It's been one year since Jim Crochet became Florida's long-term care ombudsman, head watchdog of the program charged with protecting the rights of nursing home and long-term care residents statewide.
It's been a tough year.
In February, soon after Gov. Rick Scott took office, he dismissed the previous ombudsman, Brian Lee, who had served for seven years and was considered a thorn in the side of providers as were some of his volunteers.
After taping John Stossel's show on March 16 in New York, the Mrs. and I took the 10 a.m. Acela back to Washington. Once we had boarded the train, who should come waddling up the aisle but Bill Kristol.
The headline reads, "Voting rights groups ask Scott to stop noncitizen voter purge." Think about it. Why would any voting rights group in America do a thing like that?
WASHINGTON -- In one of his characteristic conniptions about people who frustrated him, Theodore Roosevelt, progressivism's first president, said of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, "I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that." TR was as mistaken about Holmes' spine as are various progressives today about Chief Justice John Roberts'.
Florida education officials crisscrossed the state this week offering a series of apologies over the admittedly botched roll out of tougher writing assessments that, if taken at face value, showed that seven of 10 Florida students did not make the grade.
Following the release of the FCAT writing assessment results the week before, Department of Education Secretary Gerard Robinson went on the road to explain why the number of students making satisfactory scores on the test fell from over 80 percent last year to as low as 27 percent.
Filling a 15-mile gap left by SunRail, a Georgia-based company proposes to connect the Orlando airport, the Orange County Convention Center, Disney World and the Florida Mall with magnet-levitation trains.
"This is the missing link," American Maglevpresident and CEO Tony Morris told Sunshine State News inan exclusive interview. "And we can do it without spending a penny of public money."
Noting that the $1.3 billion SunRail's southern line ends at Sand Lake Road and Orange Avenue, Morris predicted that his extension would "quadruple ridership."
Nearly two years after 4 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf, Washington, D.C., policy-makers are still wrangling over how to handle a projected $20 billion fine.
"Negotiations are going slowly without much breakthrough," said Jay Liles, a policy consultant to the Florida Wildlife Federation and a participant in the talks.
"We're hoping the pace picks up, because every day that goes by, people say, we'll just wait until after the election," he told Sunshine State News Friday after another negotiating session at the capital.
With debate and votes taking place around the state and polls showing a growing acceptance, the issue of same-sex marriage and domestic partner rights will likely be among a host of second-tier issues that could determine which presidential candidate takes the state.
In a Quinnipiac University Polling Institute poll released this week, a majority of voters said the candidates' stance on same-sex marriage would not affect the way they would vote.
