Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist had just finished a lunchtime talk to the Tiger Bay Club on Friday when someone asked The Question.

"I have heard that you were gay, sir, and I wanted to know if that was true," asked Lee DeCesare. The hotel meeting room fell silent.

"I'm not," Crist replied.

With that two-word answer, Crist may have defused a potentially troublesome whisper campaign that is already under way about his prospects for the 2006 governor's race.

Crist, who is widely expected to run, would be appealing for conservative votes in what's likely to be a crowded Republican primary.

But the answer also might embolden his rivals to speculate more openly about his private life.

Every member of the state House faced re-election in 2004. But fewer than one-third faced serious opposition, and nearly half had no opponents at all.

The same is true in the Senate, where 15 of the 22 open seats were virtually uncontested except for an occasional write-in candidate. Volusia County's entire senatorial delegation was re-elected without opposition, with the exception of Sen. Carey Baker, R-Eustis, who assumed an open seat uncontested.

What's more, many of these lawmakers expected that they wouldn't have to fight an opponent. That's because they helped draw the lines that define their districts -- and the lines were designed to discourage challengers.

Redistricting, as practiced by the Florida Legislature, constitutes a cynical, back-biting political process.

At this point, the [Medicaid] proposal provides no hard evidence that a shift away from government regulation to greater private control will produce signficant savings to taxpayers and offer adequate services to the poor and disabled.

It's not a good idea, however, for the Legislature to appoint itself to this monumental task of reviewing the constitution, streamlining it and then asking voters what they think of the changes. A mini constitution revision commission is not what we need.

For one thing: What are they thinking? This is a tremendous job that seasoned Floridians have taken on with a reverence for the document and a sincere desire to keep it from becoming partisan or from wandering beyond its fundamental purpose of declaring the duties, powers and shape of government in broad ways.

For another: It's not the Legislature's duty to revise the document that is meant to govern the legislative branch of government as well as provide overall solidity to the judicial and executive branches, which ought not be easily disturbed by the legislative branch on a tear to tidy things up.

Florida's elections supervisors have refined whining to a high art and are unmatched at crying impossible whenever voters ask them to do something. ...

Runoffs mean more work for elections officials but more choice for voters, which is exactly the trade-off supervisors seem obsessed with avoiding. The Legislature eliminated the second primaries for 2002 and 2004, but they will return in 2006 unless lawmakers vote to repeal them for a third election cycle.

Hurricane victims jolted by the reality of high deductibles for their homeowners insurance may have to get used to the idea of steep out-of-pocket costs.

State legislators responded coolly Friday to the notion of letting homeowners choose deductible levels, paying various premiums in exchange for higher or lower upfront costs.

A company that is paid $40 million by Florida taxpayers to create the FCAT lost its testing contracts in two states and has come under fire in others because of incorrect or missing results and incompetently distributed test materials.

Thrasher and former Secretary of State Jim Smith, both on the FSU board, lobby for a living, depending on the Legislature to butter their bread. On the Board of Governors sits yet another lobbyist, Steve Uhlfelder.

Enter Senate President Tom Lee, who sees this swamp and decides having lobbyists sit on these university boards is a very bad idea.

Lobbyists usually bend over backward to keep legislators happy. University trustees shouldn't have to.

If we didn't have enough politics swirling in the academic air by this time, consider what happened next.

Uhlfelder picks up the phone in a rage and unloads on Lee, suggesting that he will use the Senate president's own fundraising to embarrass him if he doesn't drop his opposition to lobbyists on the boards.

Uhlfelder has since apologized but he may have just had the most expensive temper tantrum in town. Big corporations that hire lobbyists don't like it when the guy they are depending on has angered a Senate president.

A day after antigambling advocates launched a campaign in Pinellas County hoping to document rampant fraud in qualifying a November ballot measure, Elections Supervisor Deborah Clark said she sees no evidence of a problem.

A move is under way by conservative Republicans in the Florida Legislature to rewrite the Florida Constitution, setting off fears among skeptics that it will turn into a legislative assault on abortion rights, church-state separations and other controversial topics that have enjoyed protections from political intrusion.

Led by a pair of Central Florida legislators, backers of the rewrite proposal have already won the blessings of several top legislative leaders, including Senate President Tom Lee and Gov. Jeb Bush.

A budget that barely keeps the anti-smoking program alive is hypocritical. The money comes from tobacco companies and from smokers, from a lawsuit that the governor and most Republican lawmakers opposed. Spending all but a pittance of the settlement on other things, including tax cuts for the state's most well-off residents, is government at its most hypocritical and irresponsible.

Betty Castor is throwing her political clout behind a group of Florida Democrats trying to regain control of the state legislature and Congress by wresting redistricting away from lawmakers and handing it over to an independent panel.

Donna Arduin, who served as budget director for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, is forming a national economics consulting firm with two well-known conservative experts in fiscal policy.

Arduin will join Arthur Laffer, known as the father of supply side economics, and Stephen Moore, author and former director of fiscal policy studies for the Cato Institute, in Arduin Laffer & Moore Econometrics.

