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FLORIDA POLITICS
Since 2002, daily Florida political news and commentary

 

UPDATE: Every morning we review and individually digest Florida political news articles, editorials and punditry. Our sister site, FLA Politics was selected by Campaigns & Elections as one of only ten state blogs in the nation
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Welcome To Florida Politics

Thanks for visiting. On a semi-daily basis we scan Florida's major daily newspapers for significant Florida political news and punditry. We also review the editorial pages and political columnists/pundits for Florida political commentary. The papers we review include: the Miami Herald, Sun-Sentinel, Palm Beach Post, Naples News, Sarasota Herald Tribune, St Pete Times, Tampa Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, the Daytona Beach News-Journal, Tallahassee Democrat, and, occasionally, the Florida Times Union; we also review the political news blogs associated with these newspapers.

For each story, column, article or editorial we deem significant, we post at least the headline and link to the piece; the linked headline always appears in quotes. We quote the headline for two reasons: first, to allow researchers looking for the cited piece to find it (if the link has expired) by searching for the original title/headline via a commercial research service. Second, quotation of the original headline permits readers to appreciate the spin from the original piece, as opposed to our spin.

Not that we don't provide spin; we do, and plenty of it. Our perspective appears in post headlines, the subtitles within the post (in bold), and the excerpts from the linked stories we select to quote; we also occasionally provide other links and commentary about certain stories. While our bias should be immediately apparent to any reader, we nevertheless attempt to link to every article, column or editorial about Florida politics in every major online Florida newspaper.

 

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The Blog for Sunday, November 21, 2004

Someone Ought to be Arrested for This

    The Miami Herald has sunk its teeth into the felon thing:
    In a state that denies voting rights to tens of thousands of nonviolent felons, violent criminals and crooked public officials have slipped past the Clemency Board with their civil rights restored.

    Florida's Clemency Board has restored voting rights to murderers, rapists, batterers, drug traffickers and corrupt public officials -- at the same time it barred thousands of lower-level criminals from the polls, a Herald investigation has found.
    "Violent felons' rights restored while lesser offenders waited". In the meantime,
    problems have tainted Florida's clemency system since 1991, when the state scrapped its policy of automatically restoring civil rights to felons released from custody.

    Thousands of civil rights applications were lost because of faulty computer programs. Overwhelmed clemency investigators said they rejected applicants when criminal records were missing or cases were complicated. No one notified felons when they were denied their rights, shutting them out of the process without telling them they could reapply.

    Although hundreds of felons convicted of violent crimes got rights back in recent years [see above], a decade of bureaucratic missteps blocked thousands of felons who should have qualified for clemency under the state's own rules.
    And what does "Jeb!" think about all this? Well, he doesn't see a problem:

    Bush, who leads the Clemency Board, says he has fixed the troubled system. He declined to be interviewed for this report but in a previous statement wrote, "Florida has removed barriers and burdens for felons who want to regain their rights."
    "Errors followed state policy shift".

6:15 AM

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