EDITOR'S NOTE:
From education and Medicaid, to personnel and paper clips, ideas for shaping and reforming Florida's state budget are examined in this five-part Sunshine State News series.
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Three House Democrats wrote letters in support of former House Representative and Broward County Commissioner Josephus Eggelletion. Eggelletion was sentenced on Friday for conspiring to launder money. Rep. Perry Thurston, D-Plantation, Rep. Hazel Rogers, D-Lauderdale Lakes, and Rep. Joe Gibbons, D-Hallandale Beach, urged the judge to offer leniency to Eggelletion.
Lawmakers will have to correct Gov. Charlie Crist's fuzzy math if they have any hope of balancing the budget based on his K-12 spending plan.
Boosting the public schools' outlays to $22.7 billion, Crist keeps education as the single biggest item in the state budget. But, while touting a $175 increase in per-pupil spending, the governor has no firm plan to pay for it.
Lawmakers will likely whittle away at the popular Bright Futures Scholarship program that pays for the education of more than half of Florida's college students this year as they write the budget for the state's colleges and universities.
The Senate is examining a change to the scholarship that could reduce the number of students who are eligible for the award and also permanently take it away from students who can't keep their grades up.
A successful bid by the Seminole Tribe of Florida to gain a stranglehold on casino-style gambling in Florida for decades to come has exposed the state pari-mutuel industry to a world of threats that could imperil its future, industry spokespersons say.
I knew that I must have been off pretty badly when I casually wrote in this national column that Florida Gov. Charlie Crist would be a good example of a Republican that voters in critical swing states could accept in the upcoming elections for Senate and the U.S. House.
WASHINGTON -- As the Afghanistan War intensifies -- Marja, soon Kandahar, and the steady arrival of 30,000 new American troops -- it has come to be seen as Obama's war.
Not so. It's become America's war. When the former opposition party -- habitually anti-war for the last four decades -- adopts, reaffirms and escalates a war begun by the habitually hawkish other party, partisanship falls away, and the war becomes nationalized.
WASHINGTON -- The increasingly puerile spectacle of presidential State of the Union addresses is indicative of the state of the union, and is unnecessary: The Constitution requires only that the president "shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union." But a reaction may be brewing against these embarrassing events.
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.
