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The rich get richer

SP Times:

The federal government has sent millions of dollars in aid to areas largely unaffected by disasters, even after local officials warned of possible fraud, a newspaper reported Sunday.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has sent $29.2-million to people in Miami-Dade County for Hurricane Frances, the Labor Day storm that struck 100 miles to the north.

That's not an anomaly, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported.

"It's just the same nationwide," said Paulette Williams, emergency management director in Mobile County, Alabama.

FEMA gave people in Mobile County $29.5-million for flooding last year, despite repeated calls and letters from Williams saying that the county sustained no damage.

In southeastern North Carolina, FEMA has approved thousands of Frances claims in counties where the storm caused only minor problems.

"We didn't have any damage," said Mitchell Byrd, emergency management director in Bladen County, where people have collected $2.5-million. "We've got the biggest case of fraud you've ever seen."

In Michigan, more than 30,000 people in Wayne County collected $33.9-million for storms in May and June.

"That's just staggering," said Mark Hammond, Wayne County's deputy director for homeland security and emergency management. "I could see 2,000 homes, but not 30,000."

A City Council member in Detroit barely remembered the storm. "I know it happened, but I don't remember that it particularly affected Detroit," said City Council President Maryann Mahaffey.

Herald.com:

In the gallery-rich downtown of affluent Stuart, the lunch crowds are back, the stores are stocked and any signs that Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne roared through last summer are almost impossible to spot.

But 24 miles southwest of Stuart, in the hard-pressed agricultural community of Indiantown, the storms continue to pummel the economy months later.

On a drive into town, the first sight is of a field full of FEMA trailers, where 70 families still live. They're among the thousands living in temporary housing across Florida because they have no options.

In the contrast between Stuart and Indiantown lies a simple and troubling truth about hurricanes: They do their worst to the people who have the least. Working-class and poor people, experts say, suffer losses from which they may never fully recover.

''These are the people most desperate for our help -- those in lower-income brackets, many already living check-to-check to begin with, and then an extraordinary experience like a disaster comes along,'' said Brad Gair, who oversees FEMA's temporary housing in Florida. ``It can be a huge setback for them and have devastating effects on their households.''

`JACUZZI EFFECT'

The more affluent and those who are outright wealthy may actually end up more prosperous once rebuilding is finished. That's because repair work often involves upgrading their property, what some economists have labeled the ``Jacuzzi effect.''

Furthermore, they typically have private insurance and don't have to wait for government programs.

''There's plenty of money here,'' said Bob Alexander, proprietor of Alexander's Now and Then gift shop in Stuart. ``People who have money will put the cash out and reimburse themselves when insurance comes in.''

In essence, economists say, the affluent lose their deductibles, but the poor lose everything. Aid is often aimed at homeowners, not renters.

SP Times:

Florida legislators on Thursday approved a $450-million package of hurricane relief, ranging from tax breaks for some homeowners and aid for people facing multiple insurance deductibles.

Gov. Jeb Bush declared the four-day special session "a job well done" and said he planned to sign every bill the Legislature passed.

"There are a lot of people in our state that are hurting, and they were counting on the help of of their elected officials, and they delivered," Bush said during the session's closing ceremony.

Senate President Tom Lee, R-Brandon, said homeowners and mobile home owners will receive recovery checks along with public schools and agriculture.

GOP welcomes state sponsored religion

As lawmakers shape and debate Florida’s new pre-K plan, some disturbing trends have emerged. One of the most troublesome points in the legislation is the reliance on religious schools to take up the slack and provide classroom space to many of the 100,000 or more 4 year olds who are expected to be enrolled in the program.

In a fit of circular logic, lawmakers innocently say that without religious schools there will not be enough space for all those kids, conveniently ignoring the fact that Florida’s schools are notoriously underfunded and that the Legislature could have easily provided money to public school systems to help construct new classrooms. First the legislature makes it impossible for public schools to handle the influx, then they wring their hands and say that since there’s no room, we must turn to organized religion.

One problem with all this is the Florida constitution, which explicitly prohibits the state from funding religious institutions. In fact, some legislators have been very open in their knowledge that the pre-K bill is unconstitutional but have forged ahead anyway, even including language in the bill which explicitly allows for discrimination based on religious beliefs.

