Flablog

Bob Graham The Parrothead Candidate.

Rodman Dam has taken up a lot of Legislative time over the past quarter century. Now it's in the news again.

You can almost hear how Jeb's thinking --

Gotta throw those environmental wackos a bone and soon. Everyone thinks I'm a land-rapist because of that Everglades Bill and that last raid on the conservation land trust fund. Hey! I could veto the Rodman Bill, stand in front of the river for campaign ads and throw an elbow into Jim King's fat gut in the bargain! And it won't even cost anything! Hey, I'm still the smart brother.

Fred Grimm: Boca Raton, spam capital.

Eddy Marin did not return a phone call Wednesday. But one should note that spam is not illegal. That's a major improvement on his r�sum�. Marin, 41, was busted and convicted in 1990 for running a major cocaine ring in Broward County, big enough to implicate 15 others, including former Broward County Judge James Holmes.

Remarks from the Senate floor by Tom Lee. This is from a Republican who ended voting for the budget. A small dose of reality. Meanwhile in the House it's "a great day in the state of Florida."

I can't ignore some of the things that I am seeing as a continuing trend. Because, year after year, we're ignoring some of the realities of our future in favor of what I consider to be political expediency and we're passing along the problems to future leaders and future generations; declaring victory, pretending there isn't a problem, and moving on.

Wrong number in Pinellas Park.

"You should be very proud of yourselves,"
House Speaker Johnnie Byrd, R-Plant City, told the House shortly after 11 p.m. "You basically saved our state."

The FCAT bill was a last-minute sto-gap expedient meant to give some kind of alternative to students who met all the requirements for high school graduation except for passing the FCAT. But the Legislature couldn't even do that. "The Senate does not lend itself to immediacy," said Senate president Jim King.

When you combine the failure of this bill with the cutbacks and tuition increases in the budget bill, the effect to is slam the doors of Florida's community colleges shut to the kind of students their were meant to serve.

The fact that this was thrown to the Legislature during the very last week of school shows the lack of thought given to the effects of the FCAT. Remember, FCAT requirements were passed three years ago. Everyone knew this was going to happen. Nobody cared to take action.

The only intelligent way to sort this out without making things worse to to declare a one- or two-year year moratorium on FCAT sanctions to give the state time to get its act together.

Nothing you didn't know already.
Thanks Dragonleg

This Tallahassee Democrat story lists four bills that take authority away from local government. (A similar story in the Tampa Trib.) (Via Sayfie Review.)

These stories center around DOT but this is hardly an exhaustive list. The Legislature also passed a bill preventing local governments from enacting living-wage laws. (The Herald has an example of its effect in Miami.)

Paritcuarly in education, Florida Republicans have jettisoned the idea of local autonomy in favor of pure top-down from Tallahassee. What's the use of being in charge if you let locals do whatever they want? Development interests are not giving you wheelbarrows full of money to empower local government.

"Florida is broken. Florida does not have a representative democracy."

So says the usually overoptimistic Howard Troxler.

"Not in my 21 years of watching the Legislature, or in the opinion of many wise observers older than I, has the legislative process been so directly controlled by those who stood to gain from it," he writes.

(A couple weeks ago Lucy Morgan gave her worst-Legislature-ever assessment.)

Lucy Morgan sees a Legislature given to secrecy.

The Constitution says we have a right to watch when two or more legislators gather to discuss the state's business. These days it almost takes an act of Congress to get through all of the locked doors where they can hide.

The graduation ceremonies are over. School ends in a week. And now, only now does the governor discover that maybe, just maybe, there should be some alternatives to the FCAT in place. So he proposes adding FCAT to the special session. And he announces this when there's only one day of the special session left. The govenor had four years to act on this and he just now realizes there might be a problem.

The only fair thing to do given all the last-minute FCAT rule changes that schools and parents had to deal with, the only fair thing to do given all the chaos the folks in Tallahassee have created with this test is to declare a year moratorium on flunking kids because of the FCAT.

This is the only way teachers, schools and students can actually know what the rules and options are. This is the only way legislators can sit down and assess the situation instead of speed-voting on something the governor's office throws at them at the last possible minute. This spring the rules have changed hour to hour and each change has lasting effects on kids' futures.

