Category: Florida

First the good news.

For the third consecutive year, Florida’s high school graduation rate has risen. “Florida’s education system continues to be a rising star in our nation,” gushed Gov. Charlie Crist.

Now the, well, rest of that news. The rate of graduation for Florida students within four years of entering ninth grade now stands at 76.3 percent. That means nearly one in four Florida students (23.7 percent) doesn’t graduate. More than a third of black students (35.1 percent) and more than a quarter of Hispanic students (27.9 percent) don’t yet graduate.

A more accurate context. Graduation rates are less embarrassing than they used to be. Good. But we’re a “rising star?”

Imagine having a goal of getting more people to stop smoking – and yet still maintain health care programs that are heavily dependent on cigarette taxes. Well, mission accomplished, thanks to that $1-a-pack tax passed back in July that helped balance the state budget.

Statewide, cigarette sales are off 27 percent – in four months. But the new tax, according to economists’ forecasts, will raise nearly $900 million this year.

So, smart surtax move, legislators – one that is critical to the funding of Medicaid. And to those who are still resistant to admonitions about the proven dangers associated with tobacco: At least for now, thanks for smoking.

We thought it was problematic when Gov. Charlie Crist appointed George LeMieux, his former chief of staff and campaign manager, to replace the eminently replaceable Sen. Mel Martinez, who quit while he was behind. We feared that we would be getting Senator Surrogate. Those fears have been realized.

For a political appointee ostensibly trying to disprove that he’s the governor’s seat-warming lackey, LeMieux has been sending incongruous signals. He co-hosted a Crist fundraiser recently in Washington and formed a political action committee that Crist (and LeMieux) will be able to tap into. His stands on key issues, including health care reform (“rationing”) opposition, seem designed to help the ideology-challenged Crist in his increasingly competitive senatorial primary with conservative poster boy Marco Rubio.

And now LeMieux is messing with foreign policy as a further extension of political payback. Less than 10 weeks on the job, he has morphed into enough of an insider to block a bill and a nomination – the upshot of which could potentially help Crist with the conservative, South Florida Cuban vote.

The bill would reduce funding for the ineffectual, cost-ineffective TV and Radio Marti, which produces pro-American, broadcast messages to Cuba. Which are, of course, ultimately jammed. The nomination is that of Thomas A. Shannon Jr. as U.S. ambassador to Brazil. The exile community is known to look askance at Shannon, who was considered open-minded on Cuba when he was assistant secretary of state for Western Hemispheric affairs under President George W. Bush.

The Shannon implications are serious.

Brazil is a hemispheric heavyweight, an important hedge against Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and an increasingly major global player. That’s one of the reasons Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in Brazil last week visiting with his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva. This is no time for Charlie Crist’s lotion boy to play geopolitical grown-up.

Brazil’s also a big trading partner of the U.S. – and Boeing is said to be less than pleased that the ambassadorial delay, which can be interpreted as a diplomatic insult, could jeopardize its $7.5-billion fighter-jet deal with Brazil. It’s hardly coincidental that LeMieux received a come-to-Jesus letter from nine former assistant secretaries of state urging him to lift his opposition to Shannon and not risk damaging U.S. relations with Latin America.

LeMieux needs to get his priorities in order, especially if he expects to run on his own and challenge Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson in 2012. Country needs to come first, no matter how much pressure is applied by self-serving, hard-line Cuba lobbies, for whom a Cold War vendetta still trumps the best interest of the U.S. – and Florida.

            “I didn’t endorse it.”

             That, of course, is what Gov. Charlie Crist said a fortnight ago about the federal stimulus package, a sizable chunk of which enabled him to balance Florida’s budget. It’s possible Crist doesn’t even believe that himself.  Nobody else does.

Crist has a well-earned reputation for being nice and a well-crafted reputation for being “moderate.”  His political game is feel-good populism and unfettered cheerleading. He loves Florida. We know that because he’s always reminding us. But now Crist — as illustrated in the aforementioned quote — is off his credibility and charm-offensive game. It hasn’t cost him yet, but it could. Voters, even the easily seduced, the chronically gullible and the political pragmatists, know the difference between a smile and smirk.

