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Bill Maxwell
Hands off the Preservation 2000 funds
Mercifully, our GOP-led Legislature has left Tallahassee. Although I realize that name-calling is a terrible logical fallacy, I must say that Florida's state senators and representatives act like a bunch of uncaring hacks.

Editorial
All this artifice
The budget finally approved in Tallahassee reverses the damage done by earlier cuts, but it engages in accounting tricks to justify a corporate tax cut.

Editorial
Racketeer law goes too far
In 1970, when Congress passed the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO, the law's loose standards of culpability and triple fine provisions were aimed at the Mafia. Since then, the law has been used -- or abused -- to go after banks, investment firms and even political protesters.

Editorial
Harder on welfare recipients
Congressional Republicans have taken George Bush's plan to extend welfare-reform and made it marginally better. The major welfare-reform reauthorization bill, which the House is expected to vote on today, does offer a bit more cushion for welfare recipients, and flexibility for the states, than Bush had proposed. But it still contains the same basic flaw of the administration's plan: It raises the bar for mothers and the states without providing the resources they need to reach it.

Letters
Power of greed suppresses ethics and morality
Re: Stanley to schedule new vote on move, May 11.

 

Columns today
Howard Troxler
Powerboat racers rev an idle threat to civic pride
The American Powerboat Association Offshore is going about things all wrong, if it hopes to buffalo the city of St. Petersburg into paying it more of the taxpayers' money to keep holding its national championship here.

Robert Trigaux
'Masters of the universe' master hubris
With such bad karma on Wall Street these days, brokerage firms are fourth and long on their own goal line in the driving rain. They know they're going to get really dirty before this game of Pin The Blame is over.

Bill Maxwell
Hands off the Preservation 2000 funds
Mercifully, our GOP-led Legislature has left Tallahassee. Although I realize that name-calling is a terrible logical fallacy, I must say that Florida's state senators and representatives act like a bunch of uncaring hacks.

Gary Shelton
Canseco's exit is far too quiet
He would stand at the plate, a hero out of mythology, and you could not look elsewhere.

 

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.