FLORIDA POLITICS
Since 2002, daily Florida political news and commentary

 

UPDATE: remember to check out our sister website, FLA Politics. This collaborative site  uses software similar to that used at Daily Kos, permitting anyone to post mini-blog entries (called "diaries") as well as comments. Enjoy the posts of some of Florida's best progressive political bloggers, and join in the discussion. Please go there, register and check things out. FLA Politics has been updated with some useful feeds to posts (featuring post titles and snippets) from the Florida netroots, Florida media "blogs", and most recently, all things FloBama. Feel free to contact us with criticisms, comments and suggestions here.

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Welcome To Florida Politics

Thanks for visiting. Each morning we scan Florida 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 spin appears in the titles (in bold) as well as the excerpts from the linked stories we select to quote. While our perspective is readily apparent, each day we 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, February 13, 2005

Instant-Runoff Primaries

    Dyckman:
    There comes a time in a political campaign when the candidate realizes that there's no tomorrow. Mel Martinez met that moment by deciding he would rather be a U.S. senator than protect his reputation as a good guy.

    He aired an ad accusing Bill McCollum, his more conservative rival, of co-sponsoring a bill "granting homosexuals special rights." It was a hate-crime bill that also applied to other vulnerable minorities, for which McCollum deserved praise, not blame. Notably, Martinez did not accuse him of "granting blacks special rights," as the demagogues of the 1950s would have.

    Dirt works better than ever these days. The irony is that Martinez probably could have won without disgracing himself.

    But try to imagine Martinez trashing McCollum if, at the same time, he needed to ask McCollum supporters for their second-choice votes.

    Cleaner campaigning is the intangible bonus to the instant-runoff primary that Florida sorely needs to adopt.
    "The benefits of instant-runoff voting".

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