Editorials
An exciting lineup for Times Festival of Reading
Authors' talks, book signings, a book market, book appraisals and open-air stages of music, poetry and drama will be among the offerings at this year's Times Festival of Reading.

Our tax vulnerability
With its dependence on sales tax revenues, Florida is especially likely to suffer when taxes go unpaid on Internet sales. Congress should act to make collecting those taxes easier.

Of monotubes and monocrats
These things are not, as one local radio station has so indelicately insisted, sewer pipes that pump unmentionable things above the ground and over passing cars. Rather, they are, in the words of their state Department of Transportation caretakers, "monotubes." Their job is to hold up traffic signals and road signs against all of nature's odds, and such performance is apparently what requires them to be of considerable girth, as signposts go.

Letters
Hostility of state hurts teaching
Re: Teachers can expect few encouraging words.

Bill Maxwell
A bearded man gets a reaction
In the theater of current popular culture, few things interest me more than media paroxysms and average people's reactions following each sighting of Al Gore. I am not speaking of the wooden Gore of old -- the second fiddler.

Martin Dyckman
Have we forgotten what initiatives are for?
Petitions are being urged upon Florida voters to limit class sizes in public schools, bail out the sagging race tracks by giving them a slot-machine monopoly, provide a smoke-free workplace to everyone who doesn't work in a bar, and decriminalize drug abuse under the rubric of "right to treatment."

Philip Gailey
Democrats are trapped in Social Security 'lockbox'
President Bush recently told reporters the evaporation of the budget surplus is "incredibly positive news" because it will put Congress in a "fiscal straitjacket." There's really no need for a straitjacket. The Democrats are in a restraint of their own making -- their so-called Social Security "lockbox."