So, why would the GOP craft legislation that is sure to face a losing court challenge, setting the state up for an expensive legal battle that the vast majority of observers agree will result in a judge declaring that, yes, a law that sends money directly to churches does indeed violate Florida’s crystal clear constitutional language against such stipends?

Well, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the real agenda is nothing less than the wholesale destruction of Florida’s public school system, with state-subsidized religious instruction to fill the breach.

Yesterday, Sen. Daniel Webster, a former House speaker and now the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, announced his intention to put an amendment on the ballot in 2006 that would overturn the constitutional ban against state sponsored religion. This would open the door for more legislation like the discredited voucher program, which also funds religious schools, and the pre-K program now under consideration.

Critics immediately pounced on Webster for supporting unconstitutional voucher laws - the state now has three voucher programs on the books and is in the process of instituting a pre-kindergarten plan that will also send state money to religious schools - and then trying to undo the very constitution he took an oath to defend as a legislator.

"So if the constitution stands in the way of their radical agenda, don't change the radical agenda - change the constitution," said Howard Simon, head of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.

Webster should include in his ballot initiative language to abolish the public school system, Simon said, "because that's what its real effect would be. Maybe a little bit of honesty is what's needed."

Of course, for Republicans, an oath only counts when its convenient, so I’m sure that Webster has no problem with breaking the vow that he made to all citizens of Florida. The Miami Herald has more.

For nearly 120 years, one sentence in Florida's Constitution has forbidden the state to use public money to ''directly or indirectly'' help religious institutions -- a provision that is bedeviling the state's school voucher law and a $350 million prekindergarten program lawmakers are crafting this week.

Rather than leave the matter in the hands of judges, an influential state senator said Wednesday that he's ''seriously considering'' an effort to pluck the offending sentence from the Constitution itself and allow money to flow to religious schools.

Sen. Daniel Webster, one of the Legislature's most respected conservatives and head of the Senate's judiciary committee, said he may try as early as this spring to get the Legislature to put the amendment change on the ballot in 2006 -- when the governor's office will be up for grabs and Republicans typically head to the polls in larger numbers than Democrats.

If approved by voters, the repeal would free lawmakers from the constraints that prevent them from using taxpayer money on religious schools -- an issue that legal scholars say could derail the statewide prekindergarten program that lawmakers are expected to pass today. The program relies on private and religious schools to offer the pre-K program by next fall because the state doesn't have enough teachers and classrooms to meet the need.

In the House and the Senate, Republicans have the three-fifths of the vote needed to get the repeal measure before voters. Such numbers allow them to routinely steam roll Democrats, as happened Wednesday when House Republicans kept a provision in the pre-K bill allowing for religious discrimination.

The voucher law was recently declared unconstitutional, and appeals are pending, but most observers say that it is blatantly unconstitutional, so the ruling should stand. In response, GOP types are using scare tactics, claiming that a strict ban against religious subsidies will result in chaos. (Back to the Herald article)

Webster, a recent Republican U.S. Senate candidate from Winter Garden who was once House Speaker, isn't sure he's ready to wait for a court ruling. He said he started talking about an amendment campaign with religious organizations and even hospitals days after the appeal court ruling on vouchers.

''It's pretty strong language. It's not ambiguous, other than [defining] what's indirect,'' Webster said of the Constitution. He added that he believes the appeal court ruling on vouchers jeopardizes ``a vast number of programs . . . everything from Baptist hospitals that receive Medicaid and religiously founded colleges that receive [state-funded] Bright Futures scholarships.''

VOUCHER OPPOSITION

Ron Meyer, the lawyer leading the lawsuit against the voucher program on behalf of Democratic-leaning groups, said Webster and Bush are issuing a misleading ''parade of horribles'' that misrepresent the extent of the court's ruling.

''This doesn't mean that a fire department can't put out a fire at a church because that constitutes indirect aid to a religious organization. This is designed to prevent using public tax money for the inculcation of religious values in a school,'' Meyer said. ''There's a huge difference from a hospital performing life-saving surgery for the public good, and teaching the values of Christ and the Bible to young minds,'' Meyer said.

He added there's a ''great parallel'' between the proposed pre-K program and the 1999 voucher law, which gives children in failing public schools tax money for private education.

Meyer is also quoted in the Palm Beach Post article excerpted above, and we’ll give him the last word.

