Last November, voters in Florida passed a constitutional amendment raising the minimum wage by $1, to $6.15 per hour, and indexing it to inflation. Though only 3.1 percent of Florida's work force makes less than $6.15 per hour and would be directly impacted by raising the floor, Amendment 5 passed with more than 70 percent support. That suggests voters see raising a wage that hadn't been adjusted since 1997 as a matter of basic fairness.

Why then is the Legislature entertaining proposals that might weaken the new amendment and make it difficult to enforce? Could it be that some of the state's leading lawmakers are more interested in protecting business interests than in looking out for low-wage workers?

The House Judiciary Committee recently passed a bill offered by committee Chairman David Simmons, R-Longwood, that would implement the amendment in a way that is tilted toward industry. While there have been some fixes from Simmons' original proposal, including the addition of employee protection against retaliation and the provision of attorney fees (both of which are required by the constitutional amendment), the general intent of the bill is still to shield employers from being sued for noncompliance and, if they are sued, to limit employee recovery.

may have run her last race, but this gutsy reformer is not done trying to change the state's political landscape.
Castor, who narrowly lost to Mel Martinez in last year's U.S. Senate race, has revealed she will not run for governor next year, though she was the front- runner for the Democratic nomination.

In all likelihood, the decision draws to an end her career in elected office, though Castor should never be counted out.

"'The governor, without specifying a number, has made it very clear there will be a limit. When you cap expenses, clearly people with high health care needs are very likely to run into that cap,' said Joan Alker, a Medicaid expert at Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute in Washington."

Jeb Bush is mentioned often as a potential successor to his brother, but the governor has said repeatedly he won't run for president. Bush maintains he wants to return to his Miami home after his second term and work in the private sector.

His Medicaid proposal isn't exactly "his." Bush unveiled his plan with fanfare as a concept that re-imagines how the state should deliver medical care, but many components come directly out of the Republican playbook.

Bush's remarks echo those of Georgia's Newt Gingrich, who as U.S. House speaker in the late 1990s pushed efforts to privatize portions of the Medicare program for seniors. Gingrich today leads a Washington think tank that continues to promote such ideas.

Bush appears to welcome the attention, and controversy, surrounding his proposal.

Fifty percent of poll respondents said they approve of the job that ["Jeb!"'s] doing, a rating that varied considerably depending on the respondents' political party affiliation. Eighty-five percent of Republicans approved of the governor's performance, compared to 22 percent of those who identified themselves as Democrats.

Asked whether Jeb Bush should run for president in 2008, 41 percent said "Yes," 49 percent said "No," and 10 percent said they are not sure.

Florida voters don't agree with the priorities of the Florida Legislature. They want legislators to focus mostly on education. And they don't like the idea of repealing a constitutional amendment to reduce class sizes.

"I've been in this game long enough to know that someone who gives me a fund-raising check isn't going to get anything special from me ... What they're donating for is good government, and I'm going to make the best decision I can, regardless."

[t]here's no reason for Gov. Jeb Bush to pursue his plan when a state Supreme Court ruling on vouchers' constitutionality is imminent.

Tom Lee tackles politics as he does his golf game: with planned shots and calculated risks. And if he seems cold? That he learned from Mr. Spock.

Jeb Bush's characteristically ambitious agenda will help him avoid lame-duck status during his seventh legislative session as governor, but the spotlight is about to move to his would-be successors.

The Florida Legislature convenes its 2005 regular session Tuesday, with lawmakers once again partying with lobbyists, forming alliances and cutting deals -- all the while speaking the parliamentary language of an insider world that few others can understand.

But residents of the real world outside Tallahassee will be watching the two-month session, some of them apprehensively, because the insiders will be making decisions that affect children, businesses, health care and pocketbooks.

The latest presidential speculation involving Jeb Bush comes courtesy of Larry Sabato, the oft-quoted pundit and political scientist from the University of Virginia. The governor has repeatedly insisted he's not running for president in 2008 and Sabato says that's "probably wise."

