I Can’t Count That High

One of the cops running for Monroe County, Florida, Sheriff told an election forum that it’s common to have 13 deputies with 13 supervisors on any shift. “One supervisor for every deputy isn’t right,” he said. The current undersheriff, also a candidate, said studies show the Sheriff’s Office division of ranks is very similar to other Florida departments of equivalent size.

Well, sure.

5-pointed starThe stable population of Pinellas County, Florida is 928,031 with over 3,000 Sheriff’s Office employees in five major service bureaus. The Broward County Sheriff’s Office handles both law enforcement and fire rescue duties with 6,300 employees for 1,753,578 population. The Monroe County Sheriff’s Office employs 543 people for a population that in peak season (January until April) may reach as high as 150,000 but is stable at less than half that.

Each Florida county also has municipal departments. Key West P.D., for example, has 108 employees and Key Colony Beach another five. And we haven’t counted the state police, the highway patrol, or the FDLE.

BSO revenues are about $65 million annually (BSO receives about $700 million each year).

As a point of reference, the Franklin County, Vermont, Sheriff’s Office is the county’s primary law enforcement agency. Franklin County has about half the Monroe County population at 47,806, and 23 FCSO employees. Even counting St Albans City P.D., Swanton P.D., there are fewer than 70 law enforcement personnel in total. Even the Vermont State Police has fewer troopers statewide than any one Florida county.

FCSO revenues are about $2 million annually.

As a side note, every organization of long standing will swell its supervisory ranks; good people need promotions or they don’t stay. And more supervisors need more people in the trenches to, well, supervise.

Sheriffs are usually the only county-wide “local” law enforcement agency. The Staties can be run anywhere in the state and municipal police officers report to town/city officials. Sheriffs Departments provide civil process, law enforcement assistance to small towns, help with emergencies such as the recent Floods, perform death investigations, and help stranded motorists.

Most sheriff’s offices provide law enforcement services under contract to municipalities and townships in their County. Each Vermont sheriff may receive up to 5 percent of the value of the contracts as an “administrative fee.” Reports are mixed on the administrative fees available to sheriffs in other states.

All of that adds up to a single question:

Is Vermont under served or does Florida generally and the Keys in particular have way more policing than anywhere else in the nation?

Here’s What Obamacare Actually Does For You

“Wow! It is without any doubt the law now,” my friend Nola Guay crowed. “And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in it that I don’t like!”

Two days from our celebration of Independence from a monarchy, how about the facts that it is yet another tax, that it will continue to drive up the cost of seeing your doctor, and that the Regent of Pennsylvania Avenue just stole yet another piece of your heritage?

But Mr. Obama says he gave you something good!

She sent me a poster of the Obamacare Top 10.


The Obamacare Top 10

Here’s What Obamacare Actually Does For You:

(1) “Access to health insurance for 30 million Americans …”
Every one of the 46 million Americans without health insurance had “access” to it before Obamacare came to be. Access has never been the problem.

“and lower premiums.”
Your insurance premiums have doubled in the last 10 years. They’ve continued to go up because many Obamacare provisions don’t take effect until after the election or 2014.

The problem isn’t higher premiums. The problem is the high cost of our medical system. Work on cost and I guarantee premiums can come down.

(2) “The ability of business and individuals to purchase comprehensive coverage from a regulated marketplace.”
Wow. I guess the Banking and Insurance industry wasn’t already regulated. Now it will be more regulated. Like Cable TV is. That’s gonna make it better.

(3) “Insurers’ [sic] cannot discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions.”
Um, anybody remember ERISA? Been there, done that.

(4) “Tax credits for small businesses that offer insurance.”
Oh, goody. We’ll raise taxes on all the rich small businessmen and businesswomen to come up with the money to give them tax credits back.

(5) “Assistance for businesses that provide health benefits to early retirees.”
See above. And don’t forget that “early retirees” doesn’t mean thee and me. It means the United Auto Workers who get to retire with full benefits and the GM stock Mr. Obama stole from the other retirees like thee and me who used to own that company.

(6) “Affordable health care for lower-income Americans. Obamacare extends Medicaid to individuals with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty line.”
No new taxes, though. This won’t hurt a bit. You might feel a little pinch…

(7) “Investments in women’s health. Obamacare prohibits insurers from charging women substantially more than men …”
Oh, goody again. So Obamacare singlehandedly disallows the actuarial tables insurers live by. Or men, who cannot have children, get to pay a higher premium than they would under actuarial calculations. And old peeps. And children. All higher premiums.

(8) “Young adults’ ability to stay on their parents’ health care plans.”
That’s a good one. Didn’t need 2,700 pages to do that. Speaker of the House John Boehner mentioned yesterday that the insurance companies themselves lobbied for it because federal law kept them from allowing dependents to stay, well, dependent past their high school or college years.

See, young adults are generally healthier than older adults. That should improve the revenue the insurance plans generate.

(9) “Discounts for seniors on brand-name drugs.”
Oh, swell. The home of the $6,000 hammer will negotiate the cost of your Viagra.

