By Martha MusgroveAssociate Editor
In bad sci-fi movies, wild Florida’s giant snakes drop out of trees. Seductive frilly-leaf vines engulf forests in a matter of hours. Orange-striped aquarium fish with billowing spiny fins inflict paralyzing wounds. Until … a talismanic beetle, pop-eyed psyllid or mutating bacterium emerges to save the reckless.
In real life? [...]

By Barbara Petersen
To paraphrase Lawton Chiles, the late governor and U.S. senator, the general premise of the Florida’s open government laws is quite simple: As citizens, we have the right to know when, how, and why our business is being conducted, and there’s little we take more seriously than how government spends our [...]

By Diane Laney Fitzpatrick

Our friends Jackie and David are coming for dinner tonight, and I’m feeling inadequate because I don’t have some wild animal on the menu.
David is a hunting, wild-man outdoorsman from Kentucky who has guns and other weapons in places where the rest of us keep a box of Puffs. My husband [...]

By John Kennedy
Associate Editor
Talk of debt and deficits isn’t just the domain of Washington. Tallahassee has plenty of it, too.
Florida faces a budget shortfall of as much as $3.3 billion as lawmakers begin work on the 2010-11 state-spending plan. An unprecedented pile of debt also will shape how they divvy up that dwindling pool [...]

By Thomas V. DiBacco

The debate on Fox News on March 28 between Marco Rubio and Charlie Crist for the Florida GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate brings to mind that wonderful 1989 movie, When Harry Met Sally, starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan.
Of course, that flick was a romantic comedy and has nothing to do [...]

By Tom ZuccoAssociate Editor
If there were one industry that would seem immune to an economic downtown, you’d think it would be the funeral business.
The perfect intersection of supply and demand.
But there’s trouble in this economic paradise, too. These are challenging times even for something as necessary as the funeral industry, and Florida’s 2,500 licensed funeral [...]

By Lilla Ross
Women have long been in the forefront as fundraisers, organizing bake sales and walkathons for their favorite charities. But with an increase in income, influence and confidence, women have entered the world of philanthropy.
And, they are doing philanthropy in a uniquely feminine style.
Instead of the traditional checkbook philanthropy in which an [...]

By John KennedyAssociate Editor
Disgraced former House Speaker Ray Sansom is gone, having resigned his seat on the eve of a House committee probing the deal he engineered that sent millions of dollars to a Panhandle community college that later gave him a six-figure job.
But will the Sansom case spark widespread ethics changes in a [...]

Meet John H. Marks, our first FloridaThinker.
A few years ago, John Marks and his old friend and former college roommate, Craig Detweiler, came together to talk about an issue that had created a chasm between them: their divergent religious beliefs. Their conversations led to a remarkable documentary film, A Purple State of Mind. [...]

By Diane Laney Fitzpatrick

There’s a writer in San Francisco who recently wrote an excellent column about how Americans are such whiners and we’re never happy and we want, want, want and we expect too much and nothing is ever good enough. We could elect Jesus Christ as president and we’d complain that he wasn’t [...]

By John Koenig
Editor & Publisher
‘You know what Florida’s unemployed should do? They should hire some lobbyists,” I blurted out during a FloridaThinks staff meeting the other day.
My comment was met by silence. But I could hear my colleagues thinking: “Koenig is nuts. Maybe the pressure has finally gotten to him.”
We’d [...]

By Tom ZuccoAssociate Editor
They’re like a couple who dated forever and are finally talking about tying the knot.
Florida has been carrying on a relationship with gambling for more than a century. It began when railroad tycoon Henry Flagler opened a couple of illegal casinos along the state’s east coast in the 1880s, and exploded statewide [...]

By Ron Sachs
There is one surprising new certainty clearly emerging on Florida’s horizon: Casino gambling is coming to our Sunshine State to stay.
The near future will soon welcome casinos into Florida, enthusiastically, because the real benefits will win over taxpayers/voters, public officials and even many former opponents.  The reasoning is simple math: more tourists, higher-paying [...]

By James A. Smith Sr.
As legislators consider gambling expansion to balance Florida’s budget in tough times, they ought to keep in mind a simple mathematical formula: 3-1.
That’s not the odds that lawmakers will approve or vote down gambling expansion. Three-to-one is the ratio of government spending needed to address the social ills created by every [...]

By the Rev. H.K. Matthews

Last fall, I shared a stage inside a crowded Fort Lauderdale chapel with a young man who at one point in his life seemed destined for failure but rose to become valedictorian of his eighth-grade class. His name is Antonio Trigo, a student now at Miami Union Academy. As a child, [...]