WHAT’S NEW IN FLORIDA?

Here’s the latest. The former Secretary of State, also former Supervisor of Elections for Pasco County has announced his decision to run for superintendent of our school system in this year’s election.

As I wrote before, the present woman holding the position now has problems. Both are Republicans, but he has an in with our Tea Party Governor as well as the rest of the idiotic elected officials in our state capital. So we’ll look for the smear campaign to begin against her. Therefore, she has reason to be concerned when they attack her for not being qualified for the job that they had twice elected her to.

The current Superintendent of Schools had attended a local community college and graduated from a state school with a BA degree in education. This qualified her to be head of our school system. Her rival is also uniquely qualified to become superintendent because he graduated from the same community college and also a state college with a degree but not in education. I think I read he also has another degree, but it’s also not in education.

For more political shenanigans read up on JD Alexander for this week’s news on other political nonsense regarding our state school system. Even members of the state GOP are fighting him, but are there enough of them to stop him? There are only three or four of them, but they’re very vocal. We’ll see.

MAYBE I’M STILL OK

Yesterday I decided to prepare some scones to deliver to a neighbor that I hadn’t kept in touch with since Christmas. I already had some other things to deliver to them, just little things. I was shocked to discover that she had just returned from the hospital because a cold developed into pneumonia.

In my own defense, we don’t really keep in touch, so when something happens they don’t really let us know. The reason I take things to them is because she has been ill the past year and her husband doesn’t cook. We seldom see them except for some social events when she is well enough to attend.

Well, I made a double recipe of scones which looked beautiful when they came out of the oven, but on my first taste I discovered I had neglected to add sugar. Fortunately I had some homemade strawberry jam to put on them and topped them with lite whipped topping which made a delightful repast.

I’m not bragging about my innovations just telling you that I’m starting to make some mistakes, which can be rectified by me now. However, I’m at the point when things could get away from me before I know it and I have to brace myself for that fact. I hope I don’t cry when that happens but can just shrug it off as an old age thing and throw those mistakes in the garbage. I constantly tell myself that if I recognize my faults I’m still OK.

WOW!

Just went to an estate sale up our street. The house went on the market on a Wednesday and sold the next day after being previewed by group of real estate salespeople. It was listed at the low price of $48,000 dollars. While I looked for lost treasures at the sale, I was able to go through every room and the one-car garage and still couldn’t find anything I wanted to buy.

However, here’s what you can get for 48 G’s in our community, a carpeted living room, a dining room, kitchen with appliances, two bedrooms, two complete baths, a family room, screened porch and garage.

Every room was filled with the accumulations of a couple in their 90’s who had either died or gone into a nursing home. Once the clutter is disposed of, and there was a lot of that, someone will have gotten themselves a very nice piece of property with an equally nice back yard.

Don’t know whether it was bought by an investor or someone looking for a good starter home. Either way, it makes our costlier and larger home decline in value, which is what’s happening throughout our community.

I hope when our heirs sell our property that market prices will have grown. One thing though, ours has been thoroughly renovated and won’t be filled with junk.

WHAT’S UP WITH FLORIDA?

OK!  HERE’S THE POOP

We live in Florida which has one of the most corrupt state governments in the USA. The majority of the incumbents focus in the past few years has been how much money can come into their pockets as a result of shady deals they make with companies doing business with the state. One instance is the new Taj Mahal Court House built with the backing of officials, another is notably the new Senator from Florida, Marco Rubio. He won’t run for VP this year, but in a few years people will forget his involvement along with some other things having to do with the Florida GOP revenues.

Can you really imagine a local school district talking about saving money by going from five day a week classes to four days?  Most school districts hire their superintendents because of qualifications not their political affiliations, not ours though. Ours is an elected official with the backing of the Republican Party who had little educational background, and she now has competition from another Republican. Guess his educational background. He was our former superintendent of elections who got appointed to a job in Tallahassee where he helped cut the number of early voting hours. After getting a lot of flak for that, he decided to return to our county where he will be touted over the current Republican for his “now” expertise in education. Our county is also so backward that the candidate with the most votes here in the national primary was Newt Gringrich.

Our Governor is now for privatizing our prison systems and guess who would take over, friends of the GOP, of course. That means more money in politicians’ pockets by way of contributions to their election campaigns or PAC s. This seems to be the trend for the whole country. There actually is some opposition in our state legislature after some tried to sneak in such as bill in the middle of the night.

In the meantime, people are losing their homes everywhere and we in our county have been hit by an enormous amount of foreclosures, and our homes are not expensive ones. These are now the homes of the new poor.  Mitt Romney’s solution is let the houses go into default, buy  them, then rent them to the same poor people who have just lost them. That allows people like him to make more money. What I see in our community are the “for rent” signs which are visible for a long time, meaning there are enormous amount of rentals available.

Let’s hope that this year’s general election can get our country back to the values we hope most people have. Let’s pray that the bigotry in this country goes away soon, our President deserves respect from all our citizens. I hope all those” birthers” disappear and that the NRA is done away with soon.

I know, but I can hope can’t I?