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Florida Gov. Rick Scott justified his decision to opt out of the Medicaid expansion Thursday, saying that the massive health care program was growing at a pace that outstrips general revenue and that he was focused on helping his state get jobs. “The most important thing is working on getting everybody a job,” he said on CBS’s “This Morning” when asked about health care. “We have 800,000 people out of work, but we’ve had a drop in unemployment, that’s the most important thing we can do.” “That’s what I’m focused on, getting our citizens jobs to afford insurance. This expansion...

Hollywood’s brightest stars came out for the annual BET Awards Sunday night and once again took time to honor the late Whitney Houston. --snip-- ...Rev. Al Sharpton received the humanitarian award, and urged the crowd to vote this November. "This election is not just about Obama, this is about your momma," he said....

....Under the health care law, by 2014, states must implement a health insurance exchange, or a Web-based marketplace where people can shop for insurance, or defer to a federal program. States need to submit plans to the federal government by Nov. 16 that demonstrate their readiness to launch health exchanges. ....."We care about having a health care safety net for the vulnerable Floridians," Scott said on Fox. "But this is an expansion that just doesn't make any sense." ....."Hopefully we won't have to worry about it because by November we're going to have a new president-elect who is going to...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Florida Gov. Rick Scott now says Florida will do nothing to comply with President Barack Obama's health care overhaul and will not expand its Medicaid program. The announcement is a marked changed after the governor recently said he would follow the law if it were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. "Florida is not going to implement Obamacare. We are not going to expand Medicaid and we're not going to implement exchanges," Scott's spokesman Lane Wright told The Associated Press on Saturday. Wright stressed that the governor would work to make sure the law is repealed.

A federal judge denied the U.S. Department of Justice’s request for an emergency restraining order to halt Florida’s non-citizen voter purge and said the controversial scrub does not violate federal law. U.S. District Court Judge Robert Hinkle heard arguments this morning from the Justice Department and Michael Carvin, a Washington lawyer representing Gov. Rick Scott’s administration. Carvin was one of the lead lawyers for President George W. Bush in the protracted 2000 recount legal wrangle. Hinkle denied the request for the emergency stop to the program in part because he said the state was no longer doing it. But he...

Florida politics produces very few no-brainer issues. There are even fewer when you can choose whether you want to side with logic or with criminal behavior. Today’s no-brainer is the progressives’ argument against voter identification, perhaps the most irresponsible position in Florida politics today. Gov. Rick Scott is not backing off a pledge to clear Florida’s voter rolls of non-citizens who illegally registered to vote. When the governor received word that the U.S. Department of Justice intends to sue Florida to stop its efforts to “purge” voter rolls, he announced he would sue the Obama administration to force the Department...

The Florida State Attorney's office has announced the wife of George Zimmerman - the defendant in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin - has been arrested on suspicion of perjury. Her husband stands accused of second-degree murder after shooting the unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin dead, in what he says was self-defence, after claiming he had been attacked.

Tallahassee - Rumors that former Florida governor Charlie Crist is gay have been around for years, but new allegations have surfaced that he had affairs with two men and paid them to leave the state to avoid embarrassment. The allegations are made in Discovery documents related to Jim Greer's case involving alleged illegal use of Republican Party funds, according to a 10 News WTSP report. Damon Chase, attorney for Greer, who is set to go to trial on July 30 for allegedly paying himself to raise money for the Republican Party of Florida, says Crist is homosexual and once tried...

Florida announced Wednesday afternoon it would ignore the Department of Justice's demands to stop its controversial voter purge, but a state election supervisor threw another twist into the story, telling MSNBC's Al Sharpton soon afterwards that he and his colleagues won't play along. Ion Sancho, Leon County's supervisor of elections, told the PoliticsNation host that Republican Gov. Rick Scott can "do all he wants of this partisan endeavor" but that Sancho would not participate in a process he sees as illegal, adding that he spoke for a good number of his fellow supervisors. The majority of us "will not conduct...

