Don Addis Editorial Cartoons E-mail a letter to the editor

May 25, 2000

Editorial
Feeble ethics
The Legislature isn't making it any better for the Florida Commission on Ethics, which may be stuck in pursuing an ethics complaint concerning the House Speaker's just-departed chief of staff.

Letters
Our lawmakers' methods look a lot like blackmail
When is this absurdist method of legislative government going to end? Which would that be? The one that allows completely unrelated provisions to be attached to bills to insure the provisions make it to law. And I'm not just referring to the "Doc" Myers' provision passed by lawmakers in Tallahassee. This is common practice in Washington as well. Our own Florida Legislature is merely a microcosm of our nation's political machine! How long are we as citizens going to stand for this?  

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.