For $72 million, we ought to be able to buy Georgia.

Then, when people started demanding answers about the costs of this environmental lawsuit, Gov. Rick Scott's environmental chief announced he was resigning to go work for … wait for it … one of the firms that had been billing taxpayers for the suit.

Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Jon Steverson will join Scott's previous DEP secretary who already works at … wait again … the same firm.

That's enough to buy every man, woman and child in this state a Dell laptop … which residents could use to send emails to their elected officials asking: "What is wrong with you people?"

However, John D. Gartner, a registered psychotherapist from the renowned Johns Hopkins University Medical School seems to think Trump may, in fact, be the one with the problem. Gartner, who teaches psychiatric residents at Hopkins, decided to break the ethical code known as the “Goldwater Rule” in order to warn the American public about the dangerousness of our new commander-in-chief’s mental state.

Gartner, who is also the author of In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography, says “Donald Trump is dangerously mentally ill and temperamentally incapable of being president.”

So there you have it. The leader of the United States of America is more than likely a malignant narcissist who has the fate of the free world in his two tiny hands. Not to mention, he now has access to the United States government’s nuclear codes. If that’s not terrifying, we don’t know what is.

Since votes are counted unobservably in the pitch-dark of cyberspace and our voting equipment and programming (unlike our footballs) are essentially off-limits to inspection, election forensics comes down perforce to indirect measures of patterns and anomalies, from which red flags may emerge to suggest “problems” with the vote counting process. Baselines commonly used for this verification process range from exit polls and pre-election polls, to hand counts (in the very few places where they still exist), to parallel contests too noncompetitive to be likely targets for malfeasance, to vote count patterns correlated with type or brand of counting equipment (e.g., paperless touchscreen vs. optical scanner or Dominion Voting vs. ES&S). In the 2016 primaries, it was primarily the exit polls that waved the red flags, although there were other strongly corroborating indicators.

Unlike previous eras, exit polls — or at least those in competitive elections bearing national significance — in the era of computerized voting have been so habitually “off” in the same direction (to the “left” of the vote counts) that many, having first presumed the accuracy of the vote counts, have come to dismiss the polls as faulty, the pollsters as biased or incompetent. This jaundiced view prevails despite the existence of studies confirming the demographic validity of exit poll samples.

But the pattern of exit poll and vote count results in the 2016 primaries was strange enough that it should have given pause to even the most hardened skeptics. While the exit poll results were consistently accurate throughout nearly all of the Republican primaries, they were wildly and broadly inaccurate in the Democratic primaries, exhibiting a pervasive intra-party shift to the detriment of Sanders (i.e., Hillary Clinton’s vote count percentages consistently exceeded her exit poll percentages, the disparity often far beyond the poll margin of error). It seems highly unlikely that the same pollsters employing the same methodological techniques and polling voters at the same precincts on the same days, would be competent and consistently successful with Republicans but somehow incompetent and consistently unsuccessful with Democrats. This second-order comparison of one set of exit polls and vote counts against another greatly strengthens the probative value of the exit poll/vote count evidence by providing in effect a baseline that testifies to the overall competence and accuracy of the exit polls as a secondary measure of collective voter intent.

This evidence was further bolstered by the curious outlier case of Oklahoma, where the exit poll to vote count shift was reversed, favoring Sanders in the vote count. Oklahoma was one of only three states to display this reverse shift, and it was by far the largest shift of the three. In considering what made Oklahoma such an outlier, it is worth noting that the Oklahoma state government prides itself for having taken over from the private vendors most of the tasks and duties related to the programming of the voting equipment. Thus, the method of and control over programming appear to correlate with the forensic outcome. It is an open question whether the difference in access to the programming process was responsible for the egregious reversal of the exit poll to vote count shift direction relative to the pattern in virtually all of the other states.

Mr. Harris started by crafting the headline: “BREAKING: ‘Tens of thousands’ of fraudulent Clinton votes found in Ohio warehouse.” It made sense, he figured, to locate this shocking discovery in the very city and state where Mr. Trump had highlighted his “rigged” meme.

“I had a theory when I sat down to write it,” recalled Mr. Harris, a 23-year-old former college quarterback and fraternity leader. “Given the severe distrust of the media among Trump supporters, anything that parroted Trump’s talking points people would click. Trump was saying ‘rigged election, rigged election.’ People were predisposed to believe Hillary Clinton could not win except by cheating.”

