There are many horrible Republican candidates for public office this year. They include failed business executive Carly Fiorina and utterly unqualified Meg Whitman in California, secessionist/Confederate Rick Perry in Texas, ultra-right wing fanatic Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, attacker of the rights of child sexual abuse victims Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, demented pathological liar Sharron Angle in Nevada, military fraud Mark Kirk in Illinois, frightening right-wing lunatic Michele Bachmann in Minnesota, and on and on and on. But for sheer bottom-of-the-barrel wretchedness, you have to go some to beat Rick Scott, the vile Republican candidate for governor of Florida. Scott was instrumental in crippling the desperately needed public option in health care reform this past year. This is completely in line with Scott's despicable record from his time as a health care executive. His company was up to its neck in wrongdoing. And during the investigation of this criminality, Scott invoked his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination SEVENTY-FIVE times. We see the details here:
Normally, folks deposed in civil suits can't hunker down behind their right against self incrimination. But the hospital chain, Columbia/HCA, [of which Scott was CEO] had been the object of a years-long federal criminal investigation that eventually brought the company 14 felony charges and $1.7 billion in fines for Medicare fraud. There was good reason why the chain's former president sounded a lot like [a major crime figure], even in an innocuous lawsuit growing out of a software dispute. (Voters might note that the U.S. Supreme Court suggested that witnesses who invoke the Fifth in civil cases can legally be regarded with ``adverse inferences.'')
And this is who the Republican voters of Florida decided to go with for their party's gubernatorial candidate. There is a solid Democrat running against Scott. Her name is ALEX SINK. She deserves your support.
And she never even took the Fifth once.
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