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Editorials
Failure is an option
With the scheduled end of their session looming, lawmakers are still stalemated over the budget, redistricting maps and other important work.

THAP's sleazy, desperate warning
The discredited social services agency known as THAP will say or do anything to keep its snout in the public till. The latest is a warning by the Tampa-Hillsborough Action Plan that a cutoff of funds to the scandal-plagued agency will hurt the poor and people with HIV. So there you have it -- an agency under state and federal investigation that should be offering accountability and reform is giving the government a guilt trip instead. Officials should ignore it. Community service and sleaziness need not be a package deal.

Letters
Put medical decisions back in doctors' hands
Re: Prognosis for trouble, March 11.  

Columns today
Jan Glidewell
It has been pretty weird in the Pasco bozo zone
If it's not something in the water -- and the folks running everything from chemical plant cleanup sites to county landfills to power plants swear that it isn't -- then maybe environmentalists need to check to see if there is a hole in the bozone layer over West Pasco.

Ernest Hooper
Scandal's long arm, generosity travels far
Jimmy Carter had Billy. Michael Spinks had Leon.

Gary Shelton
FSU basketball fans should expect better
Following a week of intense scrutiny, heavy debate and overtime meetings, the athletic department at FSU has come to the following conclusion regarding a basketball coach:

Elijah Gosier
Too young to run out of options
He should have known better. 

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.