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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
"every political insider should be reading right now."

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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 Wednesday, November 16, 2005

"Indefensible denial of civil rights "

    "Civil rights denied":
    The first civil rights case to reach the Supreme Court under new Chief Justice John Roberts has ended deplorably. Although the court did not formally uphold Florida's lifetime voting ban on former felons, its refusal to hear the appeal of Johnson vs. Bush has the same effect for the foreseeable future. It is disheartening that even among the six liberal and moderate justices there were not the four votes to grant review or so much as one dissent.

    With an estimated 600,000 people denied the vote no matter how fully they paid their debts to society or how honorably they have lived thereafter, the Florida situation is the nation's largest and most indefensible denial of civil rights since a Congress aroused by Alabama's brutality to demonstrators at the Selma bridge passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

    It is disingenuous for Gov. Jeb Bush to assert that he and the Pardon Board have a "fair process" for granting dispensations. If it were fair in fact as well as fancy, there would not be some 9,600 people still on the waiting list and they would not have to spend so many years there. The much greater scandal is the many tens of thousands who never apply because they do not know that they can or have heard that it is futile. Where 14 states once maintained lifetime bans, there are now only Florida, Kentucky and Virginia.
    More.

8:34 AM

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