Contacted by a reporter who had discovered an electronic clue that revealed his secret authorship of ChristianTimesNewspaper.com, he was wary at first, chagrined to be unmasked.

“This topic is rather sensitive,” Mr. Harris said, noting that he was trying to build a political consulting business and needed to protect his reputation. But eventually he agreed to tell the story of his foray into fake news, a very part-time gig that he calculated paid him about $1,000 an hour in web advertising revenue. He seemed to regard his experience with a combination of guilt about having spread falsehoods and pride at doing it so skillfully.

During the past year, we have all grown accustomed to President-elect Donald Trump's sharply barbed tweets. Every opponent, it seems, is fair game for his 140-character expressions of wrath. No amount of virtue or truth can shield critics from his verbal attacks and counter-attacks, and there is no evidence that the tweeter in chief harbors any concern for propriety or what normally passes for common decency or restraint. If we ever doubted the depth of his reckless commitment to denigrating even his most revered enemies, the recent assault on John Lewis' life and legacy should put that doubt to rest. After the Alabama-born Atlanta congressman questioned the legitimacy of Trump's election and impending presidency — giving voice to a suspicion shared by millions of Americans — the president-elect tweeted: "Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results. All talk, talk, talk — no action or results. Sad!"

Here Trump is belittling not just any liberal Democratic congressman but a civil rights icon often characterized as "the conscience of the Congress." While a spirited defense of his legitimacy as president-elect is understandable, Trump's ad hominem attack on one of the civil rights movement's greatest heroes is another thing altogether, particularly when it was launched three days before a national holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Throughout his career, both before and after his initial election to Congress in 1986, Lewis has been a paragon of ethical consistency and inspiring leadership. As anyone familiar with the narrative of the struggle for civil rights during the past half-century knows, the charge that Lewis is all talk and no action borders on the absurd.

I cannot pretend to be an objective observer of the Trump-Lewis contretemps. I have known John Lewis for 17 years; we have worked together on a number of civil rights-related projects, including Freedom Rider reunions, civil rights tours, Smithsonian symposia, oral history research for my book on the Freedom Rides, documentary films, and even an appearance on the Oprah show featuring John and 180 other Freedom Riders. Through it all, my respect and admiration for him has never flagged. Along with the legendary historian John Hope Franklin, he is the greatest person I have been privileged to meet during my lifetime.

The dossier alleges extensive active coordination between Russia and the Trump team, and suggests that much of the anti-Clinton rhetoric from the left was deliberately orchestrated by Russia and Trump's team to harm her campaign.

The dossier reports that "the aim of leaking the DNC emails to Wikileaks during the Democratic Convention had been to swing supporters of Bernie Sanders away from Hillary Clinton and across to Trump."

If true, the Steele dossier brings more clarity to some of the murkier edges of the campaign. To an unknown extent, it suggests that Jill Stein, probably unwittingly, was pulled into Putin’s orbit as part of anti-Clinton pro-Trump plan.

One intriguing feature of the election fallout is the near total silence of Bernie Sanders on the topic of Russian hacks. In light of the Kremlin's alleged pro-Sanders strategy (as a means of supporting Trump), the senator from Vermont seems a little like the dog that wouldn't bark in the night.

A Manatee County woman was shot and killed Tuesday night while searching a neighborhood near her home for a lost dog.
According to NBC affiliate WFLA-TV, Rebecca Rawson was with two family members near her home in Parrish – located northeast of Bradenton – searching for the animal when someone knocked on the door of 83-year-old Eugene Matthews.

Manatee County Sheriff’s deputies said Matthews opened his door and started shooting at the group and into a vehicle where Rawson was. She was taken to a nearby hospital, where Rawson died.
Matthews has been charged with second degree murder.

The victim, Rebecca Rawson, along with Kathryn Rawson (her daughter) and Rodney Rawson (her brother in law), went to Matthews' home on Pritchart Street to retrieve her dog, Bart. When Rodney Rawson went to the door and knocked, Juanita Sills answered the door. Rawson called the dog's name and the dog came to the door. Rawson picked up the dog and took him back to the car.

Eugene Matthews came out of the house and fired a handgun into the air twice. Then he pointed the gun at the vehicle and a single round went through the windshield and hit Rebecca Rawson, 65, in the face. Rodney grabbed the gun from Williams and a struggle ensued and one round was fired before Rawson could get the gun from the suspect.