Tagged: Session 2013

Do you have what it takes to navigate the political swampland of Florida and come out clean?

WLRN and the Miami Herald have partnered to create a  new interactive experience that will allow you to put your political integrity to the test.  After a cutthroat election, you have officially begun your career as a Florida politician.

Now it is up to you to make the right political and personal choices.

CLICK HERE TO PLAY THE 'TALLANASTY' ETHICS GAME

Some two dozen states ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Florida isn’t one of them.

According to News Service of Florida, however, a bill filed in the House Thursday hopes to change that:

A familiar yellow school bus slows to pick up a group of giddy children at the corner. Florida drivers, perhaps caught in the morning rush to work, know they’re supposed to stop. After all, the bus’s retractable red stop sign and flashing lights serve as glaring reminders. But are motorists actually following the law?

The job of lobbyists is to improve the image of their clients.  But lobbyists themselves could use some PR.

Carl Adams, who was a Tallahassee lobbyist for 35 years and founded the Florida Association of Professional Lobbyists, thinks that the system - campaign finance laws and the prohibition on private deliberation - is flawed, not the people.   

We asked Adams why his profession is so maligned. 

State lawmakers will not  decide whether to abolish the death penalty this year. Rejecting cost, fairness and morality arguments, a House criminal justice subcommittee on Thursday voted down a bill to abolish capital punishment in Florida.

The vote was largely along party lines, with the majority Republicans voting in favor of preserving the death penalty.

The price of property insurance in Florida keeps going up --  such that some homeowners are getting second mortgages or dropping coverage all together.  The state created Citizens Property Insurance to be the insurer of last resort for Florida homeowners. But plans to shrink Citizens by loaning money to private insurance companies and allegations of corporate misconduct have sparked outcries by some state officials and the public alike. 

In Tallahassee, a series of proposals to repair the state election system is finding broad support in the Legislature that many say broke the voting process two years ago.

A Senate bill instituting one of the reforms proposed by Secretary of State  Ken Detzner has already been filed and there are clear signals from a House elections subcommittee that it will prepare a bill to launch the rest of them.

Number crunching by a Florida university professor has led to an odd conspiracy theory about the Florida House of Representatives.

Not that Prof. Mark Soskin actually subscribes to the theory himself. As you hear on TV a lot, he's just sayin'.

TALLAHASSEE -- Gov. Rick Scott unveiled a record-breaking $74.2 billion budget Thursday, pouring hundreds of millions of additional dollars into public schools, colleges and universities in a proposal that Democrats knocked as a public-relations gimmick.

The state Legislature, perhaps more than Congress, passes laws that have a direct impact on the day-to-day life of a Floridian: how much you pay in sales tax, how much time you have to vote, how you obtain a gun.

Tallahassee is in our lives every day. It's only 480 miles away. And yet, for many in South Florida, it might as well be on another continent.