x

x

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 Sunday, May 15, 2005

We Knew There Were A Few Crooks ...

    but this is ridiculous:
    Before floating its short-lived proposal to ban ex-felons from lobbying, the Florida Senate leadership searched exhaustively to make sure that no one currently working the Capitol corridors would be hurt. That assumption turned out to be wrong; federal felonies and convictions in other states had not been included. In the process, a more serious problem turned up.

    A computer comparison of names on the registered lobbyist list with records from the Florida Department of Corrections yielded some 2,000 possible hits, virtually the entire lobbying corps. In about 160 cases, even the birth years matched. One by one, clerks laboriously looked up driver's license numbers to exclude all but three, which also turned out to be false positives.

    That ought to have served warning about the dangers in relying on computers to cull suspected felons from the voting rolls. Yet the election bill awaiting the governor's signature intensifies the witch hunt for suspected felons without providing any assurance that the lists will be accurate before the secretary of state sends them to the counties. This was enacted despite the glaring failures of computer-assisted felon searches during the past two election cycles.

    The only thing to be said for the bill is that the election supervisors rather than Secretary of State Glenda Hood will make the final decisions. But with hundreds of thousands of ex-felons on one roster or another, many model citizens will be the victims of a false match. When that happens they will face a
    "Faulty felon searches".

7:49 AM

<< Home