By Chan Lowe, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Read the artist’s commentary here.

BONUS CARTOONS


By Jim Morin, Miami Herald



By Jeff Parker, Florida Today

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush made his strongest statement to date on the Republican Senate primary unfolding in his state, telling the conservative publication NewsMax in an on-camera interview that he considers Gov. Charlie Crist's support for last year's stimulus bill "unforgivable."

And you see this time and again. Folks on the right are sharply critical of “the stimulus” but generally raise no objections to large swathes of the stimulus—they like their local infrastructure projects, they like their tax cuts, and the more sensible among them like the education money.

A new governor named Reubin Askew — sometimes with the help of the Legislature, and sometimes despite it — led Florida in an unprecedented program of modernization and reform, including:

• A total revision and modernization of the way Florida paid for schools.

• A much-needed statewide system of water regulation.

• New programs to buy and conserve Florida's natural land.

• The first law requiring "comprehensive planning" for Florida's growth.

• "Fair share" taxes on businesses that, because of their political influence, had enjoyed one of the nation's lowest tax burdens.

• A burst of "sunshine" and ethics laws, including a constitutional amendment requiring public officers to disclose their personal finances. Opponents of these ethics reforms mocked Askew as "Reubin the Good."

Askew then ran for his second term.

At every step Askew was working for the long-term interests of the state, and he did not care if he lost popularity because of it.

Winn-Dixie's founders fought him. St. Joe Paper fought him. Associated Industries of Florida fought him. To rebut the claims of Florida's businesses that a fair tax would drive up prices, Askew famously displayed to the public a Sears shirt bought in Georgia, and the same shirt bought at a similar price in Florida, even though Sears paid far more in taxes to Georgia.

Above all else, fix Florida's tax structure. Get rid of the loopholes and tax breaks — and if you're worried that's a "tax increase," then you should lower the overall rate on everybody else who's been paying all along.

Quit fighting the "fair districts" citizen petition in an attempt to protect your own empires.

Do something about the sneaky political committees that you have formed to launder campaign money.

Once you agree to fair districts and honest money, then you should be able to ask voters to increase your terms from eight years to 12, so we can develop a little more maturity up there.

Give the universities what they want. All of it. Quit fighting them over political control.

Give the Ethics Commission what it wants, too.

Don't decide oil drilling until you've heard every study, from every party, and maybe not even then until you've gone to walk on beaches in oil-pumping areas yourselves.

If you really must gamble, don't give away the store to the casinos. Extort them until they scream and threaten not to come. Then get even more for the problems they're going to cause.

More than 230 mayors are in Washington for the winter meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors, and many said they had been forced to impose layoffs, furloughs, service reductions and fee increases to deal with falling municipal revenue. The next fiscal year looks even worse, they said.

“We are in the middle of a ‘jobs emergency’ that demands decisive and swift action,” said Elizabeth Kautz, the mayor of Burnsville, Minn., and president of the conference. “We need the Senate to pass a Main Street jobs package now.”

Mayor Kautz is a Republican, and while many Republicans in Congress oppose a second stimulus package, many of the Republican mayors here support it.

President Obama spoke before dozens of the mayors on Thursday, promising “a continued, sustained and relentless effort to create good jobs.”

In November, the latest month for which data is available, the jobless rate was up in all 363 of the cities surveyed by the conference, compared with the previous year. More than 105 metro areas have unemployment rates above 10 percent.

Even as recovery in the labor markets picks up steam in the next three years, unemployment rates will not return to pre-recession levels during that period for any metro area, the conference predicted.

“In the Great Depression they let up too soon and there was further recession,” Mayor Riley said. “Right now the president needs to avoid making that same mistake.”

By Ed Gamble, Florida Times-Union

The plaintiffs want a court to declare that the state has violated the Florida Constitution and to order state leaders to create a "remedial plan" for fulfilling that constitutional obligation.

"I hope it's a catalyst for change," said Thom Rumberger, one of the plaintiff's attorneys and a prominent Republican in Tallahassee.

Then the Florida Legislature will need to find a way to fund schools adequately, he said.

The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida. It is, therefore, a paramount duty of the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders.

To assure that children attending public schools obtain a high quality education, the legislature shall make adequate provision to ensure that, by the beginning of the 2010 school year, there are a sufficient number of classrooms so that:

(1) The maximum number of students who are assigned to each teacher who is teaching in public school classrooms for prekindergarten through grade 3 does not exceed 18 students;

(2) The maximum number of students who are assigned to each teacher who is teaching in public school classrooms for grades 4 through 8 does not exceed 22 students; and

(3) The maximum number of students who are assigned to each teacher who is teaching in public school classrooms for grades 9 through 12 does not exceed 25 students.

The class size requirements of this subsection do not apply to extracurricular classes. Payment of the costs associated with reducing class size to meet these requirements is the responsibility of the state and not of local schools districts.