Ron Meyer, the lawyer who has so far successfully pushed the voucher lawsuit through trial and appellate courts, said he was not surprised by the effort and that he always assumed that religious conservatives would eventually try to change the constitution.

"It's disappointing," he said. "Florida has long abided by the separation of church and state. I really question whether the people of Florida will want to remove their constitutional protection from using their money, involuntarily, to support religious institutions."

Meyer cautioned potential supporters, though, that opening state money to religion meant opening it to all religions, including fringe groups.

"The religious right needs to be careful what they wish for," he said.

Bibles in every classroom!

Since gaining office, Jeb! has proudly cut billions of dollars of tax revenues from the state budget, benefitting mostly wealthy individuals and businesses.

Now, when it comes time to deal with pre-K education and kids health care, the state cries poverty and wrings its hands as children struggle to survive without medicine, but the state has an answer: pray!

In fact, the state plans to pay for children’s religious education. We’re not just talking about some symbolic display of religious tracts, either. The wise men of Florida’s GOP have decreed that the Bible makes for a fine textbook, and if you don’t like it, well, perhaps you ought to convert to Christianity or move to France, you godless heathen.

''I don't see anything in this bill, the way it's worded right now, that you could not use the Bible as everyday methodology,'' (Sen. Jim) King (Jacksonville Republican) said. ``Now having said that, I'm not so sure that that will stand the test of constitutionality.''

Despite naysayers like King, worried about trivial details like the constitution, Republicans are forging ahead with the 2005 Religious Institutions Proselytizing and Welfare Act.

Under Florida's proposed pre-kindergarten program, a Baptist school taking state money could give admissions preference to Baptist children. A Jewish school could refuse to let in non-Jews.

The voluntary pre-kindergarten proposal lacks any prohibition against religious discrimination - and lawmakers want it that way.

Senate President Tom Lee said it was important to some religious schools to give their own congregants priority.

"I think it's impossible to ask participation for sectarian providers and not respect that they're going to give some preference to their parishioners," Lee said.

The bill as it currently stands cites language from the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act banning discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin. But it is silent on - and therefore permits - discrimination based on other factors, such as religion and intelligence.

"I personally would be horrified if people excluded people based on religion," said David Lawrence, a leading advocate of early childhood education and a member of Gov. Jeb Bush's task force that studied the issue.

Oh, wait: Jeb!’s spokesman says that he would be horrified if churches actually follow the law as the GOP is crafting it. I guess everything will be okay, then.

The bottom line is that Republican leaders have had years to prepare for pre-K and its associated costs. We would not need religious institutions to swoop down and save us if Jeb! had acted responsibly and seen to it that this program would be properly funded. If local school districts had been given a mandate and money to make room, public schools could handle the job of education, and they could do it without Bibles.

Florida 4 year olds to get religion

Florida’s Organized Religion Welfare Act of 2005 pre-K legislation is progressing as planned, with GOP leaders belittling or simply ignoring pleas for quality. Calls for safeguards against state-sponsored proselytizing and recruitment are likewise falling on deaf ears.

When voters passed the mandate for pre-K education in 2002, they wisely demanded a quality program. Unfortunately, it was left to the Legislature to define “quality,” and the working definition includes religious instruction paid for by the state.

In fact, the wording of the legislation as it currently stands is so troubling that Senate President Tom Lee was moved to speak out against the idea of religious schools using state funds to teach religion. Fortunately for Jeb!, though, Lee quickly realized that honest opinions and thoughtful solutions would help no one, and he is now back on board with his fellow theocrats.

Senate President Tom Lee said Monday that religious schools that participate in Florida's new pre-kindergarten program should not be teaching religious doctrine using state money - only to back away from the position hours later.

Lee's original position - the first time in years a top Republican has come down on state-backed religious instruction that way - angered representatives of the hundreds of religious schools and day-care centers the state is counting on to implement the program that voters mandated in 2002.

The bill, as drafted, does not spell out any restrictions on what would be taught during the hours paid for by the state. Lee said Monday afternoon that he thought language to that effect would be appropriate.

"I think that's an issue, if we start paying for this kind of thing in this program," he said.

Later Monday, he said discussions with Senate staffers and top advisers had persuaded him that such a restriction would be difficult to draft and would be tantamount to waving a red flag to the Supreme Court on the issue of whether funding religious institutions is constitutional.

