California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is calling on his Florida counterpart to pump him up in an ongoing battle with his state's Democratic legislators.

Gov. Jeb Bush will join Schwarzenegger at fund-raisers in Florida this weekend to raise cash for ballot measures aimed at side-stepping the Democratic-controlled Legislature of California.

Bush is drawing criticism from both coasts for helping out with Schwarzenegger's initiative campaigns. Bush has long condemned the spread of voter mandates in Florida, saying they make it difficult to manage the state's finances.

"I think there is a certain bit of irony there," said Ben Wilcox, executive director of Florida Common Cause, which has fought Bush and Florida's Republican-led Legislature over efforts to restrict ballot measures. "It always seems that people don't like the citizens initiative process, unless their initiative is in play."

Bob Butterworth, a Democratic titan for three decades, thinks he might want his job back as attorney general.

The three-term attorney general who left office three years ago has told several prominent Democrats recently he's looking at running for another term.

State Sen. Walter "Skip" Campbell of Fort Lauderdale, a leading Democratic prospect for attorney general, said Butterworth told him recently he might run. Campbell would step aside for Butterworth.

"I'm not doing this for fame and fortune. I'm doing this so Democrats can get elected. Bob Butterworth will get elected," said Campbell, who also is considering running for chief financial officer but would step aside if former Bank of America chief Alex Sink runs, as some Democrats expect.

Lawmakers quietly eliminated a state office that was meant to review Florida education programs because the office was too often critical of state policy, critics of the move say.

Gov. Jeb Bush pushed for the elimination of the Council for Education Policy, Research and Improvement, and governor's office officials and House Republicans said it was because the office's job could be done by other state officials.

Bush said this week when asked about the office's elimination: "I think they should be given a proper burial."

Younger students improved again this year on Florida's statewide reading test, but 47 percent of children in grades three to 10 still aren't reading at grade level, according to scores released Thursday.

Tenth-graders continued to struggle, with their scores on the 2005 Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test falling for the third time in four years. State officials said the emphasis on early reading instruction is paying off, but the same focus must be applied to middle and high schools.

Rep. John Mica, R-Winter Park, joined with lawmakers from Texas, Oklahoma and Midwest farm states in arguing that natural gas drilling could be handled in a way that would not jeopardize the environment and that it was necessary to reduce American reliance on foreign oil.

Bush and real-estate profiteers masquerading as business leaders backed the remote Mecca Farms location, which was selected in secret. Mecca's greatest benefit isn't to the county, where it would overwhelm rural neighborhoods, but to the neighboring Vavrus Ranch, where home builders claiming to be biotech promoters would build subdivisions.

Time after time, the profiteers belittled county efforts to pick an alternative site — despite clear warnings from the county that going forward at Mecca would result in long delays. The county's Business Development Board, made starry-eyed by a $51 million windfall from development there, refused to give up plans for developing Vavrus. Through it all, the county has lived up to its contract with Scripps, giving Scripps no legal basis for this week's ultimatum.

The state's chief financial officer, Tom Gallagher, announces his bid for governor in 2006 and speaks against gay marriage, judges and taxes.

Shedding his reputation as a moderate, Tom Gallagher, Florida's Republican chief financial officer, announced his candidacy for governor Wednesday by outlining a red-meat conservative agenda that calls for an end to "judges legislating from the bench," more tax cuts and a constitutional amendment opposing gay marriage.

Gallagher also paid tribute to Gov. Jeb Bush, a fellow Republican, and promised to carry on his legacy: pushing for "meaningful lawsuit reform" and for vouchers steering public money to private schools. Gallagher wouldn't say where he now differs with the governor, who can't run in 2006 due to term limits, but said he would earn the state's top executive office on his own merits. "I don't think there's an heir apparent to Gov. Bush," Gallagher said. "I've never considered myself other than a conservative person in regards to my values."

A state office set up to independently review Florida's education programs was quietly killed during the recent legislative session at the urging of Gov. Jeb Bush and House Republicans.

They insist they pushed for the Council for Education Policy, Research and Improvement to be eliminated because its job could be done by other state offices. Some critics contend it was killed because it had issued reports and made recommendations that angered Bush and leading lawmakers. ...

