Editorials
Overlooking airport details
While employees scrounge to save a few dollars here and there in the St. Petersburg city budget, City Council member John Bryan is ready to peel off $4.2-million of taxpayer money to fix up Albert Whitted Airport for a handful of pilots. That's the St. Petersburg City Council: Penny-wise but pound-foolish.

Republican baloney
Congressional Republicans are promoting tax cuts for corporations and higher-income workers even though those are unlikely ways to effectively stimulate the economy.

Letters
Ours is a world of expanded choices
Re: Teach your children, Oct, 21.

Bill Maxwell
Patriotism may not sit well in land of the free
I have been keeping a ledger of some winners and losers in the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster. Some areas of American life have changed significantly and may remain so for years to come. Other changes may be temporary and deservedly so.

Martin Dyckman
Republicans look pretty bad right now
TALLAHASSEE -- The Democrats controlled the Legislature for more than a century, sometimes well, as when they made education a state responsibility and wrote a new Constitution, and sometimes poorly, as in 1987 when they fumbled the last clear chance for tax reform. (A Republican, it should be noted, was governor then.) But they never looked as bad as the Republicans do now. If you owned a junkyard, you wouldn't trust them to run it.

Robyn E. Blumner
The difficult task of moving the minds of zealotry
I don't remember the grade I was in when I first learned about the Salem witch trials or the Spanish Inquisition. But I do remember at the time thinking how incomprehensible those chapters in human history were.

Philip Gailey
Democrats are honking but can't pass that red pickup
Next year's gubernatorial election is not shaping up as a referendum on the disputed 2000 presidential vote in Florida, as Democrats had hoped. Osama bin Laden has seen to that. Since the Sept. 11 attacks on America, the political dynamics have changed and what already was going to be an uphill battle -- unseating Republican Gov. Jeb Bush -- has suddenly become even tougher. At this early stage, the problem for Democrats is that they appear more committed to nominating Janet Reno than to defeating Jeb Bush.