Lee said he still believes schools should not teach religion with public money, but he added: "I don't see how we get to that policy position as a Senate. I guess we're left to a Supreme Court interpretation as to just what constitutes religious education in this voluntary program."

Advocates for religious schools said it is preposterous to think they would take God out of their curriculum just to cash in on state pre-K dollars. They said they would refuse to offer the voluntary pre-K program if that were a condition.

Two-thirds of all private schools are religious, but about three-quarters of schools taking state-backed vouchers are religious.

"My kind of religious organizations wouldn't even give this program a second thought and it would be a failure," said Howard Burke, director of the Florida Association of Christian Colleges and Schools. "If you enroll in a faith-based program, you would be a fool to think that the curriculum would not be Christ-centered."

Well, if pre-K providers are gonna cop an attitude like that, perhaps it’s a good thing that the school day will be limited to 3 hours and that the state funded theologians wont be very well trained - perhaps it will give parents a fighting chance to undo the indoctrination that their kids will have forced down their throats.

The GOP spin is that “faith based” providers are needed because public schools couldn’t possibly handle the expected enrollment.

School district officials statewide say public classrooms couldn't handle at least 90,000 additional 4-year-olds expected to enroll for state- funded prekindergarten starting in August.

That's where private and particularly faith-based providers come in. Using them allows lawmakers to have the program up and running by August 2005 without spending millions constructing new buildings and finding providers.

The question is whether the state cooperating with churches and other religious groups to provide services will pose a legal quandary. Already, courts have ruled a state program allowing some students to attend religious schools on taxpayer dollars violates the state constitution.

Florida leaders are moving ahead.

``We have to rely on the full array of providers out there,'' said Education Commissioner John Winn.

Senate President Tom Lee, R-Brandon, said trying to go around private providers would have meant a ``holy war.''

``People have already built an industry around this kind of program,'' he said.

Larry Keough, education associate at the Florida Catholic Conference, bottom-lined it: ``The state needs faith-based more than the faith-based needs the state.''

Well, Florida’s public schools are notoriously underfunded, and thus might find it difficult to meet demand, but the state could have allocated money for expansion in 2003 or 2004. In fact, the GOP has written language into the bill to ensure that public schools will not be providing stiff competition even if local school boards are so inclined.

To ensure public school districts in urban counties don't create their own large, pre-K programs that would make it hard for private institutions to compete, the legislation says any school district not meeting the class caps ''in each classroom'' is not eligible for state pre-K money. South Florida school districts have met class-size reductions but have complied by lowering the average class size over the entire county rather than in each class.

Sen. Lisa Carlton, an Osprey Republican and prime architect of the bill, said school districts unable to reduce class sizes now shouldn't be offering pre-K.

BILL'S PROVISIONS

The tilt in favor of private schools in the bill, however, goes beyond just the class cap. The bill would allow:

- The use of religion in pre-K education. There are few limits on what kind of curriculum should be offered, other than it should have some focus on early literacy.

- Providers to deny admission to any 4-year-old based on religion. Unlike Bush's initial voucher program passed in 1999, this legislation does not include a requirement that admission be ``religion-neutral.''

- An 18-1 student-to-teacher ratio. Opposed by Bush, this staffing ratio falls more closely into line with varying accrediting standards some private providers use.

- A three-hour average day of instruction in the year-round program, mirroring what many private schools now offer. Public schools offer six hours.

- Private schools to avoid a requirement that all the program's schools have teachers with higher-education degrees by 2010. The degree requirement is now considered an ``aspirational goal.''

- The state's Labor Department, not the Department of Education, to have day-to-day control over the pre-K program.

Churches get a windfall, pedophile priests get a whole new crop of potential victims, the state gets to spend half as much as a true quality program should cost, and parents get 3 hours of free babysitting each day. Everyone’s a winner!

Churches to prey on pre-K kids

Herald.com

The voter-mandated pre-K program, the centerpiece of this week's special lawmaking session, likely won't meet the number of instruction hours or qualified teachers called for by early-childhood development advocates. The proposal, expected to pass with few changes, doesn't bar religious discrimination, either.
......

But early-childhood development advocates, and Democratic lawmakers, complain the legislation is not what voters intended. ''It's less than quality. And it's certainly less than high quality,'' said Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, who has criticized the state's voucher programs because officials have had trouble tracking the flow of money.