In his latest Crystal Ball newsletter, Sabato writes: "After all, voters in a nation born of anti-monarchial revolution will naturally recoil from the establishment of a political royal line. After a few years past 2008, Jeb may be a possibility, and who would bet against another Bush serving in the Oval Office at some point in the future? (Don't forget about Jeb's dashing Latino son, George P. Bush, who possesses the perfect profile for the century of ethnic diversity to come.)"

showed up at 4 AM at the Miami home of a former girlfriend. He proceeded to break into the house via the woman's bedroom window, and then began arguing with his ex's father. Bush, then a Rice University student, soon fled the scene. But he returned 20 minutes later to drive his Ford Explorer across the home's front lawn, leaving wide swaths of burned grass in his wake. Young Bush avoided arrest when the victims declined to press charges.

"He told the rally his mother had instilled him the values of Cesar Chavez, the Chicano activist who fought for the rights of migrant farmworkers in the United States. 'She told me we have to fight for our race, we have to find the leaders who represent us,’ he said in fluent Spanish.'"

Despite six years of major changes, Florida's schools lag behind other states' in many areas - including spending.

On teacher pay, we trail Georgia.

On graduation rates, Alabama is better.

On eighth-grade reading scores, South Carolina just moved ahead.

Despite six years of major changes by Gov. Jeb Bush and a Republican-dominated Legislature, Florida still ranks with its Southern neighbors near the bottom of the education rankings.

Florida politicians are fooling only themselves if they think that the current post-conviction DNA testing law does away with wrongful imprisonment in the Sunshine State.

The only circumstance more outrageous than the resistance to compensating Dedge is the Legislature's pervasive indifference to the moral certainty that there are hundreds of equally innocent people still rotting behind Florida bars.

Rod Smith, is lining up his own experienced finance team. It includes: Sen. Bill Nelson's former finance director Richard Reeves; Buddy MacKay's former finance director Michael Spellman; Ben Eley, who led Florida fundraising for Bill Bradley, Wes Clark and Joe Lieberman; Joe Perry, fundraiser for Democratic state senate campaigns; former state party executive director Screven Watson; and James Harris, a former adviser to Bob Graham, Bill Nelson and Janet Reno.

Some 53 percent said they favor allowing taxpayers to invest some of their Social Security contributions in the market.

But when those 53 percent were asked what they thought if this meant benefits would potentially drop along with the market, 56 percent of them became opposed.

A majority [of Floridians polled are] opposed Bush on the issue of drug importation from Canada and other nations. Almost two thirds, 64 percent, said the government should allow Americans to import drugs, while only 30 percent were opposed. Bush and Republican leaders in Congress say they will block attempts to allow importation to guard against unsafe drugs.

person who administers overall election policy for the state should be independent, nonpartisan and demonstrably unbiased. The last two secretaries of state, Ms. Hood and Katherine Harris, have run the office as if it were an extension of the governor's office. Whatever changes in election law legislators ultimately adopt -- and, yes, some are needed -- their top priority should be to make the Secretary of State's position independent and nonpartisan. That one change, more than all of the changes recommended in the massive proposals, would do more to instill confidence and promote accuracy in state elections.

Environmentalists hope to convince Martinez that the potential for drilling in the Arctic and drilling off the Florida coast are linked.

Since 1980, when his father, George H.W. Bush, was Ronald Reagan's running mate, there has been a Bush on the Florida ballot in almost every general election. (The exception was 1996, when President Bill Clinton sought a second term, and Gov. Lawton Chiles was in the final two years of his.) ...

[W]aiting in the wings: Lt. Gov. Toni Jennings is expected to seek the Republican nomination to succeed Bush in 2006. The governor has said he is impartial, but his former top campaign aides have started working for Jennings.

Bush is very aware of including Jennings in his major decisions and has already begun helping her appeal to the powerful conservative base he has carefully cultivated.

They even found a vague $4 million line-item in his proposed budget and earmarked it last week for an abortion prevention program. The item became a platform for Jennings to travel to Jacksonville and Miami promoting abortion alternatives.

