Columns

WASHINGTON -- The worst job in the world, it turns out, isn't the U.S. presidency but speaker of the House of Representatives.

In June, Comcast executive vice president David Cohen hosted a $2,700-a-plate fundraiser for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. On the first weekend in October, the NBC Universal in-kind contributions really kicked in: a star turn on "Saturday Night Live," a Sunday morning interview with Rev. Al Sharpton, and a Monday town hall meeting on the "Today" program.

You win the presidency, Richard Nixon supposedly observed, by tacking to the right in the primaries and to the center in the general election. Hillary Clinton seems to be following that strategy except, as a Democrat, she is tacking to the left.

The marijuana tourism industry is a burgeoning one with great potential because of its recent legalization. As the negative stigmas associated with marijuana use fade away, just about every tourist visiting Colorado and the other legalized states now curiously enters recreational marijuana storefronts to see what might catch his or her fancy. People who haven’t used marijuana in years or sometimes never before are now putting their inhibitions aside to try cannabis. Because of the overwhelming array of edibles, tinctures, topicals, and even transdermal patches available. people don’t even have to smoke to partake in the festivities. However, with marijuana moving into more industrialized facilities for massive-scale production, it is important that consumers seek out organically grown, pesticide-free marijuana that is cultivated with the end user in mind.

To my knowledge, nobody has threatened a single Florida clergyman. But never mind that. Fear is a powerful unifier. And now legislators in each chamber are plowing ahead with bills to protect the religious freedoms of lawsuit-fearing clergy in case the U.S. Constitution doesn't.

"Look," wrote Lois Lerner, echoing Horace Greeley, "my view is that Lincoln was our worst president not our best. He should [have] let the [S]outh go.

Long before there was a "Black Lives Matter" movement, there was Ruth Starr Rose -- an activist artist whose paintings nearly a century ago captured the dignity and spirit of America's black families at a time when stereotype and caricature prevailed.

Florida’s politicians and the Republican Party of Florida should welcome vigorous policy discussion among the presidential candidates. Florida should be a leader in flourishing substantive discussion during election cycles.

Not all important public policy reforms come from Washington. Really lasting reforms can percolate from the bottom up, brewed by citizens with a grievance pushing state and local governments to act.

The $70 billion fantasy sports market apparently isn't the least bit discouraged by Florida's resistance to gaming expansion. Why should it be? Its entrepreneurs are sure they can convince Florida legislators that playing fantasy games of any kind isn't gambling at all. It doesn't represent a game of chance, they say. It's first about skill.

Welcome to The Dean’s List — an Ed Dean-style look at who Florida’s political achievers were (and weren’t) in the last seven days. What you see here is strictly my opinion, not necessarily the editor’s or the rest of the staff at Sunshine State News.

Twinkling stars are pretty but, for astronomers, problematic. Twinkles are caused by the interference of Earth's atmosphere with light radiating throughout the breathtakingly beautiful and unimaginably violent universe. In 1990, however, the Hubble telescope went into orbit 370 miles above Earth, beyond the atmospheric filter, peering perhaps 12 billion years into the past, almost to the Big Bang of 13.7 billion years ago.

Patrick Murphy's mom and dad -- best kind of parents a candidate can have when the political chips are down -- are buying love by the thousands for their Senate seat-seeking son.

Sherlock Holmes famously solved the mystery of the Silver Blaze by noting th

In 1861, as leaders from the South met in Montgomery to create the Confederate States of America, almost every political observer expected someone from Georgia to wind up as the president of the new nation. Three of the leading candidates -- Howell Cobb, Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs -- all hailed from Georgia. But Jefferson Davis from Mississippi wound up as the first and only Confederate president as the Georgia candidates all slit each other’s throats.