Columns

Either Bill Nelson has been standing too close to Charlie Crist, or his memory is beginning to go south. Or, more probably, he just doesn't think you'll notice. The point is, when it comes to offshore drilling, Florida's senior senator has developed a conspicuous case of the flip-flops.

I had the privilege of being part of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s magic when I heard him speak in 1962, while I was in college in North Carolina. There -- in a segregated city where whites used one toilet and "coloreds" another, where the largest hospital admitted blacks only to windowless basement rooms -- the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a single afternoon, welded into one thousands of people, black and white.

Frank Lloyd Wright purportedly said, "Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles." Today, however, Oregon is the state with the strangest state of mind, which has something to do with it being impeccably progressive: In the series "Portlandia," the mention of artisanal lightbulbs might be satirical, but given today's gas-pumping controversy, perhaps not.

Florida’s business community has a lot to look forward to this year, including the energy industry and the major economic growth it continues to produce.

The sanctity of Florida’s Constitution is violated when we seek to fill it with “feel good” amendments that are often vague, duplicative, and trigger unintended consequences. Such amendments are why we have a Florida Constitution addressing pigs, high-speed trains, funding for radios, and the taxation of boat storage facilities. Certainly, all of these topics are important, but they do not belong in a constitution. For this reason, the CRC should reject Proposal 23, which promotes additional, and potentially frivolous, environmental litigation.

Rumors of the affair between Republican Sen. Anitere Flores and Democratic Sen. Oscar Braynon have been drifting around Tallahassee for more than a year. But not until Tuesday, when an anonymous texter sent media outlets surveillance "evidence" of to-ing and fro-ing between apartments at The Tennyson, where they both lived last April, did the rumors become a public reality.

It is almost a law of our political physics: Those who choose to leave Congress thereby demonstrate qualities that make one wish they would linger here longer. After seven terms in the House of Representatives, which followed eight years in Pennsylvania's House of Representatives and six in the state Senate, Republican Charlie Dent, 57, is moving on without knowing his destination.

Today's political discord is less durable and dangerous than a consensus, one that unites the political class more than ideology divides it.

Dear Senator Latvala,   In view of the massive amount of campaign funds in your possession, which can be disbursed for qualified charitable purposes at your discretion, I ask for your consideration on behalf of children with learning disabilities.

If karma is a b----, justice is a beauty queen.

As the new year begins, Florida looks set to keep its status as one of the nation’s perennial political battlegrounds. 

If you think about it, the scandalous events that played out in Tallahassee in 2017 should have come as no surprise. Women in America are still fighting battles they thought they won in 1920 when the 19th Amendment was ratified.

Wisconsin's Supreme Court can soon right a flagrant wrong stemming from events set in motion in 2014 at Milwaukee's Marquette University by Cheryl Abbate. Although just a graduate student, she already had a precocious aptitude for academic nastiness.

Preaching morality while practicing cupidity can be tricky, but various American governments have done it for years regarding smoking. This mental contortion now has a new chapter. The four largest American tobacco companies (Altria, R.J. Reynolds, Lorillard, Philip Morris) are, under government compulsion, funding newspaper and television ads to tell -- actually, to remind -- people that their products are sickening:

No issue inspires more political energy in Florida than does term limits. At any given moment there are always campaigns underway to apply term limits to more offices or, in the case of cynical politicians, to undo or evade voter-approved laws. U.S. Term Limits tracked this activity for 2017 and prepared a summary.