When asked about the elimination of the office, Bush had a blunt response Wednesday: "I think they should be given a proper burial."

Nearly 56 million gallons of sewage spilled into Florida's waterways and neighborhoods last year, an environmental group said Wednesday, as it called for a standardized statewide reporting system to better track such spills.

The detention of a suspected anti-Castro terrorist doesn't end a pathetic and embarrassing saga that threatens to tarnish the United States' moral leadership in the global war on terror.

U.S. agents finally swarmed around Luis Posada Carriles on Tuesday as he reportedly prepared to leave the country. That's some sleuthing on the part of the federal government, considering that Posada had just left a press conference attended by a platoon of journalists.

It's inexplicable that it took the U.S. government so long to apprehend Posada, who had been "hiding" in South Florida for weeks. The delay led to a lot of counterproductive speculation. ...

Whatever the motives, it left U.S. leaders vulnerable to criticism they distinguished between "terrorists that are with us, and terrorists that are against us." Now the speculation swirls over what U.S. officials will do with Posada. Will they hold him in detention, or send him to another country like a deposed dictator?

People who have unsuccessfully fought Republican Gov. Jeb Bush since he took office in 1999 may have found a little pleasure this legislative session: the governor didn't get everything he wanted.

But even Democrats agree that the less-than-perfect session doesn't dull the governor's star power if he ever decides to follow his father and brother into the White House. Bush has an overall strong record - from creating the first statewide school voucher program to cutting taxes each of his first seven years in office.

"He consolidated more power in the governor's office than any of the past governors and he set out a right-wing agenda and accomplished it," said Scott Maddox, who resigned this month as chairman of the Florida Democratic Party and is running for governor in 2006.

Frustrated at the lack of progress and a "lack of certainty" over its Palm Beach County expansion, officials at The Scripps Research Institute are prepared to consider scrapping the $800 million, publicly financed Scripps Florida plan and have asked their general counsel to develop an "exit strategy," county officials said Tuesday.

The state Board of Education on Tuesday raised the possibility of withholding money - potentially millions of dollars - from school districts it believes are treating charter schools unfairly.

The discussion followed a series of cases in which the board sided with charters against school districts that either wanted to shut them down or keep them from opening. In a handful of decisions, the state determined the districts had violated the charters' right to due process and skirted state law.

The board "needs to send a message," said vice chairman T. Willard Fair, who worked with Gov. Jeb Bush to set up the state's first charter school.

An environmental group investigating enforcement of permits says the state Department of Environmental Protection appears to have been looking into whether a candidate for promotion at the agency made political contributions.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a watchdog group frequently critical of DEP, says it requested the personnel file of Henry Hernandez, who was promoted in February 2003 to head the agency's Panama City office. The group was interested in Hernandez' promotion as part of an investigation of permitting at a Panhandle landfill.

In a letter written in early May to prosecutors in Tallahassee and Pensacola, the group says that in Hernandez's file was a record of a search for campaign contributions. State law prohibits state agencies from using political affiliation as a term of employment.

"Congressman Wexler represents a party of one," said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

"It's still the belief of the Democratic caucus that the president has to take private accounts off the table before we can begin substantive negotiations," Manley said.

But the possibility of a crack in the united Democratic front against an alternative to the Bush plan was applauded by many Republicans, even if they disagreed with Wexler's approach. The White House earlier praised Wexler for coming up with a plan and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, joined in Monday.

"Congressman Wexler's actions today represent the first of what will probably be many defections by rank-and-file Democrats who shun their leadership's continued obstruction," DeLay said. "I welcome any Democrat, no matter what their ideas, to join Republicans in our efforts to find solutions to strengthen and preserve Social Security."

With the wave of a hand from federal authorities, as many as 400 additional public schools in Florida appear likely this year to meet tough education standards set by the No Child Left Behind Act.

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, standing with Gov. Jeb Bush, announced Monday that her agency has granted a request made by state education officials to alter the way Florida evaluates whether its students are meeting the requirements of the landmark, 3-year-old law; one of the top domestic achievements of President Bush.

