Jeb Hires A Winner

by Steve

Apparently, hiring bad people runs in the Bush family.

Just days after Florida Gov. Jeb Bush fired a top official over sexual-harassment allegations, Bush's office confirmed it has hired Lloyd Brown, former editorial-page editor of the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, who resigned from the paper in November following public allegations of sexual harassment and plagiarism.

Brown apparently is an ultra-conservative nut case who has issues with blacks and women.

Brown, 65, quit the paper on Nov. 2 after a former editorial writer there, Billee Bussard, wrote an article in the local Folio Weekly that asserted that Brown watched Internet pornography in the paper's office and also conducted sexual conversations on the telephone while viewing the sexual material.

Brown was hired Dec. 20 at an annual salary of $80,000 as a staff writer/speechwriter, according to Jacob DiPietre, a spokesman for Gov. Bush. He said the governor had full faith in Brown and that the governor's firing of Secretary of Elder Affairs Terry White on Wednesday showed Bush would not tolerate sexual harassment.

Brown generated national attention and staff protests in 2000, after writing an editorial that called the era of slavery in the U.S. "merely a small and shrinking part of the human condition." His paper ran a clarification, apologizing for any impressions that the editorial was "insensitive or demeaning."

The editorial further said the effects of slavery "are not permanent." After national columnists railed against the editorial and members of the newspaper's newsroom wrote a letter protesting the editorial, the paper ran a clarification, apologizing for any impressions that the editorial was "insensitive or demeaning."

Another winner from the compassionate conservatives.