Columns

Folks who play fantasy sports have been able use their credit cards to do it. Not so, for horseplayers who want to bet on the ponies online.

Happy Friday, y'all. Let's get to what's happening in the news of health care this week. 

Last week, President Trump delivered a State of the Union address that won the approval of 75 percent of viewers, including 43 percent of Democrats. Normally, presidents try to ride the wave from a successful State of the Union as long as they can.

During his early days in office, Gov. Rick Scott convinced the Legislature that Florida would reduce prison costs by $1 million if it privatized services and competitively bid healthcare contracts. 

The people who are/were behind the smear campaign against Andrew Gillum have to be crying to country music right now. 

Talk about a misnomer. The inappropriately named "Campus Free Expression Act," approved Tuesday by a 7-4 vote of the Florida Senate Education Committee, would offer students about as much freedom as a prison yard.

The Florida Legislature is a remarkable institutional setting for the great philosophical debates that occupy the time of our elected officials -- except when it isn’t.

Once a ubiquitous and tanned presence in Florida politics, Charlie Crist still has a job in politics, but it looks sadly as if he's dropped to the bottom rung of political power. 

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes was worried, but not about the unpleasantness that had begun the previous year and would linger long enough to become known as the Great Depression. What troubled the British economist was that humanity "is solving its economic problem."

The Lake Point lawsuit against Maggy Hurchalla, a former Martin County commissioner and environmental activist, alleging she interfered with the western Martin rock mine's contracts, finally … finally … goes to trial Monday. The county has endured five years of legal wrangling, accompanied by the choreographed hand-wringing and inflammatory remarks by Hurchalla groupies to get to this point.

This week, U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla., South Florida’s only Member on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee and the sponsor of the “VITA Permanence Act," highlighted the need for permanent, free tax preparing services for low income South Floridians in a Subcommittee on Oversight. Curbelo highlighted the legislation’s bipartisan support within the House of Representatives, and emphasized how free tax preparing services help vulnerable populations receive highly-accurate guidance to ensure the largest possible tax returns.

President Trump once boasted that his base was so loyal that he "could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters." Now he's putting that claim to the test with his immigration proposal. In his State of the Union address Tuesday, Trump offered to support not just legal status, but a path to citizenship for nearly 2 million illegal immigrants -- the "Dreamers" who were brought to the United States as children through no fault of their own -- if Democrats would agree to fund his border wall and limit chain migration.

Florida Forever finally found its land champion in Senate Appropriations Chairman Rob Bradley.  

It was a good speech. Calm down. I said good. Despite talking for an hour and 20 minutes, the longest speech since Bill Clinton's much-mocked 2000 stem-winder, Donald Trump's first State of the Union address did exactly what it needed to do: nothing.

I recently introduced legislation in the Florida House to start the process of moving the Capital to better serve Floridians - for the next 500 years.  Tallahassee was the right place for Florida’s Capital 150 years ago, when the state’s center was between Pensacola and Jacksonville. That criteria (the state’s center) still applies today.