Private schools say quality is in the eye of the ultimate beholder: The parents. If they don't like a school, they will place their child elsewhere.

Faith-based providers say such choice -- which includes religious preference -- is crucial. They howled last spring when the Senate wanted to bar religious instruction in pre-K. That provision is now history, said Larry Keough, legislative advocate for Florida Catholic schools, which favors more restrictions than other religious providers.

''That's one of the things we said was essential for us,'' Keough said.

Ellen McKinley, founder of the faith-based Child Development Education Alliance, said she thought the bill was a done deal. She said she liked it because it ''leveled the playing field'' for public and private providers and the three-hour instruction limit was preferable to four hours.

With a state subsidy for four hours, she said, it would be easier for public schools to tap local tax money and produce a six-hour program. That would make it almost impossible for private providers to compete with districts such as Miami-Dade and Broward that already offer pre-K to thousands of kids.

McKinley said she was opposed to requiring advanced degrees for full-time instructors in six years.

''We're going to ask experienced teachers to take time away from their families, and I don't know if that's a good idea,'' she said.

Stupid liberals, trying to obscure the issue with talk of quality and numbers of hours and teacher competence. Obviously, if we spend money on all that stuff, there will hardly be anything left for churches to proselytize and convert with, much less turn a profit. Thank God the GOP is in charge, else Florida’s 4 year olds might remain ignorant of the benefits of a religious education.

GOP planning Rape of the Gulf

Two years ago, we paid some big oil companies lots of money as part of a widely touted agreement to keep oil and gas drilling far far away from Florida’s coasts.

Well, now that both Jeb! and his brother have retaken their respective offices, it seems that ANWR may not be the only target for exploitation and rape.

Citing growing demand and rising prices, the chairman of the Senate energy committee has asked the Bush administration to consider opening protected coastal areas to natural gas drilling, including the eastern Gulf of Mexico near Florida.

In a letter dated Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, along with two fellow committee members, told Interior Secretary Gale Norton that natural gas supply is not keeping pace with demand, and said the nation must find more. They also blame the high cost of natural gas for the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs overseas.

"While we recognize that many areas of the (outer continental shelf) are under administrative withdrawal and/or Congressional moratoria, we are writing to request that the Department of Interior solicit comments from all interested parties on the appropriateness of leasing in both moratoria and non-moratoria areas," said the letter by Domenici and Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.

A large swatch of the eastern gulf, known as Area 181, has been off-limits to exploration since 2002, when a federal-state deal paid Chevron and two other lease-holders $115-million not to drill.

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., an opponent of offshore drilling off Florida, learned about the letter last week, and on Friday night he sent Norton a letter. In it, he reminds her of the bipartisan support for the moratorium and notes that a new national task force report on boosting U.S. gas production does not suggest drilling in banned areas.

"A quick, knee-jerk response to volatile energy markets may not serve our country's long-term objectives: decreasing foreign imports and increasing alternative energy sources," Nelson wrote.

Nelson was traveling Saturday and could not be reached for comment, but he will fight any attempt to lift the ban, aides said. Calls to Domenici's office and the Department of Interior were not returned Saturday.

"It certainly indicates that there is a serious attempt to undo the moratorium," said Dan McLaughlin, Nelson's deputy chief of staff. "Although this particular request is for gas leases only, once you allow drilling to take place near the coast of Florida, there will be no stopping the oil companies."

Bill Nelson

Contact Information for Mel Martinez? (Can't find anything current right now.)

Felonious Junk: Jeb! makes token changes

Jeb! and his buddies on the Florida Clemency Board made some cosmetic changes to the state's backward, racist felon disenfranchisement rules yesterday, and the changes should help some select people who have served their time to rejoin the ranks of voters, but the rule changes are minor, and Florida remains one of only 7 states that punishes people twice by denying their civil rights after they have paid for their crimes.

Bottom line: 500,000 ex-felons in Florida still can't vote. 500,000 people cannot get a state license or fully rejoin society, and that's just the way that Jeb! likes it.

Florida is one of a handful of states that do not automatically restore most civil rights when felons have served their time. The system has come under increasing criticism, especially during the presidential election, when civil rights advocates raised concerns about voters being disenfranchised in a key battleground state.