Florida Gov. Rick Scott tells Newsmax.TV that the victory of his Wisconsin counterpart, Scott Walker, in a recall election validates his own policies in the Sunshine State, and says that it may even be a bellwether for the November election between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. “Absolutely” it’s a validation, declared Scott in an exclusive interview on Wednesday. “What we know now is that if you run on a campaign of fiscal responsibility, making your state a business-friendly state, reducing taxes, reducing regulations, putting people in place that are going to be pro-business — because that’s where jobs get...

Gov. Rick Scott’s administration is positioning itself for a showdown with the U.S. Department of Justice for demanding that Florida cease searching for and purging noncitizen voters. The DOJ gave Florida until Wednesday to respond to a letter, sent last week, that said the purge probably ran afoul of two federal voting laws.

As the State of Florida continues to release evidence in the Trayvon Martin case, it becomes increasingly clear that prosecutors will have little chance of convincing an honest jury that George Zimmerman is guilty of 2nd degree murder. On May 15th, a medical report submitted by Zimmerman’s family doctor revealed that, on the night of the shooting the accused murderer suffered “…a ‘closed fracture’ of [the] nose, a pair of black eyes, two lacerations to the back of [the] head and a minor back injury…” Zimmerman was treated by police at the scene and sought medical attention the next morning....

Republican Gov. Rick Scott is already getting ready for the 2014 election. So are the Democrats who hope to challenge him. The state Republican Party is buying television ads to promote Scott's policy successes in hopes of reversing voters' negative impressions. The governor and party are also raising money for his re-election.

In a brief interview following his speech to the Boca Raton Republican Club Tuesday night, Gov. Rick Scott shared his thoughts regarding Florida's crackdown on non-citizen voters, the media scrutiny his chief of staff has been under, and his decision on whether to ask the FDLE to launch a criminal investigation into the three Florida Supreme Court judges who allegedly used their staff to help them file campaign papers. Scott also revealed his top priorities for the next legislative session, and answered the question "are you happy being the governor?"

by John HillStand With Arizona As most Americans know, Florida is a state where a small number of votes can make a huge difference. After all, the 2000 presidential election was decided by just over 500 votes. So when there is evidence of potential voter fraud, officials better take it seriously. But they rarely have. Stand With Arizona, along with FAIR, have urged Florida to check on evidence of potential illegal alien voters for over a year with no action taken. That is, until a Tampa NBC affiliate uncovered shocking evidence of illegal aliens who voted in multiple elections...

Tallahassee, Florida (Reuters) - Florida Governor Rick Scott has shot down a request by Tampa's mayor to allow local authorities to ban guns from the city's downtown during the Republican National Convention in August. Citing Second Amendment protections in the U.S. Constitution, Scott told Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn that conventions and guns have co-existed since the nation's birth and would continue to do so during the four-day event beginning August 27. "It is unclear how disarming law abiding citizens would better protect them from the dangers and threats posed by those who would flout the law," the Republican governor said...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dl-hugley/trayvon-martin-zimmerman_b_1445575.html

President Obama holds a 50-to-45 percent lead over Mitt Romney in Florida, according to a new poll from the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling. PPP also tested four potential Florida running mates for Romney — Sen. Marco Rubio, former Gov. Jeb Bush, Gov. Rick Scott and U.S. Rep. Allen West — and found that only Bush would have a positive effect on the GOP ticket in Florida. A Romney/Bush ticket would narrow Obama’s advantage to 49-46, within the poll’s 3.7 percent margin of error. The survey of 700 Florida voters was taken Thursday through Sunday. The Obama/Joe Biden ticket holds...

A task force headed by Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll, established to review among other things Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground law, includes 17 members. The task force hopes to conclude its work by next year’s legislative session.

Two sources told WFTV on Monday that gunman George Zimmerman could be arrested this week, and that a Grand Jury will not meet on Tuesday. Zimmerman has been in hiding because of threats, after he shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. He claims he shot Martin in self-defense. Jacksonville State Attorney Angela Corey has the sole authority to determine whether Zimmerman will be charged for killing Martin. Governor Rick Scott put Corey in charge of the case late last month amid concerns that State Attorney Norm Wolflinger wouldn't do a thorough and fair investigation. "You've got to make sure justice...