conservative grass-roots group, takes an extremely dangerous stance on justice.  The pitch of this ultra-right wing movement is that “if we don’t like the way you vote, we will unseat you.”  Unlike the United States Supreme Court, the seven justices on the Florida Supreme Court do not have lifetime appointments; two years after they are named to the court by the governor, they are up for retention or removal by voters.  After that, they face voters every six years in what is called merit retention.

This year, three justices are up for retention in November: Barbara Pariente, Fred Lewis and Peggy Quince.  Since their appointment by Democratic Governor, Lawton Chiles, these individuals have dedicated their lives to the judiciary and justice. However, Restore Justice 2012, and its executive communications director, Jesse Phillips, is going to bat this November to unseat these judges from the bench. The group contends that the judiciary should be controlled by one party, the Republicans, and are throwing money and resources into getting their single issue conservative players on base.

The intent of merit retention voting is to ensure a bench of competent, ethical, law abiding decision-makers.  It is not designed to unseat justices because one does not like the way a justice votes on a particular issue.  In fact, the day that merit retention is used for this purpose is the day we cease to have an independent judiciary. Everyday our justices are faced with a huge dilemma: Do we do what’s right by our constitution? Or do we do what’s popular? Unfortunately, groups, like Restore Justice 2012, continue to place justices in fear of voting for what’s right.

Beware!  Groups like Restore Justice 2012 hide behind words like justice and democracy.  However, their goal is simple; unseat judges that will follow the law and replace them with ones that will vote according to the political philosophy of those in power at the time.

The November election will be an historic one, where the three justices must give their all just to stay in the game. However, it will be the voters who ultimately decide whether Justice Pariente, Fred Lewis and Peggy Quince will be able to continue providing a balanced playing field.

Just in case even the slightest doubt remained about whether extremists have succeeded in high jacking control of the Republican Party, Friday’s announcement of opposition to the retention of three Florida Supreme Court Justices eliminates that doubt.

Justices Pariente, Quince, and Lewis just received 90% approval ratings in a statewide poll of all Florida lawyers from across the full political spectrum. Those most qualified to judge the competence, integrity, and impartiality of Supreme Court Justices have overwhelmingly expressed their confidence in these respected members of the State’s highest court.

So why would the Republican Party leadership throw its weight behind the efforts to unseat three dedicated public servants?

The answer is the desire of a far right wing minority to establish unrestrained POWER-unbalanced power- power free of the constraints of the Florida and U.S. Constitutions.

This effort is nothing less than a frontal assault on the independence of the judiciary, and as John Adams observed in 1774, without an independent judiciary “we have no other fortification against being ridden like horses, fleeced like sheep, worked like cattle and fed and clothed like swine and hounds.”

Casting an informed vote will preserve the independence of our judges and keep all of us from being turned into a bunch of farm animals.

Do cigarette manufacturers know their customers, or do cigarette manufacturers know their customers?

A recent article in the New York Times found that “low-income smokers in New York spend 25% of their income on cigarettes.”

While statistics like this might come as a surprise to regular folks like you and me (and seem far-fetched), the notion that an addicted smoker will continue to buy cigarettes to feed his addiction – no matter what the cost – is old news to cigarette makers (http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/action/document/page?tid=leq11b00).  As one Philip Morris research scientist so matter-of-factly put it in 1969, during a presentation to the Philip Morris Board of Directors:

The cigarette will even preempt food in times of scarcity on the smoker’s priority list.

Cigarette makers have been studying smokers for years.  And they have used this research to design their products.  But don’t take my word for that – all one must do is look at the previously confidential internal business records of the major cigarette makers to find out about the lengths they went to study their customers.  And why they did it.

Of all the previously confidential cigarette business records, one of the documents that sums up this aspect of cigarette/smoker research the best, in my opinion, is a Philip Morris business record from 1977.  The document’s title alone is simple, yet informative – SMOKER PSYCHOLOGY PROGRAM REVIEW – and can’t help but conjure up images as cigarette researchers as evil puppet masters who have taken it upon themselves to learn more about smokers than even smokers know about themselves.  And if the title alone doesn’t bring the puppet-master visual to mind, let me highlight some things that the author – who wrote this believing it would never see the light of day – states:

I’ve taken this as an occasion to review our basic premises – to ask

myself why are we doing the things we’re doing.

First, every undertaking has to have some mission.  I would state

our charter from Philip Morris in this fashion:

Study the psychology of the smoker in search

of information that can increase corporate

profits.

Our charter is unique in that we are given the smoker to study.

Meanwhile, back in the lab, we continue to ask what it is that the

smoker derives from smoking.

I’ll try to explain the conceptual model that we are using.

We sell a product that is bought often and used from 10 to 60

times a day, day in and day out.

