Some things are not getting talked about as much as they should, what with the war and all.
Did you see that Gov. Jeb Bush's people are trying to delay by 20 years - 20 years! - the pollution-reduction goals for our Everglades? What is that, a joke? Even some of our state's Republican members of Congress are writing letters of complaint. (The wimps.)
Did you see that 500-million gallons of acidic wastewater will be dumped in the Gulf of Mexico? The feds can't figure out what else to do. The water is from an abandoned phosphate mine in Manatee County. Too bad the EPA can't find the guys who abandoned the mine and make them drink it.
The state Legislature is doing bizarrely entertaining things, like trying to cut the right of neighbors to sue for dry-cleaning chemicals dumped into the earth. Publix, owner of strip centers, is a big backer of that one.
Meanwhile, residents of older, high-rise condos don't want to have to install sprinklers by 2014 (too tight a deadline, I guess). That bill has passed so far, over the pleas of fire marshals. Is this a matter of private property rights - or of a few citizens asserting the "right" to expose firefighters to greater danger?
The future of education in Florida is being decided. Voters last November decided that they wanted smaller class sizes. One answer being considered in Tallahassee is simply to pay more parents to take their kids out of public schools - vouchers for everybody. Another is to reduce high school graduation standards. As for higher education, the other day Florida's university presidents issued an unusually strong warning: Our national reputation (such that it is) is sliding.
By the way, for the short-term goal of making the next year's state budget work, the governor and state House would destroy some of the trust funds in the state budget that have been dedicated for years to good-guy stuff like buying conservation lands and providing housing. They say, look, times are tough.
On the national front, the U.S. Senate and the White House have been duking it out over the president's tax cuts. Even the Republican-controlled Senate is worried about slashing taxes more when there's a huge deficit looming and the economy is so shaky. The Senate also blocked oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, at least for another year, although Dick Cheney might try to sneak up there with a shovel anyway.
Here's a nominee for Most Disturbing News About America's Future: The poorest 25 percent of Americans make up only 3 percent of the students in our 146 most selective colleges, a report shows. If you think that's because poor people are just plain dumber than rich people, go look up "Social Darwinism."
There was one news story that has managed to compete with the war, or at least to sneak into the national news: SARS. Of course, there are ailments several thousand times more deadly, in terms of fatalities and communicability, but they are not nearly as sexy. You know one of the healthiest things we could do for America? Kill the sugar subsidy and quit growing as much corn for syrup. Fat (!) chance of either.
An original copy of the Bill of Rights was found, after all these years. We could use one.
What about in our own neck of the woods? The St. Petersburg City Council managed to give itself a pension, with not nearly as much fanfare nor public opposition as when it first tried in peacetime. In Tampa, Gwen Miller, by the way, became the first African-American woman to win a citywide election (a City Council seat). But as a further sign of how far we've come, nobody thought to make a big deal of it.
As for having to boil water the other day, did Tampa Bay Water sort of figure, heck, let's not replace the water pipes until they just blow up? Do we need to know anything else about the treatment of greyhounds at Derby Lane, or is it enough to say, whew, the races are starting again, let's move on?
To wrap things up, scientists announced that they now think some of the dinosaurs might have been cannibals. They also discovered that Jupiter has five more moons than we thought it had, and we already thought it had a bunch. More moons around Jupiter! And we, mind-numbed by the crawls across our cable-TV screens - we missed it!
[Last modified April 9, 2003, 02:03:05]
Times columns today
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
