If then Senator
Marco Rubio, was ever on his job of protecting Florida,
the Zika Virus Fight
might be over by now.
You see, the Zika
Virus has been known to congress
since the 1940's!
So now he is back
to
his same old lie,
cheat a
nd
greedy self again.
This country,
including Florida,
only know him as a guy
running to be president of the USA?
Senator Marco Rubio
has been seen on TV more in these past two week
then he has in the past four
plus years since taking the oath
to serve Florida in the Congress of the United
States of America.!
Ever since flunking
out as a Republican Contender
and finding out that he cannot get a real job,
because his
"No Show Rubio,"
reputation has preceded him in every
state in the union
Sorry my friends
this is a
long list of Mr. No Show's Past.
Senator Marco
Rubio's past
During that race,
Rubio's opponents hounded him over these issues.
Still, Rubio was
elected.
But a presidential
bid would bring national scrutiny to his record in Florida.
Here are some of the
scandals that Rubio has survived…so far.
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MotherJones.com
Improper use of
party credit cards: From 2005 until when he left the state Legislature in 2009,
Rubio had access to an American Express credit card paid for by the Republican
Party of Florida. During his time as speaker, from 2007 to 2009, Rubio often used
this card to pay for personal expenses—and some of those expenses ended up paid
by the state GOP. In early 2010, when Florida newspapers began to dig into
these credit card records, Rubio said he had done nothing wrong and had paid
American Express around $16,000 between 2007 and 2008 to cover personal
expenses that he had charged, such as $181.56 at the Museum of Natural History
in New York City. Rubio also put a $10,000 charge on a party card for a family
vacation at a resort in Georgia before ultimately gathering money from family
members and paying American Express directly, according to The New Republic.
In 2010, reporters
at the Miami Herald and the St. Petersburg Times (which has since become the
Tampa Bay Times) identified thousands in personal expenses for Rubio that the
Republican Party was never reimbursed for, including $68.33 for "beverages"
and a "meal" from a liquor store near his West Miami home, $765 from
Apple's online store for "computer supplies," and $1,024 in payments
to a Tallahassee property manager for personal business. Since Rubio has not
released his credit card records from 2005 to 2007, it's unknown how he used
the card during those years.
In 2012, when he was
on the list of possible running mates for Mitt Romney, Rubio sat down for an
interview with Fox News' Bret Baier and tried to dispense with the credit card
issue. Every month, Rubio explained, he would get a statement from American Express
and directly pay off any personal expenses. Rubio insisted that "the
Republican Party of Florida never paid my personal expenses" and that the
issue was "totally resolved years ago."
But after the
interview, Beth Reinhard, one of the reporters who exposed the Rubio credit
card story noted, "[Q]uestions remain about the more than $100,000 in
charges from Nov. 2006 to Nov. 2008." And she presented what she called
the "obvious" question: "Why would such a savvy politician
continually use a state party credit card for non-party business, requiring him
to reimburse the credit card company after the bill had been paid?"
Double-billing
flights: In February 2010, as he ran for the US Senate, Rubio admitted to
double-billing Florida taxpayers and the Republican Party of Florida for eight
flights during his time as House speaker. Rubio said the billing was a mistake
and repaid $3,000 to the state GOP.
How could this have
happened? Rubio blamed the snafu on his travel agency, which charged his state
GOP card instead of his personal card. Then, Rubio explained, his staffers
sought reimbursement from the state for those same flights.
In this case as in
all others, whenever Rubio or his staff fended off questions about his finances
during these times, they would chalk the issue up to "clerical
errors," according to a 2012 biography of Rubio by Washington Post
reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia. This became a "stock narrative" from
Rubio's supporters, Roig-Franzia wrote, "Rubio was simply sloppy, but not
corrupt."
Political
committees: During his stint in the state House, Rubio started two political
committees that together took in about $600,000 over a period of less than
three years and often made questionable payments. One of these was $14,000 for
"couriers" that included three relatives of Rubio who were doing
political work around the state.
Rubio established
one of these committees, Floridians for Conservative Leadership, in December
2002, to "support state and local candidates." But an investigation
by the Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times revealed that in 2010, the
committee spent "nearly $150,000 on administrative and operating costs and
$2,000 in candidate contributions." Credit card expenses as high as
$50,000 had little information about how the money was spent. The newspapers
noted that this was in "contrast with the more detailed disclosures of
other legislators' political committees." Other politicians' committees
generally gave more to candidates and had lower administrative costs.
"The
bookkeeping in (that) committee was not always perfect,'' Rubio's campaign
manager told the Herald and the Times in 2010 after they discovered as part of
their investigation that $34,000 in expenses, including a $7,000 reimbursement
to Rubio himself, had not been disclosed, as required by state law.
