Buzz has been building in recent days that Condoleezza Rice, who headed the State Department in George W. Bushs second term, would be a strong pick for Mitt Romneys presidential running mate on the Republican ticket.

Rice certainly would bring some strengths if she ends up as Romneys understudy, including becoming the first African-American woman to place on a national ticket. Romney has little background on foreign policy; Rice easily would fill that gap.

Two polls released in recent days show Rice remains popular with voters.

When you speak to Floridas small-business community, you repeatedly hear certain concerns one of them being uncertainty.

Attorney General Pam Bondi needs help spending $300 million.

The attorney general has set up a webpage for the public to make suggestions on how to distribute Floridas share of the national mortgage servicing settlement.

You have to give your name, a phone number and email address, along with your comments that take up 1,000 characters or less. The character count includes spaces and punctuation.

The attorney general's office did not immediately respond to a request about what kind of suggestions are being accepted.

The Florida Bar kicked off a $300,000 campaign in Tallahassee Monday to educate voters about the merit retention system.

The idea is to help Floridians this November make an informed choice as to whether three Florida Supreme Court justices and 15 appellate judges should keep their jobs.

A new survey shows 90 percent of the citizens of this state dont understand merit retention and have no idea how it works.

Florida voters amended the Constitution in 1976 to try to keep politics out of the judicial system.

After months of legal battling about whether it spent enough money on patient care, a Medicaid mental-health plan will not have to pay back about $4 million to the state, according to a settlement agreement.

Florida Health Partners Inc., which provides mental-health services to Medicaid beneficiaries in a large part of Central Florida, filed administrative challenges last year after the state Agency for Health Care Administration said the plan had not complied in 2006 with what is known as a "medical loss ratio."

A Leon County judge rejected a move to block the Legislatures new congressional lines on Monday as the U.S. Department of Justice cleared the new map under the federal Voting Rights Act.

As Newt Gingrich prepares to wave the white flag of surrender, at least one campaign staffer confirms the former speaker of the House "spent like a drunken sailor" during the last two months of his presidential campaign -- even outspending Republican front-runner Mitt Romney.

"Ever since the beginning of March the speaker hasn't seemed bothered by how much it cost us to travel around, as long as we were making a statement," said the longtime campaign aide on Monday. "He likes to make a splash."

Labor unions, like the United Nations, are all too often judged by what they are envisioned as being -- not by what they actually are or what they actually do.

Florida Sen. Chris Smith, D-Fort Lauderdale, couldnt wait for the state to convene its own task force following the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford.

So he put his own together.

And while he is among the 19 individuals placed on Gov. Rick Scotts Citizens Safety and Protection Task Force, which has its first meeting on Tuesday, he has released the findings of his own group.