The race for governor of Washington is even closer than the race for president in Florida was four years ago. But this time, it seems that voters will decide it.

Between Election Day and Nov. 30, the margin and outcome went from 7,000 votes with Democrat Christine Gregoire winning to 42 votes and Republican Dino Rossi winning. As of Friday, after a statewide hand recount, Ms. Gregoire was back up by 130 votes.

That final recount included nearly 750 absentee ballots that had been overlooked in King County, which is the state's largest and is strongly Democratic. On Wednesday, Republicans were before the Washington Supreme Court, arguing against counting the ballots — not because they may have been fraudulent but because a recount should include only those ballots counted the first time.

Unlike the Supreme Court in Bush vs. Gore, however, the Washington high court quickly ruled that if a ballot was determined to be legal, it should be counted. And where Katherine Harris stood up for her party, not the voters, the Republican who runs Washington's elections had urged counties to find and count every valid ballot.

Jeb Bush was cavalier about the criticism of his administration implicit in Mr. Fierro's resignation letter, but that says more about the governor's thin skin than it does about Mr. Fierro. It also underscores the importance of independent legislative review of DCF and other agency procurement practices - a review that Nancy Argenziano, chairman of the Senate's Committee on Governmental Oversight and Productivity, promised is forthcoming.

"I am amazed and sometimes appalled at some of the lack of accountability that we have," Ms. Argenziano, R-Dunnellon, said Wednesday. "There is a failure on everybody's part here, including the Legislature. ...

"I don't want to get the governor all in an uproar, but he's got to realize there are some areas of deficiency and he's got to be concerned with this issue."

It's disappointing that Gov. Jeb Bush has brushed aside Mr. Fierro's comments.

Surely Mr. Bush has not forgotten how his administration was embarrassed earlier this year by revelations of serious ethical questions in DCF's awarding of contracts. Those ethical problems contributed to DCF Secretary Jerry Regier's decision to resign. It's noteworthy that Mr. Fierro previously expressed concerns about the handling of contracts in DCF.

But could it be that these voters were Zell Miller Democrats who, like voters in rural North Florida counties, went Republican?.

Gov. Jeb Bush dismissed Fierro's complaints Tuesday.

"It's really self-serving to resign and send a letter out to the press and have your supervisors read about it," Bush said. "We've got some procurement issues, the guy in charge of procurement leaves and he blames everybody else. I think enough said."

Governor denies politics determine which campuses get plum programs

The [NAACP] investigation was prompted by the content of a single speech NAACP chairman Julian Bond gave during the group's national convention in April. One representative quote came during a section on the election debacle of 2000, in which Bond noted, "if whites and nonwhites vote in the same percentages as they did in 2000, Bush will be re-defeated by 3-million votes." ["It did not help that the IRS letter notifying the NAACP of its investigation was dated less than a month before the election."]

Such statements, while skirting the line of partisanship, are much less overt than the e-mail the Rev. Jerry Falwell sent to supporters in August saying "people of faith are as energized behind President Bush as we have been behind any president in history." While the IRS is not compelled to give any reason for an audit, the explanation they have given for an investigation that could threaten the NAACP's longstanding tax-exempt status opens the agency to charges of unfairness.

In February, St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke said Democratic challenger John Kerry should be denied communion for supporting abortion rights, and other bishops expressed similar opinions. Where is the IRS letter challenging the St. Louis diocese's tax-exempt status?

Restrictions on the use of profanity in this column limit me to terms such as sleaze bags when describing those now gathered in Tallahassee.

As you read this, the state's politicians are up there sipping cocktails with lobbyists, enjoying their power, all while helping to condemn countless kids to a second-class life.

The legislators Thomas refers to as "sleazebags" are trying....

Hillary Clinton 46%
Jeb Bush 35
Other/Not sure 19

John Kerry 45%
Jeb Bush 37
Other/Not sure 18

"From South America to Southeast Asia and everywhere in between, serving on the Foreign Relations Committee will put me in a position to influence foreign policy at a critical time in our nation's history," Martinez, a Republican, said. "Having come from the tyranny and dictatorship of Castro's Cuba as a child, I hold nothing more dearly than the American principles of freedom, democracy and human rights."

A St. Petersburg nonprofit company that runs Florida's prison industries violated state law when it created a spinoff to run its administrative services, the governor's inspector general has found.

The highly critical audit, released Monday, found PRIDE Inc. had too few internal controls, a flawed business model and conflicts of interests between it and the nonprofit spinoff, Industries Training Corp.

PRIDE's board of directors, appointed by the governor, paid its executives too much, maintained inadequate records of financial meetings and repeatedly made decisions that benefited ITC at PRIDE's expense, the preliminary audit by Chief Inspector General Derry Harper determined.