The Sun Sentinel's story on this is one of the few to get into the problems of using SATs as a substitute for FCATs. They're different kind of tests measuring different kind of things. How do you come up with any kind of meaningful cut-off score?

A Palm Beach Post editorial has this quote from Education Commissioner Jim Horne -- "Maybe we've been a little better on the tough part than we have on the love part."

No shit, Sherlock.

Just something to remember next year. Here is the final roll call on the bill to weaken the Everglades cleanup. Only 18 House members voted against it. Hooray for : Bilirakis, Bucher, Carassas, Cusack, Farkas, Gannon, Gelber, Gottlieb, Joyner, Kosmas, Negron, Peterman, Rich, Ryan, Slosberg, Sobel, Wiles and Wishner.

In the Senate, everyone voted for it although a few, notably Debbie Wasserman Schultz, said they were misled about the bill and no longer support it.

Last year's Red Belly Days' belly-flop contest champion now languishes in prison. He competed while under house arrest and when a photo of his winning jump appeared in the newspaper, authorities surmised he had probably left the house. He knew he shouldn't have done it, but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. The Gainesville Sun has the story.

Dems look to match Byrd's propaganda. Among the first tepid steps: asking for a link on the speaker's slow-loading, sometimes down, all-Byrd-all-the-time MyFloridaHouse page. Fat chance.

Story has a nice kicker: Asked Thursday about the difference between the House and Senate Web sites, King spokeswoman Sarah Bascom said, "It's a state Web site, it's an informational tool, it's a resource, and that's all it should be."

I'm trying to get up up a little outrage about the Florida US House members who are working with the Big Music to restrict fair use, but the Legislature's in session and I'm suffering outrage overload. I'll leave it to Solonor to do the job.

Teenage auto rampage in Lady Lake!
Thanks to Dragonleg

NY Times story on how holding kids back just plain doesn't work. And how Florida's posturing legislators are more interested in looking tough than improving education.

At a public hearing last year, State Senator Anna P. Cowin called the research "gobbledygook," and State Senator Donald C. Sullivan called those who questioned the new policy "the bad guys." In this manner, Florida has set a national precedent, giving the adults who know these third graders best � their teachers and principals � absolutely no say in who will be kept back.

After his work as point man for selling out the Everglades cleanup to sugar interests. After misleading state senators (Scroll down 15 graphs and here). After misleading the national media, (see 11th graph) Florida Environmental Protection Secretary David Struhs is the perfect guy to run the national EPA.

The reaction is mixed.

Columnist: Struhs can sometimes see a reality that is invisible to others.

No big signing ceremony for this one. Jeb signs Big Sugar's bill weakening the Everglades cleanup behind closed doors and says ``I'm not ashamed of it."

He is however asking for some "tweaking" of the bill by the Legislature.

One response: You can't just sign a bill that is demonstrably flawed and then just hope it will be changed in the future,'' said Dexter Lehtinen, the attorney for the Miccosukee tribe. More than a decade ago, Lehtinen, then U.S. attorney in Miami, brought the original federal lawsuit against the state over the Everglades' decline. He said whatever ''tinkering'' lawmakers do won't replace key sections of the 1994 Everglades Forever Act that the new measure deletes, including a critical one that would make meeting the strict pollution standard a requirement for new water-use permits.

The Financial Times, of all places, has a good feature on the issues involved.

Sally Swartz of Palm Beach Post dismisses the fix-it bill as just an attempt at marketing the Everglades bill.

So Gov. Bush has signed the bad Everglades bill and will ask legislators to fix it -- in ways yet unclear -- with a new bill before the special session ends Tuesday. Trusting the governor to make the Legislature do anything, however, is risky business. Two years ago, The St. Petersburg Times reports, Gov. Bush let an adoption bill become law under similar circumstances. But legislators never followed through with the second bill, and the governor promised "not to do that ever again."

The bill she refers to is the infamous Scarlet Letter adoption law. (from the vaults of Flablog.)

The Herald's Peter Wallsten looks at Bush's damage control.

An enduring public perception that the governor is aligned with Big Sugar, especially given the green nature of Florida voters, could prove damaging next year and beyond -- and erase any memories of oil drilling bans and Everglades photo ops.

Yup, it could rub off a little of the Teflon.

