Fury against Rick Scott, the tea party, and ultra conservative "ideology" in general swept Florida today when a report by the Florida Department of Transportation was released showing in concrete terms that the high speed rail system blocked by Rick Scott would have actually operated at a profit its first year, and likely thereafter. The report findings were a stunner to even rail boosters who might have quietly imagined that rail ridership would need to be built over time. An earlier report in 2009 apparently predicted profits only in 2021.
The report served to whittle away any vestige of truth to Scott's blunder defense that he was at least acting exclusively in the interest of protecting against fiscal "risks" and not politics, or, a "I wanna too" love affair with moves similar yet circumstantially different taken by state governors such as Chris Christy.
Unable to prevent or deny the report's public availability and dissemination, Scott resorted to issuing a response that in happenstance disclosed that he in fact had been "verbally" appraised of the report's findings before rejecting rail money, but dismissed them anyway in favor of documents and findings released to the Internet by libertarian groups. The report issued by the FDOT itself was generated by Wilbur Smith Associates, which Janet Zink of the St. Pete Times writes has experience in the transporation and infrastructure fields going back to 1952 and offices around the globe.
As many Floridians reeled, Scott's Twitter feed cranked out a reference to "God" and at times haphazzardly tried to promote forward thinking abstracts, all while failing to mention the report or to perhaps thankfully compound the disasterous response by his office to it. The day's feed conjured images of a Charlie-Sheen like meltdown in which its authoring team struggled to appeal to the many thousands of tea party and ultra conservatives with the best chance of remaining faithful to Rick Scott and to overlook his very serious mistakes.