Spellings justified granting Florida this "flexibility" because she said state officials have convinced her that Gov. Bush's A+ education plan, which took effect in 1999, did meet the goals of federal law because it requires schools to improve student performance through the use of a single, high-stakes test.

Florida is the first state in the nation to be granted this "flexibility," which comes at a time when the nation's largest teachers union and several school districts have challenged the law in court.

U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez went on Sean Hannity's show last week. While ranting against the Democrats, Hannity asked, "Has anyone ever told these guys they lost the election?" Martinez responded: "That's the problem. There is not a realization that they are the minority party." That line is not to be confused with Martinez's pledge to reach across the aisle and unite with Democrats -- the vow he was making last fall when he needed their votes.

In the aftermath of Schiavo and at the close of this year's legislative session, Jeb has suffered two major humiliating defeats, along with a host of insults.

Wine fans in Florida and 23 other states got approval on Monday from the U.S. Supreme Court to buy wine over the Internet directly from wineries in California and other states and have it shipped to their homes.

Yet all the while, the president rode his bicycle at a wildlife center in suburban Maryland, oblivious to the "red alert" that shut down the capital.

Few parents want to believe their children might have mental health problems or learning disabilities. They certainly don't want to believe their children might be in danger of failing school, abusing drugs or even committing suicide.

But learning about a child's problem is a first step to solving it. How much worse, for those parents, to learn about a child's problems only after irrevocable damage has been done. A bill approved this session by the state Legislature seeks to stifle objective (and in many cases, expert) observers who might otherwise speak up when they see a child in trouble. Gov. Jeb Bush should listen to his top human-services advisers and veto it.

Katherine Harris apologizes, but Florida Republicans are going to have to wait a little bit longer. ...

She is so formidable in the Republican Party that the nomination will be hers for the asking. No serious Republican will dare challenge her. But many of these same strategists say that winning the nomination is as far as she will get. They are convinced that Harris would have tremendous difficulty defeating Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson.

But if not Harris, who? That's where the strategists and other Republican insiders stumble. U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez has talked with U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, but he's not interested. Some wonder about former Gen. Tommy Franks, but he has said repeatedly he does not want to run for office. And a few even whimsically dream of Gov. Jeb Bush's running for the Senate. He gave a one-word answer Friday in an e-mail to the The Palm Beach Post. "Nope!"

There is hope that, if Harris decides not to run, either Attorney General Charlie Crist or Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher could be talked into running for the Senate. But both are candidates for governor, and they have made it clear that they have no interest in switching races.

The National Marine Fisheries Service wants to list two types of coral -- elkhorn and staghorn -- as endangered species. This push comes none too soon, because the elkhorn and staghorn are under assault by both humankind and nature. The two corals are well known to snorkelers and scuba divers in the Florida Keys. What isn't so well known is that these species' plight is mirrored worldwide as all coral reefs everywhere are under stress but nowhere more so than in the Keys. A recent article in Science magazine noted that the Bahamas and even Cuba have taken more steps to protect their reefs than has the United States.

Rather than providing universities with adequate funding, the Florida Legislature wants to penalize students for taking too many classes.

That's what Floridians should be asking in the wake of the Legislature's decision to limit access to mental-health drugs under Medicaid. The move, supported by Gov. Jeb Bush, diverts Florida from its winning strategy on cost-containment and could bring misery to persons with mental illness and to taxpayers.

For years, mental-health drugs were exempted from the utilization and cost limits that apply to other prescription drugs under Medicaid. But that all changed during the final days of the legislative session, when the House and Senate agreed to slash the program's list of preferred drugs and subject mental-health medications to restrictions on which and how many drugs may be reimbursed.

but they also raised spending caps for statewide campaigns.

Lawmakers changed a provision giving matching public money to candidates for governor and the Florida Cabinet as long as they agree to a spending cap. For gubernatorial races, that cap was $5 million, but lawmakers raised it to $2 per registered voter, or about $20 million.

The $2 million cap for Cabinet races would increase to $1 per registered voter, or about $10 million.

