Discussion: AP: Florida Spent $240M On Lawyers Under The Radar

I want to see ONE MORE REPUBLICAN whine about ā€˜their tax dollarsā€™ and the Floridians to rise up and tell them to go FK themselves. They have lied and lied and lied AGAIN to the voters and they keep getting re-elected. Imagine what that money could be used forā€¦

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Republicans: ā€œDo as I say, not as I do!ā€

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Scott, an attorney and multimillionaire businessman who ran one of the nationā€™s largest for-profit hospital chains right into a head-on collision with Medicareā€™s Fraud-busters
FIFY

Skeletor is always more comfortable with a large group of friendly, well-paid lawyers around him.

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"We do not have that information and are unaware of a way to capture
expenditures for the purchase of outside legal services that would not
entail an exhaustive search of documents," said Whitney Ray, a spokesman
for Bondi.

That doesnā€™t even pass the laugh test. Those outside lawyers are sending invoices and those invoices are being paid. I donā€™t see how a computer accounts payable search could take more than 10 minutes and somewhere is the file with the paper invoices. How could that take more than an hour?

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At least tens of billions of our tax dollars are going to be spent to support and protect Trumpā€™s business interests around the world. He will try to cover it up but just watch. It is going to happen.

ā€œSteal a little and they put you in jail steal alot and they make you king.ā€

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Itā€™s always good to keep up friendly relationships using other peopleā€™s money.

Itā€™s stories like this in which Trump and his allies would have you believe the media is the enemy of the people.

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Thats a lot of IPhones

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There are a lot of nuances to this story. First, it is reprehensible to outsource money to expensive legal firms to defend a clearly unconstitutional (but ideologically driven) issue. Case in point was our Governorā€™s grandstanding decision to drug test all welfare recipients right after he came into office. It was a dead loser from the git-go, but it made all the regressives and Bondi happy to push the case to the Supreme Court. There are other examples like this one.

On the other hand, the water war issue is incredibly important, and is a problem that has been building and gone unresolved for many years. Atlanta (and mega-farms to the south) has grown enormously, and is taking an ever-increasing amount of the Apalachicola River flow that used to end up in Florida at the Gulf of Mexico, and which supports one of the most productive estuaries and seafood producing areas in the state. This issue has huge ecological implications and has resisted all efforts to resolve it for 20+ years. It required the expertise and firepower of extra legal talent.

Then you can add in the element that Pam Bondi refused to prosecute Trump University after receiving a large donation to her re-election campaign from Der Gropenfurher himself, even though Attorneys General from several other states thought the case needed pursuit.

So the outside legal costs are good and necessary in some cases, a waste of money in others, and other cases that absolutely need to be pursued get dropped. The real takeaway is that our state is run by TeaParty idiots who are enabled by other TeaParty idiots, and every issue is a crapshoot.

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Where are the democrats? Why the hell arenā€™t they aware of this. We suck when it comes to exposing these assholes and even worse at screaming about it

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Scott, an attorney and multimillionaire businessman who ran one of the nationā€™s largest for-profit hospital chains, has backed the use of taxpayer money to bolster the stateā€™s legal team with private attorneys for defending his initiatives, despite the rising costs.

So apparently this asshole got filthy rich off of healthcare. Meanwhile, this assholeā€™s party complains how that health care costs too much (and hey, for once theyā€™re right). Seems like one good way to reduce its cost would be to ensure guys like this canā€™t make a killing off of it. But hey, the free market is always best and thus there are no areas of human endeavor from which it should be barred. We know this becauseā€¦ well because the high priests of the free market - those who worship it like a religion - tell us so.

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When you are purposely trying to hide stuff, it may be harder to put all the pieces back together. But yeah, it stinks.

Forget it, Jakeā€“Itā€™s Florida.

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Well, maybe an hour to log on, find the databases, and run a few SQL queries. In this case Iā€™d do the whole shebang, including fancy reports and an easy UI for future idiotic Florida lawyers. For FREE.

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ā€œScott, an attorney and multimillionaire businessman who ran one of the nationā€™s largest for-profit hospital chainsā€¦ā€

Before running afoul of fraudulent Medicare claims.

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Some very good investigative reporting in this article, but its these nuances that deserve a little deeper digging. The watershed/rights case was obviously important. How much of that $250M was spent on defending purely ideological issues? (gerrymandering, ACA/Medicare expansion, LGBTQ rights denial, etc., etc.). If that ends up being 5% of the total, its probably not worth screaming about. If its even 20%, then it should be front and center in every discussion over the next cycle.

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I canā€™t necessarily comment on the money being spent, but Flaā€™s water fight with Ga is a big deal. Ga wantā€™s to deprive the Apalachicola river basin of water, which, if allowed, would destroy one of the USā€™s most diverse marine ecosystems and one of the USā€™s most productive fisheries. Ga cannot be allowed to take that water.

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So, ā€œSkelatorā€ is gypping people out of money that could improve the roads, schools, and infrastructure all over Florida, but goes about telling the same people that THEY have to ________(Insert Austerity cliche here)
Sounds like a typical ā€œTrumpy Old Partyā€ MO to me.

Let me check something real fast (And it wonā€™t be Floridaā€™s major Highways, thatā€™s for sure!)

Florida General Election 2014
Republican Rick Scott/Carlos Lopez-Cantera 2,865,343 48.1%
Democratic Charlie Crist/Annette Taddeo-Goldstein 2,801,198 47.1%
(Source: Wikipedia)

Yuppers, Floridians RE-ELECTED ā€œSkeletorā€ and all his works in 2014!

You suppose that by the time 2018 rolls around, the people in Florida will have the common sense that Gawd gave a fruit bat and throw the Republicans out of Tallahassee? (and everywhere else in the State that Matters.)
This is why I havenā€™t visited the State or done business with a Florida Company since 2010.
There is one consolation. By 2018 there will be fewer still of the geriatric base that turns out to vote for people like ā€œSkeletorā€ because the only thing that they can still see when they try to read the ballot is the ā€œRā€ next to his name.
I drop Florida into the same ā€œidiot basketā€ where I keep New Jersey and all the other places that have gone dancing down the turnpike toward insanity by re-electing people whose only goal is to destroy the quality of life for its citizenry for monetary and political gain.
Feel the burn, Florida. This is what you get when you set yourselves on fire!

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And a lot of lawyeringā€¦