The governor may be theoretically free from the heaviest political burdens, but it's clear he will always be calculating the political realities.

New Senate President Tom Lee is ready for two years of policy debates but still itches for a fight every now and then.

House Speaker Allan Bense, who rose from poor beginnings, has earned praise for his deferential ways.

Last year, Florida voters overwhelmingly decided to give low wage workers a raise to $6.15 per hour. This is only a dollar more than the federal minimum wage, and it doesn’t even come close to being a living wage - a salary that is sufficient to pay rent, buy food, and provide clothes and other necessities for a family.

Despite the miserly paychecks that will result from a $6.15 wage, Florida’s GOP legislators feel that this extra dollar would be a huge burden for the businesses that would have to pay it, and they are fighting hard to minimize the effects.

The distinction that lawmakers don't seem to want to acknowledge is that the Board of Governors, like the Florida Legislature, is itself a creature of the Florida Constitution.

Unlike the old Board of Regents - which was summarily dissolved after its members offended powerful politicians - the board can neither be abolished nor marginalized with the mere passage of legislation.

The state's social services agency said it wants to delay the removal of brain-damaged Terri Schiavo's feeding tube so it can investigate about 30 new allegations of "abuse, neglect or exploitation" by her husband who is trying to end her life, according to a court document made public Friday. ...

DCF's petition said general accusations include failure to file proper guardian plans and reports; failure to provide therapy and investigate experimental medical procedures; denial of legal counsel; lack of communication and visitation; and lack of manipulation of Terri Schiavo's arms, "causing severe contractures."

Michael Schiavo's attorney, George Felos, said Friday at least 89 complaints have been filed with the DCF regarding Terri Schiavo and none of them produced any evidence of abuse.

"The obvious question is, after 89 investigations, why is DCF compelled to file a petition to intervene in court now?" Felos said. "And the answer is that it's purely a political situation."

Our expectations may be too high, but it looks like we could have a legislative session that does good things for Floridians.

We've had a long dry spell.

Another US bishop has stepped up to the front lines of the battle in the US Catholic Church over the reception of communion by pro-abortion, dissenting Catholics. The coadjutor bishop of Orlando Florida, Thomas Wenski, has published a pastoral statement in which he calls pro-abortion Catholics who demand to receive communion "boorish and sacrilegious." He suggests that they are in a worse moral position than Pontius Pilate after his condemnation of Christ. ...

It is extremely rare for Catholic bishops to criticize each other in public. However, bishop Wenski in his statement made a not very veiled reference to the reaction of some US bishops, such as Washington's Cardinal McCarrick and Los Angeles' Cardinal Mahoney, who have said that sanctions and public rebukes may ultimately harm the pro-life cause.

Pope John Paul II has declared the Church's near total opposition to the death penalty. In his encyclical "Evangelium Vitae" (The Gospel of Life) issued March 25, 1995 after four years of consultations with the world's Roman Catholic bishops, John Paul II wrote that execution is only appropriate "in cases of absolute necessity, in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today, however, as a result of steady immprovement in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically nonexistent." Until this encyclical, the death penalty was viewed as sometimes permissible as a means of protecting society.

In January 1999, John Paul II, who had written an earlier encyclical on the issue, brought his anti-death penalty crusade to the United States. "I renew my appeal," he declared in St. Louis, "for a consensus to end the death penalty, which is both cruel and unnecessary."

new pre-kindergarten program should not allow religious instruction because that would violate the state constitution, the American Civil Liberties Union argued in a letter sent to lawmakers Friday.

The new pre-K program, slated to start in August, is to be run largely by private day-care centers and schools, including religious ones.

The religious organizations have to meet state standards but are free to teach religious beliefs to the 4-year-olds in their care.

Betty Castor is telling friends and supporters she will not be a candidate for governor next year.

In a political matchup likely to gain national attention and become one of Florida's most costly races for Congress, Boca Raton Democrat Ron Klein on Thursday announced plans to challenge incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Clay Shaw's 2006 re-election bid.