With more than a year to go before the 2006 August primary and November general election, the changes may spur more candidates to declare early

As President Bush's former adviser on the matter, she knows a thing or two about security.

class is still a powerful force in American life. Over the past three decades, it has come to play a greater, not lesser, role in important ways. At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains linked tightly to class. At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the rich are isolating themselves more and more. At a time of extraordinary advances in medicine, class differences in health and lifespan are wide and appear to be widening.

And new research on mobility, the movement of families up and down the economic ladder, shows there is far less of it than economists once thought and less than most people believe. [Click here for more information on income mobility.] In fact, mobility, which once buoyed the working lives of Americans as it rose in the decades after World War II, has lately flattened out or possibly even declined, many researchers say.

Here are a few of the most popular political blogs:

· Eschaton (atrios.blogspot.com): The nation's most-linked liberal blog, as indexed by Blogstreet.

· Instapundit (www.instapundit.com): Blogstreet's top-ranked conservative blog.

· Romanesko (www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45): A must-read for media junkies.

· Florida Politics (flapolitics.blogspot.com): Liberal-leaning perspectives on state news.

· Abstract Appeal (abstractappeal.com): A blog dedicated to Florida appellate law, which became a national source of legal analysis during the Terri Schiavo saga.

· The Sayfie Review (www.sayfiereview.com): Technically not a blog, this conservative-leaning site (run by a former staffer for Gov. Jeb Bush) compiles news stories from around the state.

· Fort Report (www.fortreport.com): A more liberal counterpart to Sayfie.

· FlaBlog (www.flablog.net): News-Journal metro columnist Mark Lane's scintillating musings on state and local issues.

Florida Republicans are looking for a candidate to unseat Sen. Bill Nelson in next year's race and further build the GOP majority in the U.S. Senate.

The task won't be easy. While Nelson shook his base by supporting more government interference in the Terri Schiavo case, time has shown us that Nelson is an honorable man, a seasoned campaigner and a moderate politician who works diligently on behalf of constituents.

So the GOP will need to offer a candidate who can making a compelling case that he or she can more effectively represent the people of Florida.

The person we believe can best envision that future is Hillsborough's Tom Lee, president of the Florida Senate, who proved himself to be a courageous leader and consensus-builder in a time of great divide.

Critics of Jeb Bush call him an elitist Republican. But when you follow the trend line on FCAT scores, he has done more to boost education for poor, minority students than any governor in Florida's history.

Bush said the class-size amendment would blot out the budgetary sun. He warned there would be tax increases. In fact, ever since the amendment passed in 2002, Bush has been cutting taxes. And we have had budget surpluses.

This is not about whether we have the money, but how we spend it. Time and again, voters have said they want it spent on schools.

Maybe they're not so stupid. Maybe it's time to grant their wish, governor.

Quit this annual attempt to overthrow the amendment, and give them smaller classes.

If, after a reasonable period of negotiation concerning the terms and conditions of employment to be incorporated in a collective bargaining agreement, a dispute exists between a public employer and a bargaining agent, an impasse shall be deemed to have occurred ... the legislative body [the school board] shall take such action as it deems to be in the public interest, including the interest of the public employees involved, to resolve all disputed impasse issues; and

(e) Following the resolution of the disputed impasse issues by the legislative body [the school board], the parties shall reduce to writing an agreement which includes those issues agreed to by the parties and those disputed impasse issues resolved by the legislative body's action taken pursuant to paragraph (d). The agreement shall be signed by the chief executive officer and the bargaining agent and shall be submitted to the public employer and to the public employees who are members of the bargaining unit for ratification. If such agreement is not ratified by all parties, pursuant to the provisions of s. 447.309, the legislative body's action taken pursuant to the provisions of paragraph (d) shall take effect as of the date of such legislative body's action for the remainder of the first fiscal year which was the subject of negotiations;

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

In the closing minutes of the 2005 legislative session, when it was clear that some important bills would pass and others wouldn't, Senate President Tom Lee said that failure to pass legislation isn't always a bad thing. He is right. The first pass at complicated issues often doesn't produce the best result. Sometimes it takes more time to get it right.