You are all familiar with Pavlov’s dog.  Present a dog food,

he salivates.  Ring a bell each time you present food, and in

due time you can ring the bell without the food and he will

salivate.  This is classical conditioning.

Operant conditioning is quite different.  Consider the classical

operant experiment.  Put a hungry rat in a cage.  Put a lever in

a cage.  Make it so that a push on the lever delivers a pellet of

food.  In its random movements the rat will push the lever.

He’ll get the pellet.  The rat will soon associate lever pushing

with food.

Consider the smoker.  Smoking the cigarette is the lever press.

The effect of that smoking act upon his person is the reward.

That effect reinforces the smoking act.  He comes to push the

lever 10 to 60 times per day.

This, then, is how we have translated our corporate charter

into a scientific model.

So if you read the above article and are left shaking your head how, in this extremely difficult and sometimes desperate economic climate, a smoker can spend one quarter of their income on cigarettes, somewhere, cigarette executives and researchers read the same article; and that after they did, they congratulated each other on a job well done, and saying to one another “I told you so … just like rats in a cage.”

September 16-22 is Child Passenger Safety Week in Florida

Governor Rick Scott has declared September next week Child Passenger Safety Week in Florida and September 22^nd as National Seat Check Saturday, calling upon all parents and caregivers to exercise responsibility to keep America’s children safe by helping to reduce injuries and deaths by buckling up themselves and their children “every trip, every time.”

All 50 states require the use of car seats for children younger than 5.  The proper use of car seats has been recognized to reduce the risk of deaths in car accidents by 71 percent by babies younger than 1 and by 54 percent for children between the ages of 1 and 4.

Florida, however, is one of only two states, South Dakota being the other hold-out, which does NOT require the use of booster seats for children between the ages of 4 and 7.  Despite legislation being proposed during the past two legislative sessions, the bill has not found adequate support from the members of the Florida House and Senate to make it to a floor vote.

Safety experts such as Safe Kids USA, AAA, The National Child Passenger Safety Board, and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) agree that too many children and using just the car’s seat belt too soon.  Adult safety belts are not meant to fit children; they are made for adults who are at least 4’9” tall.

Children who have outgrown their 5 point harness car seat by weight or height should use a booster seat until they reach 4’9” (typically between the ages of 8-12). However, many parents and caregivers skip this very important step and allow a child to use only a seat belt.

A booster seat “boosts” a child up and allows for proper placement of the lap and shoulder belt, which is crucial for safety during a crash. When seated correctly, a lap belt should cross over the lower hips/upper thighs and the shoulder belt should cross over the shoulder/collar bone.  This simple “boost,” however, literally moves the child into a much safer position in the vehicle and allows the seat belt to provide substantially more protection against injury or death than the seat belt alone.

A $35 High Back booster seat can keep children out of the hospitalsaving Florida Families heartache and worry. Hospitalization costs associated with children in a car crash using adult safety belts without a booster seat contribute to approximately $2500 in medical costs per child.

Florida child passenger safety laws lag behind other states. The Florida Booster Seat Coalition is working to pass a booster seat law that would bring Florida up to the recommended standards.

Parents and caregivers should urge your local legislatures to support and vote for this bill when it presented during the legislative session in 2013.

To become more involved with these efforts please contact flboosterseatcoalition@gmail.com or follow the coalition on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/flboosterseatcoalition.

You can get FREE booster seat information and growth charts for distribution to families from AAA and its Traffic Safety Foundation, showing how using the right seat at the right time can save lives. Contact Michele Harris at mmharris@aaasouth.com for more information.

Two Words this election season: Vote Early!!

I have regularly voted on Election Day. There is nothing wrong with the early voting process and absentee voting is quite fine as well. In fact, this year, I strongly recommend you consider to early vote or vote by absentee ballot. Go to the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections site for good information.

This year, though, if you are not early voting or voting by absentee ballot…pack a lunch and join me. The ballot is going to be long…very long. Palm Beach County’s ballot could be 3, 4 or 5 pages long in fact.

Stay with me though…it’s important!

When ballots are long, elections suffer from a large percentage of what is called “under voting”. Under voting occurs when voters do not complete their ballot and stop somewhere before the very end. Under voting is a big problem and, more importantly, it speaks to a conscious decision about our lack of commitment to the country, our state and our local government.

Voting is the single, most important act any American will do in a Democracy; it is the ultimate “free speech”. Sure, because we are fortunate enough to live in a free country, I can stand on a street corner and make any speech (within reason) that I want. But, voting is that one act of free speech, which actually allows me to make a difference.

So, this year, consider:

• Read about ALL the candidates.
• Decide early on about your selection of candidates.
• Read about all the amendments on the ballot and make an early decision on them.
• If you are voting on Election Day take a sample ballot with you with all the votes you want to make clearly indicated.
• Finish the WHOLE BALLOT. Stick it out and don’t stop short.
• To all of you voters, thank you for exercising one of your most important of all civic duties.