Many felons must seek a hearing before the clemency board to regain their civil rights. More than 4,000 people are waiting for a hearing. They could be stuck in bureaucratic limbo for years because the clemency board, a four-person body led by Bush, meets only four times annually and hears about 200 cases.

Civil rights groups argue that the process makes it difficult for ex-convicts to reintegrate into society. Aside from voting, they can't serve on juries or hold office. There is an economic factor, too - many cannot get professional licenses. They also cannot own firearms.

The changes approved Thursday, effective immediately, narrow the list of crimes for which felons must seek a formal hearing before the clemency board to regain their civil rights. It also waives hearings for people who go several years without committing a new crime.

Actually, according to the new rules, they must stay arrest free, not crime free, which means that being falsely accused and arrested is enough to disqualify.

And despite Jeb!'s rosy rhetoric, his rule changes do not go anywhere near far enough, especially when one considers that Jeb! himself enacted many of the (still remaining) more restrictive policies that have led to over half a million people being unfairly denied their basic civil liberties.

There are two ways felons can get rights restored in Florida. When they're released from state custody, their names are automatically forwarded to the Clemency Board for consideration. If they aren't disqualified by any of the many restrictive clemency rules, felons generally get their rights back within a year. But a majority are disqualified by the rules, which means they must appeal for a formal hearing before the board, which can take years. The backlog of people waiting for that chance has quadrupled since Bush became governor, a Herald analysis found.

LOOSER RULES

On Thursday, the board loosened restrictions so that more people can regain rights without a hearing.

Among other things, the board decided to:

- Scrap several rules that block felons from regaining rights in the first place. One rule banned felons who had their rights restored once in the past decade and then commited a new crime. Another blocked felons who have been deemed ''habitual offenders'' by the state.

- Allow felons still disqualified by the rules to get their rights back quickly. The board decided that unqualified felons who have been crime-free for at least five years are eligible to regain rights without a hearing. That could potentially affect about 100,000 people.

Excluded are the most violent felons, like murderers and sexual offenders, who still must appeal directly to the board.

- Allow all felons -- regardless of their crimes -- to apply to get their rights back without a hearing if they have been arrest-free for 15 years. This single change could affect an estimated 200,000 people whose last conviction is 15 years old or more, assuming they haven't been arrested.

That will help reduce the number of people waiting to appeal directly to the board, which now stands at 4,000. At the current pace, clearing those cases could take decades.

''Given the fact that we only hear about 200 a year, that's a long time,'' Bush said.

''I believe we can do more to make civil rights restoration without a hearing available to more people,'' he said.
......

Civil rights advocates, who have pushed to scrap Florida's 136-year-old voting ban altogether, said the changes are encouraging, but they don't go far enough.

For one thing, the board left largely untouched the more than 200 crimes that block felons from regaining their rights without a hearing. Under Bush, the board quadrupled the number of crimes that require felons to appear before the board -- and most of those crimes are still intact.

The changes also require felons to remain arrest-free before they can regain rights, which means even people whose charges are later dropped would still be kicked out of the quicker process.

''We're glad that the governor and the Cabinet have begun to move toward meaningful reform,'' said Courtenay Strickland, voting rights project director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. ``But so much more needs to be done in order to bring Florida into line with the rest of the nation.''

More on Florida's felon disenfranchisement program.

Troxler does some blogging

The SP TImes’ Howard Troxler takes on the arrogant attitude shared by many GOP leaders that the people of Florida really don’t know what the fuck we are doing. Today’s column is written like a blog, complete with quotes form his own newspaper, as he skewers the various proposals to repeal existing citizen initiatives and to weaken the citizen initiative process itself.

Last, but not least, there's the odious industry of hog farming.

I know, I know, the "pregnant pig" amendment is held up as the all-time poster child for frivolous petitions. But is it really all that crazy to use the Florida Constitution to keep a devastating industry out of our state? If you want to see the alternative, go visit eastern North Carolina.

You say these things should be laws, not amendments? Great, sure, fine - then give the citizens the power to petition for laws, to bypass a Legislature that listens only to the industries that give it money.

Smaller class sizes. Alternatives to paving more roads. Less pollution, clean indoor air, strong universities, healthy marine fisheries - why, the nerve of these ignorant Florida voters!