I like Florida Senator Bill Nelson. I’ll vote for him next year and not just because he’s running against the totally incompetent and morally challenged Katherine Harris, but when Nelson attempts to capitalize on the Florida hysteria about “sexual offenders,” claiming that we have 30,000 of them registered in the state, I have to wonder. There doesn’t seem to be any data confirming this, nor is there date showing an increase other than a handful of horrific crimes that are being used to feed the wrath of the public.
I bit of investigative reporting by the Orlando Weekly shows that many of these listed on the State Website share something with Chicago Voters – they’re dead. Many are incarcerated, some for life terms. Some are in jails outside the state and many live outside of Florida. Like Ms. Harris’s famed and flawed Florida Felons list that prevented tens of thousands of Democrats from voting in 2000, it results from an ulterior motive.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement of course has an interest in overstating the case as more offenders means more money, and politicians benefit from public hysteria because they can promise to do something about something that may or may not work regarding a problem that may or may not exist. There is no data that I have seen showing an increase in sex crimes in this state, but hysteria is running very high and people are writing to the papers and most likely to our representatives suggesting ever more restrictive and even vicious treatment of those on the list without regard to the actual nature of their crimes or how many decades ago they were perpetrated. Never mind the declining crime rates, which politicians mourn the way they mourn the loss of the Soviet menace they have to make life seem dangerous both to be seen to be heroes and so that the dangers of increasingly intrusive government can be hidden.
Hence, Bill Nelson has introduced yet another bill mandating that all offenders in the country have ankle bracelets with Global Positioning Satellite devices so that they can be tracked nationwide – the dangerous, the harmless, the living and the dead, apparently forever.
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Bill Nelson is a bit of a curiosity to me. As insurance commissioner, he seemed to play too parts. But in the end the insurance companies always seemed to get their way. I really can't see what good Bill has ever done. And not doing anything is hardly harmless. Bill is just hard for me to figure out. I think his political motives are purely instrumental. A job. Bill paying. Parties. I'll probably vote for Bill, but I don't know why. Sad.
I agree. In a way he's almost like MArk Foley, my congressman who goes off on irrelevant crusades to capture the support of the cracker crazies.
But of course his opponent is Kathryne Harris - there's not much of a choice there. . . .
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