Senate President Tom Lee said a lobbyist who also serves on the state board that governs universities tried to intimidate him into dropping a proposal to ban lobbyists from state education boards.

Steve Uhlfelder was "screaming at the top of his lungs," Lee said Wednesday. Lee also said Uhlfelder claimed to have embarrassing memos about fundraising for last year's Republican Senate campaigns.

Lee said he is considering banning Uhlfelder from lobbying the Senate under a rule forbidding lobbyists from acting improperly to influence lawmakers.

That a law in one state stands in contrast with the laws of 49 other states doesn't in itself mean that the law is inherently wrong-headed. The law can be ahead of its time -- a lunge at fairness other states will sooner or later feel compelled to emulate.

Civil rights law has evolved that way, most recently with Massachusetts' legalizing of gay marriage. Massachusetts looks like an aberration, but no more so than Wyoming when it gave women the right to vote 30 years before the Constitution embraced the idea, or when New Jersey opened up Little League baseball to girls in 1973.

The reverse is just as true. A unique law can also be proof of a dumb, backward law. Florida's law banning gay adoption is one such.

Voters who overwhelmingly approved a higher minimum wage two months ago might be expecting it to take effect by May as the ballot language suggested.

Not so fast, say business lobbies that failed to defeat the proposal in the Nov. 2 general election.

They are urging the Legislature to step in with a law to minimize the measure's effect on restaurants, retailers and other businesses faced with paying minimum-wage workers an extra $1 an hour.

"Florida employers need certainty and predictability in application of the new Florida minimum wage, avoiding costly and unnecessary litigation over wage issues," says a position paper presented to lawmakers Wednesday by a lobbyist for the Florida Chamber of Commerce and Florida Restaurant Association. ...

In another twist, the state Agency for Workforce Innovation, which is expected to oversee compliance, says it has no money to do so. The agency's budget comes from the federal government, an agency official said, and it is prohibited from using federal funds to enforce a state law.

Miami-Dade ranked No. 8, with 58 imperiled species. Broward ranked No. 4 for development demand exceeding land supply. Palm Beach ranked No. 7 for land in the path of development.

The biggest danger in Gov. Jeb Bush's plan to reform the state's $14 billion Medicaid system is that it may simply shift costs from federal and state governments to local taxpayers and providers already struggling to survive.

In the latest bad news, JPMorgan Chase & Co. will close its credit card call center by the end of the year. It hopes to keep some employees.

The Tampa Bay area's coveted financial services industry suffered another damaging blow Wednesday when JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced that it will close its credit card call center by the end of the year and eliminate 1,900 jobs.

The news, long rumored, was denied by company officials for months until employees were notified in "waves" during midmorning gatherings. It comes just six months after Capital One did the same thing, closing its credit card call center in Tampa and releasing 1,100 workers.

Like Capital One, the Chase Credit Services operation received millions of dollars in tax incentives for creating the jobs that are now vanishing.

Rather than put a positive spin on the grim findings of the Child Abuse Death Review Team, DCF should face facts and focus on reducing child-abuse deaths. ...

We understand the tendency in Tallahassee toward bureaucratic spin, but since when did an increase in child-abuse deaths become progress?

A new chiropractic college that the Legislature awarded to Florida State University has started a fight between chiropractors and doctors.

Department of Management Services Secretary Bill Simon apologized for chronic problems in the state's privatized personnel system Wednesday and told legislators he is putting Convergys on a five-point improvement plan that could lead to pulling out of the massive deal.

It's highly unlikely that Gov. Jeb Bush's most ambitious outsourcing initiative - a nine-year, $350 million contract that Simon inherited two years ago - will be scrapped. But Simon told the House Governmental Operations Committee that DMS has paid Convergys only $11 million, while holding back twice that amount, and that its next payment to the Jacksonville management firm will go out with a note saying the state is protecting its legal options by keeping up its end of a contract that still needs major performance improvements.

Department of Management Services Secretary Bill Simon, who oversaw the mammoth outsourcing of Florida government's personnel systems to Convergys and planned the movement of state agencies away from old buildings downtown, said Tuesday he will resign at the end of the month to develop global-business ventures for a restaurant chain in Dallas. ...

On the eve of a House committee hearing on implementation of People First, the governor's biggest privatization project, Simon said he was not leaving because of controversy surrounding the Convergys operation.

Bush has relied heavily on Simon to create a process to review privatization in response to criticism that some earlier efforts lacked analysis or preparation.

Simon's departure comes in the midst of the biggest public relations problem yet for Bush's privatization efforts.

Bush failed to deliver the high-quality statewide prekindergarten program he promised voters. So he is trying to convince Floridians that the inadequate standards he signed into law are good enough.

Because of Monday's Supreme Court ruling, Florida will retain its dubious status as the most hostile state to children most in need.

Despite several high-profile cases of fraud and abuse in voucher schools, a new Senate Education Committee report says private schools getting state vouchers should not have to be accredited.

Lawton "Bud" Chiles III will run for governor in 2006, hoping to capture the seat his father held for eight years before Gov. Jeb Bush took office.

