"For years, many Republicans have derided public campaign financing as welfare for politicians. Now the Florida House has suddenly taken an interest in the final days of the legislative session, backing a drastic change that would enable candidates to raise huge amounts of money and still qualify for public money. That sort of mischief distorts the purpose of public campaign financing, and the Senate should reject it.

The head of the Florida Department of Children and Families personally decided that her agency should go to court to stop a 13-year-old foster child from having an abortion.

DCF Secretary Lucy Hadi reviewed the case and felt she could not allow the girl to end the pregnancy before notifying a juvenile court judge, Marilyn Munoz, spokeswoman for the agency in Palm Beach County, said Friday.

"Why can't I make my own decision?"

That was the blunt question to a judge from a pregnant 13-year-old girl ensnared in a Palm Beach County court fight over whether she can have an abortion.

"I don't know," Circuit Judge Ronald Alvarez replied, according to a recording of the closed hearing obtained Friday.

"You don't know?" replied the girl, who is a ward of the state. "Aren't you the judge?"

Against a backdrop of state and federal efforts to pass a parental notification law for teen abortions, the exchange was typical of L.G.'s pluck as she argued that she had the right and capability to make her own decision, despite a move by the Department of Children & Families to seek a judge's permission for her abortion.

"I think if I want to make the decision, it's my business and I can do that," she told the judge.

The creator of the FCAT and the nation's largest testing company will take over the scoring of the state's tests for third- through 10th-graders later this year — despite a record of lost and missing scores and incorrectly graded tests in other states.

Last year in West Virginia, more than half the tests CTB/McGraw-Hill administered to students in one county were destroyed by the company before they were graded. Of 2,096 tests given in Wyoming County, results for 1,070 students were missing. Scores from 12 of Wyoming County's 13 schools were missing or incomplete.

Also in 2004, Connecticut fined CTB/McGraw-Hill $300,000 — the maximum its contract allowed — after scoring errors delayed test results for six months. It was the first year of Connecticut's $49 million, eight-year contract with the testing giant to develop and score tests for 150,000 students.

The Florida Department of Education signed an $82 million contract last month with California-based CTB/McGraw-Hill to distribute and grade millions of annual tests in reading, writing, math and science starting in October.

Reps. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.) and John Sweeney (R-N.Y.) have been meeting with 30 House Republicans over the past few weeks to coordinate a more aggressive strategy to defend Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), according to a Republican source familiar with the meetings.

Sen. Bill Nelson and Interior Secretary Gale Norton failed to reach an agreement Thursday over whether the federal government will open about 4 million acres in the eastern Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling beginning in 2007.

Nelson, D-Fla., said after the half-hour meeting in his office that he was "very disappointed" Norton refused to commit to removing the area from the government's 2007-2012 plan for offshore oil and gas leases.

Floridians have reason to fear the energy bill recently passed by the U.S. House. This giveaway to the petroleum industry would undermine a state's ability to fight offshore drilling or other harmful projects.

For a handful of members of Florida's congressional delegation, it wasn't a tough call: A Florida company with deep pockets and deep roots in the state's political establishment needed help on legislation that enjoys the support of the House leadership.

And in the process, it gave them the chance to needle Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

But critics say a new bill designed to tweak U.S. trademark law to help Bacardi USA Inc. sell rum under the name Havana Club - a brand that happens to be owned by the Cuban government and that has become a top-selling rum in much of Europe - is a wrong-headed giveaway to a major political donor.

The bill, approved unanimously by the Senate on Thursday, expands the state airplane privileges of the state's highest officials to allow their children to ride alongside them on the taxpayers' dime.

The state already picks up the tab for spouses of the governor, lieutenant governor, Cabinet members, House speaker, Senate president and chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court when they accompany their mates on official business.

conservative commentator is not broadcasting on the Rush Limbaugh show today. He told listeners yesterday that he would be at a doctor's appointment.

In a startling rebuke to Gov. Jeb Bush, Senate President Tom Lee said Wednesday the governor should "watch what he says" in the heated final days of the legislative session.

Senate President Tom Lee, responding to accusations of political game-playing, said Wednesday that Gov. Jeb Bush plagiarized Senate plans to regulate development throughout the state.

"As class size and Medicaid reform begin to languish, and the governor's legislative agenda begins to fall apart, he decides to cannibalize on the work product of the men and women in the (Senate) Community Affairs Committee and launch a growth management program that is essentially plagiarism of the Senate," Lee said.

"I think the biggest game of the session has probably been played by the governor's office," Lee said.