I haven’t had much experience in my life with having everyone regularly agree with me on any given subjects.  In fact, I don’t have ANY life experience with that phenomenon, yet that is exactly what Governor Scott and the folks at “Restore Justice 2012” want Floridians to vote for in November.

Governor Scott does not like some of the recent decisions made by the Florida Supreme Court.  And, they really didn’t like it when the Court voted 5-2 in 2010 that a proposed amendment relating to Florida “opting-out” of participating in the Affordable Health Care Act was ruled confusing and deceptive; preventing it from being placed on the ballot.  As a result, this faction wants the sort of revenge that comes with heads of these justices figuratively on a platter and actually seeing them stripped of their robes. Groups like Restore Justice and others with specific agendas have undertaken a campaign full of misinformation and misguided efforts to destroy the impartiality of the court and the separation of powers that governs our country and state.

Why this effort is misguided is elementary and junior high (middle school) social studies kind of stuff.  It’s simple, not at all that confusing, and has at its origin in a very fundamental principle of our democracy – the separation of powers and the checks and balances between the branches of our government.

Justices serve on the Florida Supreme Court.  Judges serve on lower courts.  Judges and justices should be selected to serve based upon three basic qualifications:

1) integrity and honesty;

2) professional reputation, competence, experience and demeanor; and

3) judicial temperament, freedom from bias and a unwavering belief in equal justice under the law for all individuals.

Justices and judges should NOT be selected to serve based upon agreeing with the political party in power or with the governor of Florida.

The independence of the judiciary has always been a valued part of our democracy. Justices and judges, must be able to render decisions based on law and not people, must be protected from the influences of partisan politics and answer only to the law and the Constitution in making decisions. They can be neither beholden to nor influenced by elected officials.  This is the hallmark of a fair and impartial judiciary.

In Florida and in the United States of America, the government is divided into branches, each with separate and independent powers and areas of responsibility so that no branch has more power than the other branches.  Why is this important to remember?  Because this foundation of democracy was created to eliminate the possibility that these newly-formed United States could ever be ruled by a monarchy and to allow for checks and balances between the branches to safeguard against that possibility.

Even George Washington knew, more than 200 years ago, how important this separation of powers was for our country.  In his Farewell Address, he said people love power and are prone to abuse it and cautioned us of the “necessity of reciprocal checks of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositories and constituting each the guardian … against invasions by the others.” Of such checks and balances through the separation of powers be concluded, “To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them.”

Also, there is an important political rule of thumb to remember:  for every change you want when your party is in power, once that change is enacted, your opponents will have the exact same power.  So, if the effort by groups like Restore Justice is successful, we no longer will have judges and justices in Florida who can rely upon the hallmarks of our democracy, that is, separation of powers between the branches of government.

We’ll be left with “if you don’t agree with the Governor, he and his cronies are going to run you off the bench” as the way things are.

Nobody should want that.  Regardless of political party.

This November, our Florida ballot will include eleven – count ‘em, eleven – proposed amendments to the Florida Constitution.  Each one is on the ballot because it was sponsored by the State House or State Senate.  I recommend voting “no” to each of the eleven amendments for both procedural and substantive reasons.

Procedurally, the practice of legislating by constitutional amendment is unwieldy and unwise.  The Florida Constitution is designed to serve as a “bare bones” document, providing general guiding principles.  It is through the process of legislation that details are added – or, in some cases subtracted.  A law may make perfect sense when it is passed, but may over time either become unnecessary or require fine-tuning.  The legislature can make appropriate adjustments with additional legislation.  However, once an idea is written into the Florida Constitution, then the ability to make adjustments is substantially limited and the process is cumbersome.

The Founding Fathers set up a difficult process for amending the United States Constitution for a reason: ratification by three-fourths of the states.  In Florida, 60% voter approval can turn any idea, big or little, good or bad, into a constitutional amendment (and before 2006, only 50% approval was required).  For this system to work, somebody needs to provide a filter to make sure that only larger, broader policy questions are addressed by constitutional amendment.

It seems that the legislature has done little in the way of filtering this year.  There are several possible explanations for the large number of proposed amendments.  Republican politicians who control the House and Senate may have wanted to put things into the Constitution precisely because they will be harder to undo if the balance of power shifts back to Democrats.  The legislators may have sought to avoid passing controversial bills themselves; letting voters make these decisions can provide political cover.  And, in some cases, it appears that amendments were placed on the ballot specifically to encourage voter turnout in November.

[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2Vj_uKRw-8&feature=g-all-u]

Whatever the reason(s), the result is that it will be up to the electorate to provide the proper filter.  We must decide, not only whether a proposed constitutional amendment looks like a good idea, but whether it is an idea that should be implemented by changing the Constitution rather than passing a law.  In my opinion, most of the subjects addressed by the proposed amendments, such as additional homestead exemptions (many of which have already been granted through legislation), property tax rates, and the composition of school governing bodies, do not belong in the Florida Constitution.

