They’re making you look stupid

MIAMI – We should be asking ourselves if some voters are stupid. It seems our politicians waste money on projects that produce NO results, except for getting them reelected. I normally try to stay away from insults; but here are samples that leave me no choice.  Because the fact is there are politicians on our payroll (yes folks, they ARE supposed to work for us!) who keep repeating the same mistakes. Errors that end up costing us tax dollars. And we keep reelecting them!

As George W. Bush tried to explain (and failed): the first time, shame on the politician… every other time, shame on us.

Just recently I wrote about the boondoggle that is TV Marti – a Washington-sponsored project to “annoy and undermine” the Cuban government. The aforementioned reasoning for the failed station came from Washington Post reporter David Farenthold. To quote him, it’s a TV station that “doesn’t really reach many Cubans … less than one percent of Cubans” at its peak.

Let me put it in perspective. In 1990, TV Martí was launched with a $16 million appropriation from Congress. By 2007, American taxpayers had contributed over $500 million in taxes to Radio and TV Martí’s broadcasts. Since then, millions more have been spent – tax dollars that might have gone to education, new roads, cancer research… you choose.

The U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors oversees the Martis. Foreign Policy magazine has reported that over the past few years the Board has repeatedly asked Congress to discontinue the program calling it a failure.

Still, our elected members of Congress have continued funding these programs. You can put names to who leads this effort in Congress. Persons who will spend our tax dollars knowing it is NOT the right thing to do, except it benefits them personally. Their attitude is screw the taxpayers and voters! They are aware that their actions do damage to us. But their narrow agenda is more important to them. And – let’s call it a sick child whose parents can’t afford his or her health insurance, for example – those they represent suffer the consequences. The names are not a secret: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Mario Diaz-Balart (and before him his brother Lincoln), Bob Menendez, Marco Rubio and all the others who follow their demagogic lead.

At a local level, last decade we experienced the rants and ravings of one of our formerly elected thieves, David Rivera, who waits for the outcome of investigations by the federal authorities into his financial dealings while an elected official. Rivera’s actions over the years, and especially during his period as a Florida state legislator, cost taxpayers in this state millions of dollars. David would propose and too often pass laws to ingratiate himself to certain idiots (I mean voters) in his district. Floridians later had to pay to cover for David’s spoiled-brat type actions in court because they could not pass constitutional muster.

These days in the Miami area we have new versions of David Rivera: Clones in a long line of spoiled-brat, anti-Cuba politicians who care little about the results of their actions – as long as it helps keep them elected.

They are State Sen. Rene Garcia and State Rep. Michael Bileca. Both are republicans who sponsored legislation in Tallahassee that prohibited state and local governments from hiring companies with business ties to Cuba. And in June of 2012, U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore found that the legislation interfered with the federal government’s authority to set foreign policy.

It was all a stupid and costly maneuver by the duo to keep Odebrecht USA from working in Florida because their parent company is doing business in Cuba. After losing in court, Florida had to reimburse Odebrecht $500,000 in attorney’s fees.

Where do you think that money comes from?

I guarantee that the cost to us the taxpayer was much higher than the $500,000. But let’s take that amount as a figure. True, 500K is not a lot of money when you’re talking about a $70 billion state budget. But how many of us could not put 500,000 dollars to better use than these two shameless scallywags from Miami?

Of course, they could care less. The money is not theirs. Still, many who suffer because of their maneuvers gladly go out and vote for them on election day anyway.

I’ll call them the idiots.

But listen to this. Mr. Garcia told The Miami Herald that “he would sit down with legislative attorneys to try to craft a narrower version of the law in the future, to see if it passes muster.”

Déjà vu!

Exactly what David Rivera would have done.