If the labor union AFSCME, the Florida Democratic Party or any of the governor's regular critics knock him, it's what one would expect. Predictability has nothing to do with whether their criticism has substance. Mainly, it's boring.

Jeb Bush has already blazed the trail. Florida's governor has been an aggressive privatizer, and as The Miami Herald put it after a careful study of state records, "his bold experiment has been a success — at least for him and the Republican Party, records show. The policy has spawned a network of contractors who have given him, other Republican politicians and the Florida G.O.P. millions of dollars in campaign donations."

What's interesting about this network of contractors isn't just the way that big contributions are linked to big contracts; it's the end of the traditional practice in which businesses hedge their bets by giving to both parties. The big winners in Mr. Bush's Florida are companies that give little or nothing to Democrats. Strange, isn't it? It's as if firms seeking business with the state of Florida are subject to a loyalty test.

So am I saying that we are going back to the days of Boss Tweed and Mark Hanna? Gosh, no — those guys were pikers. One-party control of today's government offers opportunities to reward friends and punish enemies that the old machine politicians never dreamed of.

Cantero, however, is a conservative jurist whom Bush appointed to the state's highest court amid much attention in 2002.

Despite Cantero's widely acknowledged keen legal mind, his appointment was unusually controversial - because of his lineage (he's the grandson of former Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista); his unabashed opposition to abortion; and his help defending an anti-Castro activist who, as attorney Dexter Douglass said, was either a freedom fighter or a terrorist depending on your point of view. Bush called Cantero "perfectly qualified" for the job, and one got the sense that the two were ideological soul mates.

But Cantero's tough criticism of a privatized appeals process for inmates on Death Row, a change the governor put into motion two years ago, is anything but predictable. It's another chink in the armor of privatization just when other aspects of outsourcing are under legislative scrutiny.

Statewide, there's a buzz about prominent Florida attorney Willie Gary possibly running for governor. Gary, who specializes in personal injury cases and is in high demand as a public speaker, undoubtedly has the charisma and the money to mount a serious campaign.

He may not win the Democratic nomination, but he would alter the landscape during a primary battle. Moderates like Jim Davis and Rod Smith couldn't take the African-American vote for granted, and would have to address some left-leaning issues in debates.

A year after state lawmakers tightened the eligibility requirements for the state's subsidized insurance program for children, enrollment in KidCare is plummeting — down 100,000 since last year.

The decline is worrying some that needy uninsured children won't get health care or will have to go to hospital emergency rooms when they get sick.

"The numbers are very alarming," said Deanna Schaeffer, president and chief executive officer of Healthy Communities, a Daytona Beach organization that helps administer KidCare.

have been getting a dose of reality that should inform the debate on Medicaid funding and reform in the upcoming session. Consider these examples from recent public forums: Without Medicaid-covered prescriptions, a heart-transplant recipient would die in two weeks from organ rejection. Without Medicaid, a 20-year-old woman with muscular dystrophy can't work or pay taxes and likely would have to be institutionalized at state cost. Freezes in already-low payments to doctors, hospitals and nursing homes would cause physicians to stop taking nonemergency Medicaid patients. And Medicaid beneficiaries forced into emergency rooms would cost local taxpayers far more to treat.

The lesson of these real-life scenarios is clear: Before rushing head-long into reforms for what ails Medicaid, the Legislature should ensure that the cure isn't worse than the disease. Attempts to cut costs from the state's Medicaid budget shouldn't come at the expense of shifting increased costs to local communities or leaving federal matching funds on the table.

Another high-ranking department employee is accused of ''favoritism'' following a months-long scandal over the social service agency's contracting practices.

Women with unwanted pregnancies would be counseled against having abortions under a taxpayer-financed state program announced by Gov. Jeb Bush's administration Monday.

