Columns

On Wednesday, the halls were packed with members of the Florida Cattlemans Association and the Florida Catholic Conference. Catholics and Cattlemen from around Florida were here to meet with their elected officials on important issues. For the Catholics, it was parental notification. For the Cattlemen, it was growth management.

In a speech Thursday to a hundred African American clergy and laity at the capitol, CFO Alex Sink demonstrated how difficult it can be to tell if state office holders are acting as campaigners or government officials. Sink, the leading Democratic candidate for governor, seemed to be sounding only election themes, speaking on unemployment and education.

If anyone was looking for a self-righteous extreme feminist, they found one in Angie Jackson. This is a woman who was so proud she was aborting her baby that she announced she would "tweet" her chemical-cocktail abortion live, as it happened, on Twitter. The liberal media found this made-for-TV slaughter fascinating, and not at all a controversy worthy of discussing with two sides.

There's a lively debate going on in the blogosphere and the press about whether Democrats would be better off passing or not passing a health care bill.

WASHINGTON -- Skipping through the Candy Land of the health care bill, one is tempted to hum a few bars of "Let Me Call You Sweetheart." What a deal. For deal-makers, that is. Not so much for American taxpayers, who have been misled into thinking that the sweetheart deals have been excised.

The South Florida Water Management District faces a defining vote at its meeting this week, one that could bring the agency to the fiscal brink and force an increase in property taxes for homeowners in 16 South Florida counties.

Abraham Lincoln once asked an audience how many legs a dog has, if you called the tail a leg? When the audience said "five," Lincoln corrected them, saying that the answer was four. "The fact that you call a tail a leg does not make it a leg." That same principle applies today. The fact that politicians call something a "stimulus" does not make it a stimulus. The fact that they call something a "jobs bill" does not mean there will be more jobs.

Greece this past weekend saw the worst rioting since the debt crisis began. After Athens had announced new tax hikes and budget cuts to reduce a deficit of 13 percent of gross domestic product, mobs drove guards from Greece's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and attacked police.

"Stop messing with Texas!" That was the message Gov. Rick Perry bellowed on election night as he celebrated his victory over Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Republican primary for governor. In his reference to Texas' anti-littering slogan, Perry was making a point applicable to national as well as Texas politics and addressed to Democratic politicians as well as Republicans.