Florida Today says -- Gov. Jeb Bush talked grandly about preserving the Everglades during his re-election campaign last year, when he needed the votes of environmentally-concerned Floridians. But Tuesday, showing his true colors, Bush signed a bill that guts the plan to save the River of Grass and goes against the grain of long-standing bipartisan efforts to restore it.

Blog Holiday is over. Weekended in Tampa, saw my sister and picked up a second place award from the MidFla. Society of Professional Journalists. Column will resume next Sunday.

The Florida Coalition for Assessment Reform, Inc. (FCAR) now has a Web site with resources for those opposing the FCATization of Florida education. Here's an op-ed piece by the group's president Gloria Pipkin.

The site includes an on-line petition.

The group's stated goals:

• To monitor the uses and abuses of FCAT throughout the state


• To advocate for Florida students and their families


• To promote public policies that support constructive assessment of all Florida students


• To increase public awareness of alternatives to high stakes testing


• To publicize the onerous burdens and negative effects of the federal No Child Left Behind Act on education in Florida.

The heavy-handed Byrd PR machine cranks out a little damage-control at state expense. (The Times ran a followup the next day.)

"Because our message is filtered or ignored by the press, the House needs to communicate the whole, unbiased story directly to you," the letter to voters says directing them to MyFloridaHouse.com for the real truth.

The Florida House Web site is now a personal propaganda platform for the speaker rather than a site for House news and bill information. Because it's so slow and isn't good at delivering basic bill information, most people I've spoken to use the Senate site for workaday information. (And this whole Microsoft-inspired thing of naming things my-this and my-that is starting to get on my nerves. It's not my "network neighborhood" and it most certainly isn't my Florida House. There's a false familiarity to this that annoys me. Like waiters who insist on calling you by your first name.)

I enjoy the way the House site will give you this warning screen if you click on the Fla. Senate link. That's right, it asks you if you really, really, really want to go there.

Kids ... stress ... automotive ... heaps of unanswered e-mail ... even the dog needs maintenance. I am going to declare a five-day blog holiday. (Unless I spot something that demands attention.)

A plan for a Florida economic boycott received subdued and rather skeptical play in most Florida papers But the NY Times runs it nationally.

(Style Note: The AP style is FCAT the NY Times style is "F.C.A.T." Some Florida papers seem to have dispensed with spelling out what it stands for in the first reference.)

The Legislature is still in denial over this issue. It thinks everything will blow over. Not likely.

Despite the usual photo ops in classrooms, the governor's office hasn't done much of anything to deal with kids who fail the test. The Department of Education can't even notify kids whether they've passed or failed on a timely basis. The anecdotal evidence suggests a huge spike in the dropout rate that won't show up in the official figures for a couple of years.

"The 60-day session was a huge, huge success for the Florida House of Representatives."

-- House Speaker Johnnie Byrd, quoted in St. Pete Times and in The Herald

``Once we've done our state budget and once the correct information is transmitted, however we can do that, I think you'll find the citizens in your district will understand you've been incredibly successful this spring.''

What if the current mess in Tallahassee isn't just the result of typically dumb Florida politics? What if it's a national trend?

The Gainesville Sun makes the point that Speaker Johhnie Byrd's push for a new Alzheimer's research center in Tampa is a waste of state tax dollars and an unnecessary monument to his own ego. We have a research center already, the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida. It's doing important work, but sadly not in Byrd's district.

A neighboring editorial argues that cutting the state universities, as the Legislature plans to, could destroy the state's struggling tech sector.

Palm Beach Post editorial says If Jim King surrenders this week, Florida loses. Prediction: Florida loses.

St. Pete Times runs a poll on state issues.

58 percent disapprove of the Legislature's performance. "It is the worst legislative report card I've ever seen in 20 years of polling," said pollster Rob Schroth.

Lucy Morgan at the St. Pete Times clips and pastes the statewide criticism directed at Johnnie Byrd and the pliant state House. Useful numbers at the bottom. I have always doubted the $40,000-a-day estimate of special sessions costs. She find that the five special sessions over the past two years cost between $15,725 and $25,942 a day. The big variable being travel costs.

The problem isn't the cost of special sessions. It's that they are a sure sign the Legislature is unable to do its normal job.

Judge William M. Hoeveler issues a ruling blasting the Everglades bill.

Herald version -- Governor is warned about Glades proposal. Judge: Disputed bill is `clearly defective.'