The $4 million initiative, unveiled by Lt. Gov. [and candidate for Gov.] Toni Jennings, would set up a state telephone hotline to direct pregnant women to nonprofit organizations, possibly including some with religious affiliations, that would encourage them to consider adoption and other alternatives to abortion.

Bush rejected the notion that politics played a role in Jennings getting a prominent role on an issue that could improve her standing with Republican primary voters.

"She volunteered for the duty, and I'm glad she did," Bush said. "I do believe that women, when confronted with this very traumatic choice when they're pregnant, need to have options available to them."

John Dowless, a political strategist and former executive director of the Christian Coalition of Florida, said Jennings' involvement makes it more likely the program will be approved.

"As one of three leading candidates for governor, that gives it a lot more momentum, that's for sure," Dowless said.

J.M. "Mac" Stipanovich, a lobbyist and GOP strategist, called Jennings the logical choice.

"From now on, anything the governor does that gives a high profile to the lieutenant governor is going to result in accusations of politics," said Stipanovich, who supports Attorney General Charlie Crist for governor. "She is the lieutenant governor and she's capable. The governor would be remiss if he didn't use her skills."

Bush is backing away from his promise. He's recommending the state delay the nursing home staff increase so that he can give people tax cuts and save the state about $65 million this year.

One flaw in Gov. Bush's latest school voucher proposal overshadows the others: It abandons the children whom the governor says that he wants to help.

In Tallahassee, Gov. Jeb Bush said he didn't attend the Washington conference because he didn't want to add to speculation about whether he planned to run for president in 2008.

The tall man in a dark suit holds a drink in one hand while greeting guests at a cocktail reception in the swanky University Club, just blocks from the Capitol.

One by one, the guests quietly approach and, with a pat on the back, offer a long white envelope, which he accepts with a smile and a nod of appreciation. ...

He's Tom Lee, the Senate president who this night would raise $300,000 for the Republican Party of Florida, but not without taking a few jabs at the lobbyists who were handing him the checks.

Sen. Steve Geller, D-Hallandale Beach, the incoming minority leader who presided over [an event at the Governor's Club] in which he hoped to bring in as much $20,000 — the cost of two dinners at Lee's event the previous night ....

Before considering Gov. Jeb Bush's request for more authority over county supervisors of elections, legislators should assess Florida's track record since 2001. That's when responsibility for election policy and administration was effectively transferred to the governor because he would appoint the secretary of state.

The new system has invited lax administration, partisan bias and political mischief because it eliminates important checks and balances in three areas:

Florida's original school voucher law violates two provisions of the state Constitution, opponents told the Florida Supreme Court in a legal brief Monday.

The 1999 law breaks down the wall separating church and state and undermines the requirement that the state provide for the education of children with a public school system, the brief said.

The law, which was challenged in court the day after Gov. Jeb Bush signed it six years ago, lets students at failing public schools attend private and parochial schools at taxpayer expense.

Two trial judges and an appellate court have concluded the law is unconstitutional, but the state has been allowed to apply it during the court challenges. Nearly 700 children attend private schools under its provisions.

Florida's high court has not yet scheduled oral arguments but requested briefs. The state filed its brief in January. Several groups, ranging from the U.S. Department of Justice to the Florida Catholic Conference, have also filed briefs supporting the state.

Tom Lewis, 65, formerly a Disney World vice president and agency head in Gov. Bob Graham's administration, was appointed to head DMS as of March 8. He replaces Bill Simon, who left in January to take a job in a restaurant chain.

Meanwhile, a woman who's been involved in legislative decision-making on health-care appropriations and nursing-home care is the new head of the Florida Department of Elder Affairs.

Carole Green, 52, until recently a Republican state House member from the Fort Myers area, was appointed to lead DOEA [Elder Affairs]. As of today, she replaces Terry White, fired earlier this year because of sexual-harassment allegations.

The governor's office has yet to explain how the private market can rein in costs when private insurance rates have risen at a faster rate than comparable Medicaid services. Bush's office has described the need for reform in terms of fairness, saying taxpayers shouldn't pay for a Medicaid program richer than their own health plan.