Chiles, a Democrat, has never run for political office. He realizes, though, his name will be an asset as he tries to build support for his candidacy. Though he has not formally announced, he said Tuesday he has decided to run.

Gov. Jeb Bush said he will propose an overhaul of Medicaid that would give private companies a larger role. But critics fear the plan would shortchange the needy.

Florida would stop shelling out dollars without limit for medical care for more than 2.1 million poor people and instead pay their insurance premiums, letting them shop for their own health plans, under a sweeping reform plan unveiled Tuesday.

Former House Speaker John Thrasher faces a career-defining decision Friday - a choice that will speak to the credibility of local university governing boards and whether lobbyists should run them.

Thrasher, who runs the largest lobbying firm in Tallahassee, is chairman of the board of trustees at Florida State University, his alma mater. This week the university announced that it is naming a building after him in its new medical school complex.

The naming shouldn't come as a surprise, given that Thrasher's legacy as speaker of the Florida House was the creation of a medical school at FSU. He also pushed legislation that abolished the state Board of Regents, which had said a medical school wasn't needed in Tallahassee.

In place of the regents, Thrasher's Legislature created local boards of trustees to run the universities. But in 2002, voters overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment re-establishing a statewide Board of Governors.

The Senate Communications and Public Utilities Committee plans to introduce a bill giving the Public Service Commission more authority to require the telephone companies to sign up more customers to the subsidized Lifeline service, even if they have to spend more money to promote it.

The mother and father of Terri Schiavo again tried to legally challenge her husband's role as her guardian.

The news out of Tallahassee last week clearly showed that Gov. Jeb Bush takes sexual-harassment allegations very seriously.

Well, most of the time.

Less than 48 hours after Arthur Anderson took over as Palm Beach County elections supervisor, Democratic U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler gave him a pointed public reminder of who and what got him elected.

"Arthur, we are going to have a paper trail, right?" Wexler, D-Delray Beach, asked Anderson in front of about 400 people at a Democratic rally west of Delray Beach on Wednesday night.

Wexler's tone was jocular. But the underlying message was as serious as a manual recount.

Bush is hitting the road to unveil his recommendations for the state's next budget, initially focusing on education and Medicaid changes.

Bush will announce proposed policy changes and enhancements on reading initiatives for Florida middle schools Monday and return to the Capitol on Tuesday to release his recommendations on Medicaid, likely to be one of the dominant themes in the legislative session beginning March 8.

Education and the social services are the largest components of the state budget.

A campaign consultant at the center of an investigation into alleged ballot fraud in a disputed mayor's race has told prosecutors that the campaigns of many Central Florida politicians, including newly elected U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, paid him to gather absentee ballots, according to his attorney.

Florida entered the pre-kindergarten business 18 years ago, deciding preschool for disadvantaged youngsters was a good way to shore up a lagging public education system.

That initial pre-K program, run mostly by public schools, earned praise from early-childhood experts.

But now, as the state gears up to expand pre-K to all 4-year-olds, most public schools will be excluded.

The pre-K plan lawmakers approved last month in Tallahassee -- awaiting Gov. Jeb Bush's promised signature -- will largely be run by private providers, including schools, day-care centers and family day-care homes.

The new pre-K classes will provide three hours of instruction a day with child-care workers instead of six with college-educated teachers.

"Florida is really the oddest state," said Walter Gilliam, a professor at Yale University's Child Study Center who has studied preschool programs across the country. Most states with well-regarded pre-K programs view public schools as key players, he said, but Florida seems to have the opposite view.

fundraising dynamo ... who shouldn't have much trouble raising big money fast should she decide to challenge Sen. Bill Nelson for Senate as many expect.

Still, one potential GOP rival for that Senate nomination, U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, has a big early leg up. Foley, who dropped out of the Senate race last year when his father became ill, is sitting on nearly $2.2-million he could roll into a senate race.

Floridians don't have to wait until hurricane season to see a threat forming. Insurers are trooping to Tallahassee seeking rate increases. There's no doubt that they're coming. The only question seems to be whether the state's Office of Insurance Regulation, which considers rate requests, will keep the increases below Category 5. The A.M. Best Co., which keeps track of the insurance industry, reports that 12 companies have filed for rate increases of between 5 percent and 24 percent.

Florida helped keep President Bush in the White House, so it should come as no surprise that some deep-pocketed Florida companies and individuals ponied up for next week's inauguration. It's expected to cost more than $40-million.

The Legislature took no public testimony on the need for a $9-million-a-year chiropractic school at Florida State University. The Senate Appropriations Committee discussed the issue Feb. 19, 2004, during which two Democrats repeatedly questioned why the project was being rushed through along with funding for an Alzheimer's center in Tampa named for former House Speaker Johnnie Byrd's late father.

Yet every December, when the State Child Abuse Death Review Team releases its report, expect greater concern about the state's image than about the conditions that allowed such preventable deaths to happen. "This report," DCF spokesman Bill Spann told The Associated Press last month, "validates the progress made in Florida toward safeguarding the welfare of children from abuse or neglect. It also shows the need to continue strengthening a multidisciplinary approach to responding and reviewing child fatalities."