Wait. That’s not right. Don’t the drugs we want fall into the “donut hole”? (That’s the difference between the initial coverage limit and the catastrophic coverage threshold currently in the Medicare Part D prescription drug program. This Administration loves donuts. One box of Munchkins™ coming up for your med-surg snack. Mmmm, donuts.)

(10) “Coverage for the sickest Americans.”
Bwahahahahahahahahah hah ha. And ha.

My friend Rufus had non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 2011. My mom’s breast cancer metastasized in 2001. Oddly, both of them were pretty darned sick. Both of them had coverage, Rufus on a company retirement benefit and Mom on Medicare and Medicare Part B.

That was before Obamacare.

Thomas Sowell commented, “It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.”

Bottom line: “It’s a tax,” Chief Justice John Roberts said.

So tell me again, other than nationalizing the payment system for health care (and running up the costs), What Obamacare Actually Does For US? ‘Cause I just don’t see it.


I wrote a two part series a couple of years ago on how to fix our broken health care system:How to Fix It, Part I
How to Fix It, Part IIAnd here’s the entire ObamaCare category:
Obamacare in America


Next week, we look at the squadron of opossums in Ninja outfits who raided my trash can and laid the blame on the raccoons.

Tuesday Thorn

ObamaCare zealots like to point out that “45,000 Americans die every year from lack of Health Insurance.

“If Terrorists killed that many Americans we would be nuking the whole world.”

Leaving aside the fact that our zealots made up the statistic from whole cloth, I don’t notice any of them lining up to nuke the automobile industry.

Here We Come, Purged or Not

Monroe County’s part in the great Florida Voter Purge of 2012 has finished. “We do have a clear understanding of the National Voter Registration Act and we have to conform to it,” Elections Supervisor Harry L. Sawyer, Jr., said. “We are not going to break the law even if the governor thinks we should.”

Florida officials (except Mr. Sawyer, apparently) want to compare thousands of names from the state DMV’s non-citizen roster against the Homeland Security immigration database. Federal officials refused. It’s a simple premise. If you are not a citizen of Florida, you can’t vote in a Florida election; if you’re not a citizen of these United States, you can’t vote in any election here. Not one. Period.

“We can’t let the federal government delay our efforts to uphold the integrity of Florida elections any longer,” Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner said.

To Purge or Not to Purge
The U.S. Department of Justice in the person of Assistant U.S. Attorney General Thomas E. Perez ordered the state to stop the purge because it could violate federal voting laws.

Florida claims that the DoJ and Homeland Security have deliberately denied Florida access to what Homeland Security calls its “SAVE Program.”

It is indeed true that elections supervisors like Mr. Sawyer have delayed cleaning their checklists until we got too close to a national election. The National Voter Registration Act bans checklist decontamination within 90 days of a federal election; this year, the primary election on August 16 stops the state from purging the rolls after May 16. That ought not stop us from identifying the non-citizens on our voter lists. Or from purging the non-citizens for the general election which does not occur until November 8.

Big Brother knows who you are
I must have been living under a rock because I didn’t realize that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security knows who is in this country illegally. That department operates the “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements” Program, a database known as SAVE, which contains citizenship information on about a gazillion people. Homeland Security. And they have them listed in a special phonebook that is incompatible with all the state DMV databases.

Let me repeat that with emphasis in case anyone missed it. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security knows who is in this country illegally. And they don’t seem willing to do much about it.

“The number of noncitizens who are on the rolls or appear to have cast unlawful ballots grows by the day. And there’s no evidence yet that any lawful voter has been kicked off the rolls,” the Miami Herald reported.

Suppression or Fraud?
The ACLU has accused Florida of “voter suppression.” The Monroe County Tea Party has accused the Obamanation of abetting “voter fraud,” mostly because Homeland Security knows who is in this country illegally and doesn’t seem willing to do much about it.

I don’t know why it’s so tough to prove that a non-citizen actually cast an illegal ballot.

Oh. That’s right. The Feds won’t tell the state who might be illegally in the country which means there’s a whole lot less proof of suppression and a whole lot more appearance of fraud.

No matter whether you fall on the illegal alien or “undocumented guest worker” side of the argument, the government has become harder and harder to trust.


Go Arizona

And that, boys and girls, is why Arizona and other states (except Vermont) figure they need to do in-person immigration status checks. And why Florida needs to purge its voter checklists.

Friday Foibles

“People are pleased that gas prices have dropped about 40 cents from the near four dollar high,” the Burlington, Vermont, DJ said.

Say what?

I don’t know what planet the Burlington, Vermont, DJ gets his gas on but it isn’t Planet Vermont where gas prices didn’t drop, didn’t drop, didn’t drop and have only now slid slightly to about 20 cents lower than the near four dollar high and have held there for a few weeks. Gas in New York State (number ONE in the nation by fuel taxes) were lower than gas prices here last week.

The average price of gas nationwide dropped below $2/gallon in November, 2008.

Vermonters are almost ready to drive to Canada for gas.