Palm Beach Post version -- Judge rebukes lawmakers on Everglades.

The St. Pete Times version runs excerpts (scroll down.)

Like this --

While I am deeply troubled by the content of the bill, I am dismayed by the process that led to its passage. The bill was moved quickly through the legislative process, reportedly at the behest of more then 40 lobbyists for the sugar industry. There simply is no acceptable explanation for the speed by which this was accomplished, given the fact that the deadlines remain three and a half years off and given the state's assurances that much of the cleanup project is proceeding on track. The important issues addressed . . . warranted serious consideration by Florida's elected representatives.

and this:

I share the federal government's concerns that the state's commitment has been attenuated. It is my understanding that the governor intends to sign the bill. Apparently, he has been misled by persons who do not have the best interests of the Everglades at heart. It is my fervent hope that he has the opportunity to compare the bill with the one it would replace, the Everglades Forever Act, and consider whether the derogation of its mandates and deadlines is necessary, or wise.

First, it was the state library. Now, it looks like the Jebbites are poised to go after state parks.

Another disappearance: The state's environmental ombudsman.

The Palm Beach -- in a so-far lonely stand -- says put off flunking kids over the FCAT until problems with the FCAT are worked out. (I mentioned this in an aside in a column a couple weeks back.)

Common sense, really. And even FCAT supporters must admit there's something wrong with a test that changes its passing score only weeks before graduation. Now, 1,000 kids who were told they won't graduate high school have been told they actually will. If the school can find them. And only a couple weeks before commencement. Oops. (Also here and here.)

"Is this any way to run an education system?" asks a St. Pete Times editorial.

Students in Miami protest.

(Extra credit: Web designers! Scroll around the amazingly uninformative 12th Grade Options site and count how many pages you must click past to find anything remotely useful. Also count how many pictures of pictures of Jim Horne, Florida Commissioner of Education, you must view. )

Hidden City has the definitive blog entry on the largest stinkiest flower in the world now blooming at Fairchild Tropical Garden.

Several sites point to the bottom three 'graphs of a NY Daily News about Cheney's place on the '04 ticket and how this fits with Jeb taking a turn.

Too depressing to contemplate just now.

Satire is hard to write. Too heavy handed, and it's not funny; too subtle, and people don't get the joke. Katie Couric didn't get the joke and read a satirical column on Graham's notebooks to Graham on the air as though they were real quotes from his notebooks.

The piece appeared in the Washington Post and was not marked with a box marked "WARNING: the following is satire."

About the only thing I've seen in print about the passage of a last-minute bill that could restrict everything from Internet downloads to TiVo is
in the St. Pete Times today.

Unconvincing denial of the day:
Rep. Dennis K. Baxley, R-Ocala, one of the bill's co-sponsors, said he never talked to anyone from the Motion Picture Association of America, but he did not say how he came to sponsor language matching its goals.

"It was really viewed just as a good law enforcement bill" on cable piracy, he said. "I don't remember any opposition to the bill, and it certainly wasn't controversial."

The Sun-Sentinel does a good roundup of Big Sugar's latest muscle flexing.

The one point missing is this: large-scale sugar farming in South Florida makes no economic sense in a free market. Big sugar can only survive by a steady flow of favors and interventions from the federal and state governments. It must have aggressive price supports, a degree of protection from foreign competition, specially designed immigration laws that give it a steady flow of foreign workers and protection from prevailing land-use and labor laws.

It can only exist in an artificial environment of political favors. No wonder, then, that it engages in muscular lobbying and political manipulation. It can't exist otherwise.

Grousing about Miami Herald is suspended for awhile because they ran my column this week.

Now here's a pull-no-punches editorial from the Gainesville Sun, (a paper I would have overlooked today were it not for nice folks at Fla. Politics.)

Is Florida's House a House of Sheep?

Is loyalty to the office of the Speaker so blind that the 80 other Republicans who dominate that chamber are incapable of telling Byrd that it's time to stop acting like a tinpot dictator and begin to negotiate with the Senate in good faith?

...What we don't understand is why the rest of the House Republicans don't seem to care about Byrd's indifference? Are they all ideologues who care little about the quality of life in fast-growing Florida? Or are they merely, sheepishly, afraid to buck the authority of the leadership in defense of their own constituents?

# posted by Lane @ 5/06/2003 0 Comments Links to this post