Best of the Blogs: Stir It Up

Progress Florida Education Center’s Best of the Blogs for the week ending 1-16-15
Best of the Blogs is featured weekly as part of Progress Florida Education Center’s popular free Daily Clips service.

Record 346 inmates die, dozens of guards fired in Florida prisons
By Shaun King
Daily Kos
The United States has a prison crisis of epic proportions.

Hillsborough transit group begins what should be an interesting 2015
By Mitch Perry
SaintPetersBlog
Although a potential referendum for a transit tax in Hillsborough County is more than 20 months away, the group responsible for deciding if there’ll be any referendum at all met for the first time in months in Tampa today.

Gwen Graham stirring trouble with Democrats. Will she push toward the right, like her father did?
By Gimleteye
Eye On Miami
North Florida, first-term Congresswoman Gwen Graham was one of the very few bright lights for Florida Democrats in the 2014 election cycle, winning against one of the most controversial Republicans in Congress, Steve Southerland.

Florida Democrats at a crossroads: Making DECs really work
By Katy Burnett
The Florida Squeeze
After the November elections, there was a lot of blame going around among Democrats throughout the state.

Why These Republicans Rejected House Members’ Extreme Anti-Immigrant Agenda
By Esther Yu-Hsi Lee
Think Progress
On a 236-191 vote, House Republicans voted through a Department of Homeland Security spending bill that funds the agency through the end of the fiscal year Wednesday, tying the bill with amendments that would repeal the president’s executive actions on immigration.