HOLD ON A MINUTE - Why is a Florida state employee being paid to "volunteer" to help "fix" the California budget:
Desperate to pump up his state's sagging budget, California Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger is turning to Florida's budget director to provide much of the muscle.
Donna Arduin was granted a paid leave from her $122,981-a-year job by Gov. Jeb Bush to volunteer and lead an audit of California's beleaguered budget, which faces a shortfall next year that could top $10 billion. "Bush dispatches aide to California".
THE NEXT CRISIS -Florida's 2.9 million uninsured people and double-digit increases in health insurance premiums for the past four years have attracted the attention of the governor and legislature. Those two problems have spawned a cycle that has built each higher and higher -- costing consumers, businesses and taxpayers more and more for health care every year. "State's next insurance crisis: health".
In the meantime, the Jebbites just don't get it:
Appearances do matter, but Gov. Jeb Bush's staff seems to have been blind to them when it scheduled the time and place for the first public meeting of his task force on affordable health insurance. It was inserted into the program of an industry-oriented insurance symposium being held at the Biltmore in Coral Gables, one of Florida's most opulent hotels, for which a $200 admission fee was being charged. Private citizens who weren't insurance executives could get the fee waived, but nobody connected with the symposium, which was sponsored by the Office of Insurance Regulation, went out of the way to tell them and they had to pursue the fine print to figure it out. . . . Concern is spreading in Tallahassee that what the governor's task force and that of House Speaker Johnnie Byrd have in mind is to make health insurance more affordable to employers by making it less valuable to their workers. There's talk again of "flexible benefits," with massive exclusions and minimal coverage, that would create the illusion of insurance without providing any real substance. If that's the game, the Biltmore was as appropriate a venue as any. "Keeping insurance out of reach".
VOUCHERS OUT OF CONTROL -At the Ocala Word of Faith Academy, Florida tax dollars help teach children that people who do not accept Jesus as their savior go to hell.
The beliefs of Hare Krishna also are spread with state tax money, as teenagers who use vouchers to attend the Vaishnava Academy for Girls chant in front of the University of Florida on Friday afternoons.
Tax money even helps buy religious textbooks published by the Bob Jones University Press for use in the Citrus Park Christian School, which accepts corporate tax-credit vouchers. "Increasing vouchers to religious schools stirs debate".
DYCKMAN ON FIRE -House Speaker Johnnie B. Byrd must have struggled to keep a straight face as he objected that an independent commission to draw Florida's voting districts wouldn't be accountable to voters.
Byrd is the reigning P.T. Barnum of Florida politics, but that was a stretch even for him. There is nothing the Legislature does - except, perhaps, when it is whoring for the telephone companies - for which it is less accountable to the voters. "In Florida, we don't choose our Legislators, they choose us".
WHAT'S THE RUSH?The public subsidy to pay salaries for as many as 575 researchers and for laboratory equipment would last eight years, and lawmakers said Friday they want assurances that the company won't leave once state funding ends.
"If they are here three or four years and all of a sudden they get a better deal in Puerto Rico, will they leave?" asked Senate Majority Leader Dennis Jones, R-Treasure Island. "Legislators short on time to learn about biotech plan".
And,
The governor must know that his call for a special session will again raise questions about his fiscal priorities. This will be the second time in two months he will ask lawmakers for an emergency appropriation, and both times he has refused to discuss the emergency budgetary shortfalls in public schools, community colleges and universities. In so doing, he moves prisons and new business to the front of the line, and schools to the back. Where does he think a research institute will find suitable talent if the university system is too impoverished to produce it? "Biomedical opportunity".
Remember,
But when something seems too good to be true, it's wise to step back and make sure it's all it's cracked up to be. This deal requires Florida to put a heap of money up front, including paying the salaries of 31 Scripps employees the first year, for the promise of the payroll growing to 545 employees within seven years and to 2,800 in 15 years. In addition, Palm Beach County would have to invest $100 million to build a 364,000-square-foot plant by 2006. "Bush's bombshell".
Moreover,
Cracks began showing in Gov. Jeb Bush's proposal to spend $500 million of one-time federal funds on wooing new business ventures to Florida as social services advocates and some Democrats complained Friday that new jobs should not come at the expense of health care for children, the poor and the elderly. "Some democrats wary of plans to lure business".