St. Petersburg Times Online: Opinion

Thanks for making 10 years at USF St. Petersburg a growing success
Ten years ago, I was selected by the faculty and staff of the then St. Petersburg campus of the University of South Florida to serve as its dean and CEO. For me, it was a wonderful opportunity to develop a campus with so much promise into a distinctive institution.

Editorial
For a better school board
In Pinellas County

Letters
Remember how women struggled to win the vote
In 1920, after a 72-year struggle, women in the United States won the right to vote. As noted by Carrie Chapman Catt, founder of the League of Women Voters, "Young suffragists who helped forge the last links of that chain were not born when it began; old suffragists who helped forge the first links were dead when it ended."

Columns today
Ernest Hooper
Basketball bobbles, the Hub's last blast, a trying conversation
Shaquille O'Neal once starred as a genie in the movie Kazaam. Maybe that's why Darryl Madison continues to think that if O'Neal had shown up for last weekend's celebrity basketball fiasco, everything would have magically turned out right.

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.