The "Taj
Mahal" courthouse: Among Tallahassee's many scandals during the Rubio
years was an elaborate new courthouse for the 1st District Court of Appeal
located in the state's capital. At a time when the Republicans running the
state were preaching fiscal austerity, the Legislature appropriated a whopping
$48 million for the new facility, which included plans for each judge to get a
60-inch flat-screen TV, mahogany-paneled chambers, and granite countertops for
a private bathroom and kitchen, according to the St. Petersburg Times. Funding
for the new courthouse snuck through the Legislature as an amendment to a
transportation bill on the last day of the legislative session in 2007.
During his 2010
Senate bid, Rubio denied any part in funding the lavish project, saying it was
"not something I worked on as speaker." Yet, the St. Petersburg Times
uncovered an email distributed among the judges on the 1st Circuit listing the "heroes"
who helped fund the project. Rubio was among those who were "especially
helpful" in appropriating money for the project. "The outrage may be
that it was a legal waste of public money, and that powerful legislators like Marco
Rubio quietly conspired to make it happen," charged a St. Petersburg Times
editorial, arguing that the odds the funding for the courthouse passed the
Legislature without Rubio's blessing were "slim to none."
His friendship with
David Rivera: For over two decades, Rubio has been close friends with David
Rivera, state representative who became a member of the US Congress. They both
served in the Florida state Legislature in the early 2000s, and Rubio and Rivera
jointly bought a house in Tallahassee and lived there together when the
Legislature was in session. The two were known as a team there, and when Rubio
campaigned to become speaker of the state House—a job that takes years to
secure—Rivera acted as his top strategist. Their shared house and five months
of missed mortgage payments came to haunt Rubio during his Senate run in 2010
when their bank tried to foreclose on the property. Rubio and Rivera made the
missing payments and kept the house.
For the past several
years, Rivera has been under investigation from state and federal officials for
an exhaustive list of alleged misuses of political money. For example,
investigators suspected that Rivera had accepted more than $500,000 in payments
from the owner of a Miami dog track for Rivera's help on a local initiative to
allow slot machines at gambling sites. State investigators, though, let Rivera
off the hook in 2012 after an 18-month investigation, citing the statute of
limitations and Florida's lax campaign finance laws.
But Rivera remains
under federal investigation for an elaborate campaign finance scheme and
cover-up that reads like an over-the-top Hollywood script. Running for
reelection to Congress in 2012, Rivera was likely to face Democratic challenger
Joe Garcia, whom he had beat two years before. Federal prosecutors are
investigating whether Rivera propped up a Democratic candidate running against
Garcia in the primary. Rivera allegedly used his on-again-off-again girlfriend,
Ana Alliegro, as a go-between to funnel more than $80,000 in cash to the other
Democratic candidate, Justin Lamar Sternad. Garcia beat Sternad in the primary,
and then defeated Rivera in the general election in 2012. When the feds began
to look into the campaign finance scheme, Rivera helped Alliegro to escape to
Nicaragua to avoid federal investigators.
Alliegro was
arrested in Nicaragua nearly a year ago at the US government's request and sent
back to the United States, where she ultimately plead guilty. She has testified
in depth about the entire scheme to a federal grand jury. Sternad also plead
guilty for his part in the scheme in 2013. Rivera has yet to be indicted,
according to the Miami Herald. Attorneys familiar with the case told the Herald
that the US attorney might be waiting until his case is "iron-clad."
Or perhaps Rivera is giving testimony to implicate others. It's anyone's guess.
Rubio has repeatedly
defended his friendship with Rivera, refusing to distance himself from his
embattled chum. "He's a friend, and I'm going to give him the benefit of
the doubt," Rubio told Fox's Baier in 2012. If Rubio runs for president,
he may get plenty of opportunities to continue this defense.
Marco Rubio’s Boat
vs. John Kerry’s Boat
June 9, 2015
"For years,
Senator Marco Rubio struggled under the weight of student debt, mortgages and
an extra loan against the value of his home totaling hundreds of thousands of
dollars."
(Boo, poor people! —
ed.) "
But in 2012,
financial salvation seemed to have arrived:
A publisher paid him
$800,000 to write a book about growing up as the son of Cuban immigrants."
(Boo, rich people! —
ed.)
And what did Mr.
Rubio do with his dirty, filthy publishing fortune?
He bought a BOAT.
And not just any
kind of boat, but a "luxury speedboat."
He splurged on an
extravagant purchase:
$80,000 for a luxury speedboat, state records show.
At the time,
Mr.
Rubio confided to a friend
that it was a potentially inadvisable
outlay that he
could not resist.
The 24-foot boat, he
said, fulfilled a dream.
The big picture that
we are not seeing in this
is the fact that John Kerry was, is and will always
be
able to afford his boat,
Marco Rubio needed his book deal
to help in his run
for the presidency?