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Editorial
Brown for School Board
A comparison of resumes clearly shows which candidate has the experience to tackle the challenges of helping to run Pinellas County's schools.

Editorial
Ballot summary
An amendment to the state Constitution to allow counties to exempt from taxation an increase in the assessed value of homestead property resulting from constructing living quarters for a parent or grandparent of the property owner or the property owner's spouse who is 62 years old or older. Limits the amount of such exemption to the increase in assessed value resulting from such construction or 20 percent of the total assessed value of the property as improved, whichever is less.

Editorial
No on Amendment 7
Amendment 7 comes courtesy of the Florida Legislature and may sound like a noble tax incentive to encourage families to take care of their elderly parents. What it really amounts to is a cheap play to elderly voters, unworthy of the ballot.

Letters
Costs of smoking outweigh any revenue loss
Re: Will ban leave patrons in a huff for a puff?, Oct. 8 and What if everyone quits? and Begging people to smoke, letters, Oct. 10.

Bill Maxwell
Words of advice for a young, black male
SAN ANGELO, Texas -- A few days ago while I was shopping for groceries, a young African-American teenager and his father approached.

 

Columns today
Ernest Hooper
On class control; drill with the King
Roy Rood knows a thing or two about education.

Howard Troxler
Sneering vs. mush; this is a debate?
Gov. Jeb Bush and his Democratic challenger, Bill McBride, had an hourlong debate Tuesday morning on statewide radio. Bush was better than McBride but too snotty. He can't help it. McBride was woolly and ineffective. Apparently he can't help that either.

Robert Trigaux
WCI squirms as condo buyers find wiggle room
There's trouble amid some of the snazziest luxury condo towers in southwest Florida.

Bill Maxwell
Words of advice for a young, black male
SAN ANGELO, Texas -- A few days ago while I was shopping for groceries, a young African-American teenager and his father approached.

Gary Shelton
Home is where the challenge is
Simple game, baseball.

 

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.