The cause for the blow-up, though, was Bush's reaction to the Senate's refusal to confirm Allen Levine as secretary of Bush's Agency for Health Care Administration. Levine was Bush's deputy chief of staff in 2003 when he sent an e-mail to supporters suggesting they recruit opponents for Lee and other GOP senators who opposed Bush's attempt to limit medical malpractice lawsuits.

Bush will now have to re-appoint Levine and try to have him confirmed next spring. If the Senate again refuses, he would not be allowed another reappointment.

Bush told reporters Tuesday: "I've told him (Levine) not to worry about it. Stay above the fray, don't get involved in the little games people play inside this building and focus on doing his job."

Lee's remarks, unleashed in one extended stream, reflect frustrations that had been building for weeks.

He said Wednesday that a bill to implement slot-machine gambling in Broward County had less than a 50-50 chance of passing this session because Bush and his House allies are insisting on both a high tax rate and a less profitable type of machine.

He said a bill to restructure Medicaid had only a 25 percent chance of passing because of Bush's insistence on handing over key decisions about medical care to private insurers.

He was upset by Bush's comments that he was likely to veto bills that make it harder for him to outsource state functions to private companies. Lee, according to legislative sources, said he would consider trying to override a Bush veto, should that happen.

And Lee criticized Bush for taking credit for growth management legislation that he said was actually developed by the Senate. Bush's office "came out with two growth management initiatives. Both of them fell flat on their face," Lee said. "They were neither embraced by the environmental community, the development community, or local governments...

Florida's Cuban lawmakers announced Wednesday the formation of the Congressional Cuba Democracy Caucus, which will promote policy aimed at ending the island's communist regime and speeding its transition to democracy.

U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez and U.S. Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Mario Diaz-Balart and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, all of whom are Cuban American and Republican, decided to form the group shortly after Martinez's election last November.

"The public be damned!," as railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt infamously remarked, was the order of the day on Tuesday in the Florida Legislature. Vanderbilt would have been overjoyed by how Florida's big business lobbies were calling the tune.

The House passed three constitutional amendments and an outrageous bill collectively intended to stifle the public's right of initiative. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved its version of the bill (CS for SB 1996, HB 1471) despite ample misgivings over its constitutionality.

A standoff between Gov. Jeb Bush and the Florida Legislature is threatening a deal between the House and Senate that would increase oversight of state contracts in light of a string of recent controversies.

As the Florida House of Representatives approved a proposal Tuesday to require state agencies to notify legislators about plans to hire outside contractors to do government work, Bush said the bill would usurp the authority of his office and the agencies he runs. He has threatened a veto.

Fool me once, the saying goes, shame on you. Fool me twice ... well, you know the rest.

So, apparently, does the Legislature with regard to Gov. Jeb Bush's oversight of state contracts. And lawmakers don't relish the idea of being fooled twice. Nor should they.

The governor's office, by Mr. Bush's own admission earlier this year, hasn't done a very good job at procurement.

His acknowledgment in January was, if anything, an understatement. Actually, his office has done a lousy job - which is why the Legislature currently is in a tug of war with Mr. Bush over contract accountability.

In a move that could dramatically boost spending for next year's race for governor to new highs, Florida legislators may increase the amount of money that parties can spend to help candidates while throwing out strict campaign spending limits.

It ought to be impossible to imagine an American government that deliberately leaves innocent people in prison. But in Florida, present reality is precisely that savage scenario.

A move to limit travel from Florida to Cuba died in the state Senate on Monday when committee members said they don't want to stop anyone from visiting a sick or dying relative.

The rift between Gov. Jeb Bush and Senate President Tom Lee over Medicaid changes widened Monday.

Lee announced the Senate will not confirm Bush's pick to run the Agency for Health Care Administration.

That gives AHCA Secretary Alan Levine one year to win Lee's favor, or he will have to leave his post. ... "We really need a balanced, fair arbiter for those reforms," said Lee, R-Brandon.

Lee said Levine damaged himself in the eyes of the Senate during the 2003 fight over medical malpractice insurance, both by aligning himself too closely with hospitals at the expense of doctors and by using state e-mail "to attack senators."

During the heat of the medical malpractice debate, which kept the Legislature in Tallahassee for much of the summer, Levine sent out an e-mail to GOP supporters, suggesting opponents be found to run against Republican senators who opposed Bush on medical malpractice.

Levine was a top aide to Bush, and Lee was one of the senators named.

Levine later called the e-mail a mistake and apologized.

Big-ticket government contracts, the source of a series of missteps in recent years, are about to be scrutinized as they never have been before.