Substantively, most, if not all, of the proposed amendments should be objectionable as well.  I will list each amendment by number and official title, then discuss the merit, or lack thereof.

Amendment 1, Health Care Services: would prohibit laws that require any person to purchase health insurance.  In light of the recent United Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act (a/k/a Obamacare), and specifically the individual mandate, this amendment is unenforceable under the Supremacy Clause, which provides that federal law takes precedence over conflicting state law.  This amendment is a wholly symbolic gesture, and was almost certainly designed to drive “single-issue” voters to the polls.

Amendment 2, Veterans Disabled Due to Combat Injury; Homestead Property Tax Discount: would provide a property tax discount on the homesteads of disabled veterans.  While the general goal of helping our wounded vets is noble, a constitutional amendment to change their property taxes is not the way to accomplish that goal.

Amendment 3, State Government Revenue Limitation: would limit state revenue based on inflation and population changes.  This amendment places an inflexible and strict limitation on budget growth, regardless of the state’s specific needs at a given time in the future.  A similar amendment was passed by Colorado in 1992, then repealed three years later, after the limitation caused a financial crisis in that state. Managing the budget is a role and responsibility of the legislative and executive branches that they want to saddle citizens with through a constitutional amendment.

Amendment 4, Property Tax Limitations; Property Value Decline; Reduction for Nonhomestead Assessment Increases; Delay of Scheduled Repeal: would cut the annual cap on the rate at which the tax assessment on non-homestead real property can increase from 10% to 5%.  It also gives additional homestead protection to “first-time home buyers,” which is defined as anyone who has not owned homestead property in Florida for three years.  Florida Trend estimates that Amendment 4 would cost local governments up to $600 million per year.  This means either enormous cuts in government services, or a new revenue source to plug the $600 million annual hole in our budget.  Can you say “state income tax?”

Amendment 5, State Courts: would give the Senate the power to confirm or reject Florida Supreme Court appointees, would give the legislature the power to repeal court rules by a simple majority instead of two-thirds vote, and would prevent the court from re-adopting a rule that had been twice rejected.  The net effect of this amendment is to shift the balance of power in our state government away from the judicial and toward the legislative branch.  This attack on our judiciary goes hand-in-hand with the Tea Party-backed effort to defeat Justices Pariente, Quince, and Lewis in their merit retention elections.

Amendment 6, Prohibition on Public Funding of Abortions; Construction of Abortion Rights: would prohibit that which is already prohibited (public funding of abortions), and would exempt abortion from the Florida Constitution’s privacy clause, allowing the legislature to pass a parental consent law.  This is clearly part of an effort to energize “single issue” voters.

(Amendment 7 did not make it onto the ballot)

Amendment 8, Religious Freedom: would delete a 126-year-old provision in the Florida Constitution prohibiting state funding of religious institutions.  This amendment is not about “religious freedom” at all.  It is about tearing down the wall of separation between church and state and gutting our public school system.

Amendment 9, Homestead Property Tax Exemption for Surviving Spouse of Military Veteran or First Responder: would again attempt to help people who need help through the improper vehicle of a constitutional amendment to change the tax rules. This should be proposed in the legislature as a law and not an amendment.

Amendment 10, Tangible Personal Property Tax Exemption: would increase, from $25,000 to $50,000, the exemption for equipment or furniture used in a business.  This amendment will cost local governments $61 million over the first three years. Can you say “increased sales tax?”

Amendment 11, Additional Homestead Exemption; Low-Income Seniors Who Maintain Long-Term Residency on Property; Equal to Assessed Value: see comments on Amendments 2 and 9.

Amendment 12, Appointment of Student Body President to Board of Governors of the State University System: this is a great example of what happens when things that should be handled by legislation are placed into the Constitution.  The governing bodies of the state university system were initially created by statute.  But the Board of Governors was created and empowered through a 2002 constitutional amendment.  In order to revise the current system, sponsors in the Florida House are seeking another amendment.  Under the banner of “two wrongs don’t make a right,” I would oppose proposed Amendment 12 and support returning the details of the state university system to the statute books.

I am not alone in opposing the amendments.  The League of Women Voters recommends a “no” vote on all eleven amendments.  The Democratic Progressive Caucus opposes seven of the eleven amendments, supports only the state university system revision (Amendment 12), and is “neutral” on the substance of the three homestead exemptions (Amendments 2, 9, and 11), though with the observation that “the Constitution is not the place to make tax policy.”  Agreed.

On November 6, I suggest that you reject the process of legislation by constitutional amendment, reject legislators’ side-stepping their job responsibilities, and reject the particularly bad ideas proposed this year, by voting “no” on all eleven proposed amendments.