It looks like a wet and jittery weekend in Florida.
After stalling in the Caribbean and dumping boatloads of rain on the Dominican Republic, Tropical Storm Emily is meandering toward the Sunshine State -- though no one knows exactly where.
Warren Buffett and Barack Obama see trains as a green wave back to the future, but an emerging fleet of intercity buses is passing them by.
"Entrepreneurial immigrants from China and recently privatized British transportation companies have developed a new model for intercity bus operations that provides travelers with faster service at dramatically reduced fares," Randal O'Toole says in a new study for the libertarian-leaning CATO Institute.
President Barack Obama on Tuesday signed the debt and deficit package that gives Congress more time to make the hard decisions.
Easily clearing the Senate 74-26 -- Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson voting in favor and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio voting against -- the measure raises the nation's debt ceiling above $16 trillion and calls for some $2 trillion in budget cuts.
But the spending package lacks specifics, and Obama said it will require both parties to "work together on a larger plan to cut the deficit, which is important for the long-term health of our economy."
A last-minute debt and deficit package easily passed the House of Representatives Monday night, but was roundly thrashed by the right and left.
The measure, which is expected to clear the Senate on Tuesday, includes $3 trillion in budget cuts and a two-step, $2.4 trillion increase in the national debt ceiling.
The deal was demanded by administration officials and business groups that said upping the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling was essential to averting a government default by midnight Tuesday.
Pushed by the progressive left, Fair Districts' reforms collided with minority interests at the state's redistricting road show in Central Florida.
Lawmakers were caught in the middle in Orlando last week when Hispanics and African-Americans demanded that the Legislature carve out legislative and congressional districts for them.
Emilio Perez, chairman of the Central Florida Redistricting Council, told legislators that failure to draw a Hispanic-heavy congressional district would "be like penalizing us for the growth that landed this state two new congressional districts."
A heavy-hitting fundraiser for GOP Senate candidate Adam Hasner wants Republicans to "embrace the principle of compromise" and back a tax increase to break the debt-deficit deadlock in Washington, D.C.
Al Hoffman Jr., a high-profile and longtime party fundraiser, urged in a New York Times op-ed:
"Rather than go to their martyrdom as ideological purists, [Republicans] should open the door to tax increases -- but only if every $1 in new taxes is applied to deficit reduction and is matched by at least $4 in real spending cuts, including entitlement reform."
As if the job of redrawing 187 congressional and legislative districts weren't complicated enough, liberal groups are ascribing the worst possible motives to Florida lawmakers assigned to the task.
At nearly a dozen public-input meetings conducted around the state over the past month, representatives from the ACLU, the NAACP and the League of Women Voters, among others, have read nearly identical scripts assailing the redistricting process.
