Two issues jumped out at me after watching last night's Rod Smith/Jim Davis debate.
U.S. Sugar ties to Smith.
The Davis connection to Freddie Pitts and William Lee.
I wanted more information.
Apparently, Jim Davis is straddling one serious swift boat.
As reported by the Miami Herald, an ad made by a third-party group called Florida's Working Families, savages Davis for a minimum-wage vote and for having the second-worst attendance record in the House of Representatives since he began campaigning early last year.
''Maybe we should be glad Jim Davis rarely shows up for work,'' said the commercial underwritten by U.S. Sugar, an insurance group and a real estate holding company. It cost about $700,000 to run the ad.
Florida's Working Families has targeted Democratic candidate Jim Davis, who often tells voters that if he had been governor, he would have vetoed a 2003 measure weakening Everglades pollution limits on sugar growers.
Davis' opponent in the Sept. 5 primary, state Sen. Rod Smith, supported the sugar-backed bill.
The industry has given $100,000 to Florida's Working Families and another $295,000 to a group that did pro-Smith mailings.
Davis states that sugar growers have spent $1,000,000 attacking him on behalf of Smith, who serves as chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. Smith voted for sugar-backed legislation in 2003 that environmentalists said would weaken Everglades pollution standards and delay the national park's cleanup.
Smith said the Everglades bill ensured the cleanup timetable was ''realistic.'' The real problem, he said, is that Congress has not put up its share of the billions in cleanup money. He also defended the anti-Davis ads, saying that they aren't personal attacks and accurately describe the congressman's record.
Smith denied that the sugar industry's involvement suggested he was beholden to its interests. Smith is a lifelong farmer from rural Alachua who serves as chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee.
''Am I going to remain a strong supporter of agriculture in Florida? Yes,'' he said. ``Is that going to be at the expense of the environment? No.'
One of Smith's hardest punches hearkened back to when Davis was a state representative. In 1990, Davis voted against awarding compensation to two black men, Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee, who were convicted in 1963 of murdering two white gas station attendants in a rural Panhandle town.
Pitts and Lee were sentenced to die and served 12 years in prison. Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee, who are black, twice were convicted by all-white juries of murdering two white gas station attendants in 1963 in Port St. Joe, a Florida Panhandle fishing and paper mill town.
There was no evidence linking Pitts, a 27-year-old soldier, and Lee, a 19-year-old cook, to the crime, and they "confessed" after being beaten by police. They were pardoned in 1975 after Gov. Reubin Askew said there was substantial doubt about their guilt -- and another man confessed to the murders. In 1998 -- two years after Davis went to Congress -- the Florida Legislature awarded Pitts and Lee $500,000 each.
They were on death row for nine years before their convictions were thrown out when a white man, Curtis "Boo" Adams admitted to the murders and passed a lie detector test.
But the judge in a 1972 retrial did not allow the jury to hear about Adams' confession, and Pitts and Lee were convicted again.
But in 1975, after a Pulitzer Prize-winning book was written about their case, Invitation to a Lynching (Doubleday, 1975) by reporter and editor, Gene Miller, Florida Gov. Reuben Askew ordered an investigation and used executive privilege to grant Pitts and Lee full pardons.
''My job was to hear the evidence,'' Davis said. ``So I did what I thought was the right thing to do, not the popular thing to do.''
Legislation to compensate the two men had been introduced during every session since 1977, but in 1998, the Republican party set its sights on winning the governor's race and has campaigned hard to win more support among blacks.
In May, the Republicans, who control the state legislature for the first time since Reconstruction, passed a compromise bill compensating Pitts and Lee with $500,000 each.
This blogger takes pause. Was the Davis decision to vote against compensation "the right thing to do" as he so states or was his decision based on holding party lines against the Republicans...a sort of sour grapes vote against the newly anointed majority Reps, not necessarily against Pitts and Lee?
"I lost all my young lifehood," says Lee, 62 at the date of this report and a correctional counselor for Miami-Dade County. "I lost all my family. I lost everything."
"I am bitter, and I will be until the day I die," says Pitts, then 54, the driver of an oil tanker. "But it's a bitterness I control. It's like a scar, a burn. It's going to be there."
"What you gotta do is you gotta start cleaning up," continued Pitts. "You get a bad cop, you get a bad politician, you gotta throw his butt out."
Exactly.
http://www.cnn.com/...
http://www.legacy.com/...