Best of the Blogs: Crunch Time

Progress Florida Education Center’s Best of the Blogs for the week ending 5-3-13
Best of the Blogs is featured weekly as part of Progress Florida Education Center’s popular free Daily Clips service.

The Florida GOP And Sick-Time: “Small Government” Hypocrites
By Martha Jackovics
Beach Peanuts
Conservative Republicans claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility, and yet Rick Scott threw away taxpayer dollars along with stimulus money and the promise of jobs when he rejected high-speed rail, a project that was years in the making.

Florida House GOP Wants Poor People To Pay Three Times More For Health Care Than State Lawmakers Do
By Sy Mukherjee
Think Progress
The GOP-controlled Florida state house on Friday passed a Medicaid “expansion” bill that would substantially burden the state’s budget by rejecting any federal funding.

Debriefing Parent Trigger’s Defeat in the Florida Senate
By Bob Sikes
Scathing Purple Musings
Perhaps Senator Bill Montford said it best in this quote he gave Palm Beach Post reporter Dara Kam:

Medicaid Expansion in Florida: It’s Obamacare vs. Grouponcare (Part 2)
By Gary Stein
Huffington Post
In the Florida House session day last week on Thursday, April 25, as the House Healthcare Bill was to be debated, one lawmaker quoted those sages known as the Rolling Stones by stating, “You can’t always get what you want.”

Deal makers and breakers in final days of 2013 Florida legislative session
By Daniel Tilson
West Palm Beach Liberal Examiner
As the clock wound down on the 2013 Florida legislative session yesterday, the wheeling and dealing wound up and into high gear as Governor Rick Scott and GOP legislative leaders all “gave some to get some”; to each other at least, if not to more than a million impoverished, working poor and middle class Floridians suffering without health insurance coverage.