That's thanks to a compromise the House and Senate have reached on a proposed law giving the Legislature - and a new commission - more oversight of state contracting, from start to finish.

[S]everal law school professors say they haven't seen any evidence that such litigation has run amok, and counter that legislative efforts in Florida and Washington to limit the citizens' ability to recoup losses is an ominous trend with a political undertone.

The latest report by state auditors on Florida's charter schools is proof that Gov. Bush and other ideological advocates for non-traditional schools aren't helping their cause by holding charters and voucher schools to a different set of standards — or, in too many cases, to no standards at all.

Under growth management plans moving through the Legislature, lawmakers would throw the doors open for development in previously unspoiled parts of the state -- and force local taxpayers to pay for the party.

The plans being moved forward in the House and Senate take slightly different approaches toward growth, but both are based on the idea that the support structure for development should be in place before more growth is allowed. That sounds good -- until you realize that the plans hinge on forcing local residents to pay higher taxes and commit a larger portion of the state budget to building roads, bridges and other amenities new residents will need.

Whatever happened to the idea that growth should pay for itself?

Politics was an issue in this case, .... The Republican opponent of Mayor Dyer, a Democrat, sued after the election. Gov. Bush, a Republican, assigned a Republican as special prosecutor and suspended Mayor Dyer after the indictments. The mayor's supporters, though, were looking forward to the testimony of Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, and other Republicans for whom Mr. Thomas also had been a campaign worker in local elections.

[t]he fact that politicians from both parties long have paid Mr. Thomas to get out the vote also makes it harder to explain away FDLE investigators' alleged intimidation of elderly African-American residents in the runup to last year's election. For those residents, the governor's dismissal of complaints that his administration was trying to suppress the key city's black vote before the presidential election probably rings hollow.

Last week the online political group [MoveOn] aired radio ads bashing her and nine other Republican members of Congress for supporting the controversial bankruptcy revamping bill signed by President Bush. MoveOn targeted Republicans seen as having bigger ambitions in 2006, and noted that Harris had received $142,000 from companies with a financial stake in the law.

Why, for example, does the makeup of the Florida Legislature not accurately reflect the political makeup of the state? Why do Republicans in the Legislature outnumber Democrats by more than two to one when membership of the two parties in the state as a whole is close to 50-50? I haven't noticed Gov. Jeb Bush complaining about that.

For that matter, I haven't noticed his brother, President George W. Bush, complaining about the grossly undemocratic system still employed for electing presidents of the United States.

We continue to depend on the archaic Electoral College to elect presidents, making it possible - as happened, of course, in 2000 - for a person who does not come close to winning the popular vote to become president.

You may recall that Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 by about half a million, but lost in the Electoral College. I suppose it's understandable that George W. doesn't lie awake nights thinking of ways to abandon the Electoral College that put him in power.

Consider the disgraceful imbalance of political power in Florida, a result of political rigging of congressional and legislative districts - so-called gerrymandering. The dictionary definition: "Dividing of a state, county into election districts to give one political party a majority while concentrating the other party into as few districts as possible." Boy, have the Republican politicians done a job in Florida.

Registered Democrats slightly outnumber Republicans - but Republican representatives in Congress from Florida outnumber Democrats 18 to 7. In the state House it's 84 to 36. In the Senate it's 26 to 14. All this is a result of politicized redistricting.
The result: Millions of Floridians are unrepresented. Many of the districts are grotesque. State Senate District 18 literally crosses Tampa Bay on the Skyway Bridge - covering voters with completely different interests and concerns. Senate District 27 stretches across the Everglades for 115 miles from Palm Beach on the east coast into Charlotte and Lee counties on the west coast.

The only way to correct this ridiculous system is to take the power to draw districts out of the hands of politicians.

The language concerning history education worries some teachers, who believe it could be an attempt by legislators to control how and what is taught in Florida's social studies classrooms.

The language in question says American history shall be "viewed as factual" not as "constructed."

To some social studies experts, the word "constructed" means interpretations of history, and not being allowed to teach that would mean not being able to teach how ideas about historical events change over time. ...

The language that pertains to history education in the Senate bill was pulled from separate legislation sponsored by Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey.

Fasano said he sponsored his bill because parents in his district were concerned about how American history was being taught. ...

Fasano said teachers may be reading too much into the way the language is worded. But, he said, it's true he doesn't want teachers' to interpret history if that's synonymous with them putting their own spin on it.

"All we're asking them to do here is teach the facts about the country, good and bad," Fasano said. "If you interpret history, aren't you giving your opinion a little bit?"