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
"every political insider should be reading right now."

E-Mail Florida Politics

This is our Main Page
Our Sister Site
On FaceBook
Follow us on Twitter
Our Google+ Page
Contact [E-Mail Florida Politics]
Site Feed
...and other resources

 

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.

 

Older posts [back to 2002]

Previous Articles by Derek Newton: Ten Things Fox on Line 1 Stem Cells are Intelligent Design Katrina Spin No Can't Win Perhaps the Most Important Race Senate Outlook The Nelson Thing Deep, Dark Secret Smart Boy Bringing Guns to a Knife Fight Playing to our Strength  

The Blog for Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Sad Day

    "On Monday, Florida voters saw their hard-won right to amend their Constitution come to fruition. And special interests exacted their revenge":
    Monday was a great day for the people of Florida. Thanks to an initiative voters approved last fall, some 700,000 workers began to receive a $1-an-hour minimum-wage increase. That is a rising tide that will lift all boats. Whether it was the sort of issue that belongs in the Constitution is irrelevant now. What matters is that representative government, co-opted by powerful special interests, had failed for years to give a fair hearing to the necessity. So the people, exercising some hard-won rights, took the cause into their own hands, and won.

    But Monday was also a terribly sad day for the people of Florida. In a series of procedural votes, the Senate refused to clean up a bill that incorporates the revenge of those same special interests. The legislation, moving toward enactment as HB 1471, is intended to harass organizations sponsoring current and future initiative campaigns. Under the pretext of preventing fraud, it sets up a gantlet of gimmicks for the disqualification of otherwise valid signatures.
    "A great day, a sad day".

<< Home