As Tallahassee Democrat staff writer Rocky Scott reported in Sunday's editions, more than 50,000 private and public employers in Florida have Medicaid-eligible workers on their payrolls. Those workers can collect Medicaid because they don't have their own health-insurance coverage or are paid so little that they can't afford the coverage that is provided.

They are employed by a laundry list of companies ranging from Publix to Best Buy, both local hospitals, city, county and state government.

The Department of Children & Families' top contracting official resigned Monday, chiding social service officials for defanging the state's oversight of private, often profit-making agencies that provide services to Florida's most vulnerable citizens.

In a strongly worded three-page resignation letter, Robert D. Fierro, DCF's director of contract services, said he could no longer manage the state's child welfare, mental health and domestic violence programs after cutbacks reduced his staff by half.

Fierro strongly criticized a decision by DCF's newly appointed secretary, Lucy Hadi, to transfer to private companies the lion's share of the monitoring and oversight of about $1.5 billion in social service contracts. Fierro said the move carried "far more peril than promise."

Beset by staff cuts and saddled with often unrealistic demands and "externally imposed deadlines," Fierro wrote, contract managers have been forced to negotiate, draft and supervise agreements with private agencies far too quickly. The public is more often ill-served than well-served by haste in contracting," Fierro wrote. "To quote an old adage, 'If you want it badly, you get it badly.'"

Republican Congressman Tom Feeney of Oviedo asked a computer programmer in September 2000, prior to that year's contested presidential vote in Florida, to write software that could alter vote totals on touch-screen voting machines, the programmer said.

Former computer programmer Clint Curtis made the claim Monday in sworn testimony to Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee investigating allegations of voter fraud in the 2004 presidential election involving touch-screen voting in Ohio.

In his testimony, Curtis said that Feeney, then a member of the Florida House of Representative, met with Curtis and other employees of Yang Enterprises, an Oviedo software company, and asked if the company could create a program that would allow a user to alter the vote totals while using the touch-screen machine. The program had to be written so that even the human-readable computer code would not show its illicit capabilities, Curtis recalled.

Curtis said he wrote a prototype program for Feeney, and that he believed the program might not only be usable on touch-screen voting machines, which some counties - predominantly in South Florida - now use, but also on optical-scan machines, which most of the state's counties used in the 2004 elections.

Feeney could not be reached for comment.

More than 50,000 private- and public-sector employers in Florida have workers who qualify for Medicaid for themselves or their dependents because they are not paid enough or lack private health-insurance coverage.

"That is unbelievable. I would have thought it would be much less," said state Sen. Durrell Peaden Jr., R-Crestview, chair of the Senate Health Care Committee, when told about the number of employers who have Medicaid-qualified employees.

The state Medicaid program covers children in very low-income families, the disabled, pregnant women and those over 65. Children in foster care and some adopted children also may be eligible. The income limit for the program generally is 150 percent of the federal poverty level, or $18,850 annually for a family of four.

Employers with workers receiving Medicaid benefits include Wal-Mart, Publix, McDonald's, state agencies, universities, cities, counties - even hospitals and doctor's offices.

In analyzing Wal-Mart's success in holding employee compensation at low levels, the report assesses the costs to US taxpayers of employees who are so badly paid that they qualify for government assistance even under the less than generous rules of the federal welfare system. For a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store, the government is spending $108,000 a year for children's health care; $125,000 a year in tax credits and deductions for low-income families; and $42,000 a year in housing assistance. The report estimates that a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store costs federal taxpayers $420,000 a year, or about $2,103 per Wal-Mart employee. That translates into a total annual welfare bill of $2.5 billion for Wal-Mart's 1.2 million US employees.

Wal-Mart is also a burden on state governments. According to a study by the Institute for Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2003 California taxpayers subsidized $20.5 million worth of medical care for Wal-Mart employees. In Georgia ten thousand children of Wal-Mart employees were enrolled in the state's program for needy children in 2003, with one in four Wal-Mart employees having a child in the program.

Hundreds of millions of tax dollars will begin flowing to private pre-kindergarten programs in August, creating in essence the largest school voucher program Florida has ever seen.

But some lawmakers say the oversight for that money is woefully inadequate.

They compared the hastily passed bill, which sailed through the legislature in four days last week, with ones during the past several years that resulted in charges of financial fraud and theft, as well as abuse of the rules within the state's three other taxpayer-funded voucher programs.

Republicans bristle at Democrats' concerns of potential cheating.

The manatee, peregrine falcon and other vulnerable wild animals in Florida could lose many of their protections if the state adopts new rules on how species are listed as threatened or endangered, conservation groups say.

Conservationists are lined up against their historical nemeses, business and development groups, in a struggle over how the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission [FFWCC]applies new guidelines for listing animals. Those business groups have complained for years that the state lists animals without hard scientific evidence showing the species are in danger of extinction.