TALLAHASSEE - This is no time for Floridians to feel too smug about California's nutty politics. For all we know, Arnold Schwarzenegger could be on our next ballot.
Why not? By dispensing yet again with the runoff, the Legislature hung a "Y'all come" sign on both senatorial primaries. No one needs a majority any longer. Whoever gets the most votes, however few they might be, wins the nomination.
The Democrats stand, at the moment, to lose the least by this, as their free-for-all is more likely to nominate a moderate like Betty Castor. Everyone in the Republican race is either obscure or listing so far to the right as to sink the boat. With five profound conservatives splitting that bloc, a well-known moderate - if one could be found - just might walk off with the nomination.
So Schwarzenegger ought to keep that option in mind if Californians decide the devil they know is better than the one they don't. He'd save a bundle on his income taxes, too, and he would hardly be the only carpetbagger in the race.
I don't really expect that to happen. But I do expect the Republicans to regret the no-runoff decision. Especially if Bob Graham comes home to seek re-election in the Senate.
It's not just Democrats, however, who are waiting breathlessly for Graham's decision. Attorney General Charlie Crist said Friday there may be some unannounced Republicans who would run should Graham make clear that he won't. Would Crist be one? "I don't think so," he said.
Speaking of well-known Republican moderates, the present GOP field would be an ideal target of opportunity for Gen. Bob Milligan, Florida's recently retired comptroller. He has an invaluable asset in the gung-ho Marine network that helped him win with little money in 1994, but Milligan has passed the word that he has "zero interest." Pity.
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The next time you get one of those "urgent" e-mails asking you to put up some money to help someone get their money out of Nigeria or wherever, don't delete it. Forward it to the Florida Board of Administration, which seems to be eager for what it calls "alternative" ways to invest Florida's pension funds.
If it does lose the $182-million it has gambled spectacularly on Edison Schools Inc., the privatizer that teachers love to hate, don't blame Coleman Stipanovich. He's just the hired hand. His bosses are Gov. Jeb Bush, Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher and Attorney General Charlie Crist. Though Stipanovich says they knew nothing of it, it's a safe bet he wouldn't have done it if he didn't think Bush would enjoy seeing the teachers' own retirement funds stuck in their eyes like that.
Sure enough, Bush approved. In doublespeak: "I don't think that we should make investment decisions based on politics," the governor said. Of course not. But what about the fiduciary risk?
The big surprise is that Gallagher took a pass on it too. (Crist reserved judgment.) The issue is not whether the trustees should check off on specific investments - of course not - but whether they ought to have guidelines against unnecessary and provocative risks. Obviously, they don't.
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If I correctly read U.S. District Judge Edward W. Nottingham's decision in the telemarketing case, he's saying citizens have an absolute right to block unwanted telephone calls, and even to have the government's help in doing it. But the Federal Trade Commission's do-not-call list is out of bounds because it doesn't help us enough. It lets us block only commercial calls, not those from charities. Therefore it is improperly "entangling the government in deciding what speech consumers should hear."
I wish the do-not-call list let us block everything, especially those unprincipled "charities" that lease their names to professional telemarketers for a token slice of the haul. But I do not see the government as entangling itself in our decisions as to what to hear, so long as we can still hang up on the ones that the list does not block.
One way out for the FTC: Give the public a choice whether to block just some calls, or all.
There was another important angle to Nottingham's decision that was largely if not totally overlooked by the press. He upheld a part of the rule that cracks down specifically on "predictive dialers." These are the calls you answer only to find nobody on the line because it's either a burglar checking whether you're home or a telemarketer's computer that is dialing them faster than people could. If the human telemarketer is still busy with another spiel, the machine hangs up. This is called an "abandoned call," and the FTC rule purports to essentially prohibit them.
There is, alas, a loophole. If the human telemarketer is too busy to talk to the person whose dinner the machine has interrupted, a recorded message can be played to defeat the rule. Nothing is more annoying, and there is no stopping it unless a higher court reinstates the basic rule or the FTC rewrites it. Fifty-million Americans are waiting.
