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Editorials
Billboard bullying
Faced with legal threats from the industry, the Pinellas County Commission is preparing to capitulate to billboard blight.

Don't shell out for peanut farmers
While the Bush administration is talking about tightening up welfare for the poor, Congress is busy expanding welfare for rich farmers. The latest windfall proposal in the 2002 Farm Bill would favor peanut farmers with more than $4-billion in redundant subsidy payments. As usual, this bailout by taxpayers would help the large agribusinesses that need it least rather than the family farmers it claims to protect.

Letters
Florida schools' problems begin in Tallahassee
In a recent speech at St. Petersburg College, Gov. Jeb Bush cited the fact that 47 percent of fourth-graders in Florida's public schools read below grade level. He charged that our elementary school teachers were not teaching reading properly. His concerns lead us to the question: What can be done to remedy this situation?  

Columns today
Howard Troxler
Allowing them to meet in secret is akin to tyranny
I am a child of the South but I envy New Hampshire for its state motto: Live Free or Die. You have to admit, that is not a namby-pamby motto.

Sara Fritz
Congress can't keep up with the pace of war, modern life
WASHINGTON -- The world seems to be passing Congress by. So much of what the lawmakers do is simply too little, too late.

Eric Deggans
Through the lens is close enough
If you were one of those millions watching the horror of the World Trade Center collapse unfold on TV six months ago today, it was a question that probably crossed your mind more than once. 

Perspective
Taking jobs, alienating customers
For weeks Americans have been told that the outsourcing of high-tech jobs is good for our economy. So said Greg Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers in a recent report signed by President Bush. So, too, writes Thomas Friedman of the New York Times in articles praising the rise of call centers in India used for everything from making airline reservations and reading medical X-ray films to providing tech support for American computer firms.

Philip Gailey: Democrats fall off campaign finance reform wagon
Well, what do you know. Soft money is back, and it's making hypocrites of all those Democrats who fervently championed the McCain-Feingold campaign reform law, not to mention those Republicans who objected to the law's restrictions on issue advocacy.

Bill Maxwell: Who is for the farm worker?
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is touting legislation to improve the lives of Florida's 300,000-plus farm workers, who endure institutional and systemic injustices each day in our fields and groves and their personal lives.

Robyn E. Blumner: For some defendants, an American gulag
In Bernard Malamud's masterpiece The Fixer, inmate Yakov Bok was subjected to psychological torture in a Soviet gulag through the humiliations of constant shackling and repeated strip searches.