Can you win a lawsuit that accuses the Florida Legislature of doing a lousy job?

Let's say that every claim in the lawsuit is true.

There's still a good question: Can the courts really order the Legislature to do better?

Maybe they'll win.

Maybe the weight of statistics will convince the courts, as in the famous U.S. Supreme Court ruling on pornography, that they know "high quality" when they (don't) see it.

If our Legislature is hostile to education, it is still the Legislature elected by the people of Florida. To be sure, our election system is biased by campaign money loopholes and rigged voting districts. If we addressed those factors, we might have a different Legislature.

But that is hard. To an extent, filing a lawsuit like this is asking the courts to do the work of democracy for us.

Republican political opportunism.  That, in a nutshell, is the Sunshine State’s worst and not so well hidden tax burden.

Two stories that broke in recent days help highlight the shameful mess that the Florida GOP has made of both the state’s economy, and its tax code.

Some will object to such finger pointing, claiming it’s the national economic crisis that put Florida in the financial pickle it’s in. That would constitute a half-truth, at very generous best – as would any attempt to argue that the Democrats are equally responsible for the state’s unfair, dysfunctional tax system and the havoc it has created for working and unemployed families.

"We're going to take advantage of the people we have locally," said Weatherford, a Wesley Chapel Republican who's in line to become House speaker in 2012. "What I want to focus on is the low-hanging fruit, the things that everybody knows need to be fixed."

Things that might get bipartisan support.

The two lawmakers expect to tap Pasco School Board vice chairman Allen Altman to lead their information-gathering effort.

"I think (they) have a genuine desire to work with people who are on the ground, in the field … to learn what their frustrations are and how we can cooperate more on the local and state level," Altman said.

"If we're going to challenge the local districts to try to be more effective in their programs and to spread their resources further and do more with less … then (lawmakers) need to look at what they are doing," Altman said, calling some of the Legislature's past practices "wasteful and ineffective."

If ever there was an era in which to slash away at all those money-green umbilical cords linking Florida's well-endowed Big Mamas of economic development -- the real estate and commercial development interests that rule the roost -- to their dutiful, mostly obedient offspring -- the state legislators and other officials still sucking on their cash-cow teats -- well hell, you'd think this would be it.

But just how widespread and effective such efforts will be, remains to be seen. 

Floridians of all stripes are going to have to demand that any politician whom they would even consider voting for, first publicly pledge allegiance to protecting and promoting the best interests of the state's working families, small businesses, and mismanaged natural resources, by growing a greener economy.

So let's all take the time to turn up the globally warmed heat on Governor Crist, on his two most likely successors, Alex Sink and Bill McCollum, and on all the other Florida politicians, officials and regulators who like to talk a good environmental game, without ever actually playing to win.

After all, wouldn't it make more than a little sense for the freaking Sunshine State to finally become a dynamic leader in supporting and promoting solar power and other Green business initiatives, like those featured in the 5-minute video, "Growing Green Jobs & Clean Energy in Sunshine State".  Now is the time to transition Florida to the 21st century, no?

By Chan Lowe, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Read the artist’s commentary here.


BONUS CARTOON


By Jim Morin, Miami Herald

Nice story in the Naples News Thursday about how pleased Southwest Florida legislators are over this year's recent session. 

Good to know they're happy to give themselves a pat on the back for capping the amount Big Tobacco has to set aside for lawsuits; trying to loosen the class size amendment, eliminate public art funding, and open the eastern Gulf up to reckless drilling; and making it even easier for Big Developers to promote sprawl and wreck the environment.  All in all, apparently not a bad session's worth of work. 

Ah, but in comparison to other states, maybe Florida's session wasn't so bad.

"Rep. Matt Hudson, R-Naples, said California and Illinois both started their fiscal years on July 1 without a balanced budget.  Florida did pass its budget, despite the fact that they were hit with a $6 billion deficit at the start of the session."

Yeah, and come to think of it, New York's legislature has grinded to a complete standstill recently.  So Florida's legislature looks pretty good in comparison, right?  Right?

Wrong.

Just because other state legislatures could possibly be more screwed up than Florida's doesn't mean we should all be happy about what we've got.  And what we've got is a legislature beholden to special interests, a governor who's bailing for D.C and selling out the state in the process, and a bunch of really bad new public policies.

So before we go hailing our legislative session as a success simply because it got a budget passed (late, by the way, costing the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of extra dollars), let's stop for a minute and think about what good really was done.

Then it's easy to wonder if what's happening in New York is really such a bad thing after all... 

    Eleven days later, she bought $1,001 to $15,000 worth of Bank of America stock. It was on the same day that then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told leading banks that he expected them to accept billions in bailout money to prevent a financial meltdown.

    Brown-Waite, who has since left the committee to join the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, and her spokeswoman would not comment for this article. The precise value of her investments is not publicly known because financial disclosure reports provide only broad ranges, although some members include detailed brokerage reports."