Recall how the governor got here.

Once State Senator Crist agreed to take one for the team and run as a cheery sacrificial lamb against Bob Graham in 1998, his political career has been ascendant. Fast forward from commissioner of education to attorney general to governor. He mouthed just enough conservative platitudes, smiled that winning populist smile, maxed out on the “Chain Gang Charlie” moniker, bid “good riddance” to State Farm, managed to be governor when no hurricanes wreaked havoc and availed himself of enough stimulus money to buy time during a ravaging recession.

Over time, however, it has become increasingly apparent that Crist is both authentically pleasant as well as genuinely duplicitous when it comes to ideology. Crist has morphed from heavyweight moderate to empty-suited chameleon of self-interest.

It’s been enough of a revelation to at least slow down Crist’s seemingly seamless transition from governor to U.S. senator. It’s been enough to encourage Marco Rubio, otherwise lacking in name recognition and money, to take him on in a GOP primary. And it’s been enough to prompt the national media to weigh in about pragmatism, ideology, the Sunshine State’s microcosmic proxy war and the possibility of Jeb Bush playing kingmaker.

While Crist still maintains large leads in the polls and in fund-raising, Rubio has been gaining, attracting a following of county-level GOP activists and conservative true believers. The ones who vote in primaries. And recruit others. Their support of the attractive, articulate – but not fire-breathing – ideologue borders on a man-crush.

Charlie’s definitely not courting any, uh, man-crushes. He just wants to float above the fray as the “people’s governor” who would make a dandy “people’s senator.”

But if it’s one thing that tends to annoy the “people,” it’s being manipulated. It’s being taken for granted – and played for fools. If you publicly campaign – from appearing on national talk shows to lobbying key members of Florida’s congressional delegations — for the $787-billion federal stimulus bill pushed by President Obama and passed by Congress and yet deny any endorsement, you will be called on it. And among the things you will be called will be a pants-on-fire “liar.”

That’s anathema to a politician of Crist’s nice-guy, populist stripe. Insulted voters notice. Like the governor saying he didn’t know the president was traveling in Florida recently or how he’s responsible for “the largest single tax-cut in the history of Florida.” Before long, voters start to notice even more things, like how many workdays the governor has phoned it in. Few politicians handle scrutiny well. Crist, as we’re seeing, is no exception. Should his lead over Rubio drop like a rock, it will have accelerated at EndorsementGate.

What’s mystifying is that the “endorsement-not” flap was so unnecessary, so dumb and so un-Crist. Why couldn’t someone have scripted something better than “I didn’t endorse it. I didn’t even have a vote on the darned thing…”?

The stimulus issue should have been vintage Crist. He should have hit it out of the ballpark. As in:

“Of course I endorsed the stimulus bill. Indeed, that was me with the president on that Fort Myers stage. I wasn’t taking any chances. These are, we all know, uniquely troubled economic times, and you don’t have to be the Second Coming of John Maynard Keynes to see that a stimulus and deficit-spending stopgap was necessary to prevent an economic free fall. So, sure, I endorsed the stimulus bill. Of course, I did. We needed the help.

“And I meant it when I said this was ‘not about partisan politics. This is about rising above that, helping America and reigniting our economy.’

“But, no, that doesn’t mean that I also endorse big government intervention across the board. Hardly. What’s critical is understanding that I also endorse creating jobs and saving jobs, including those of teachers. That I also endorse continuing to help unemployed Floridians. That I also endorse balancing a budget without doing it on the backs of hard-working Floridians. That has everything to do with why we wanted more than $15 billion in stimulus dollars for Florida in the first place.

“Look, I am the day-to-day governor of Florida, not some accountability-challenged candidate free to glibly play the ideology card in the abstract. And I am a pragmatist. I’ll take common sense and the vested interest of Florida over cherry-picked ideology every time.

For this governor, Florida will always come first. Others, I acknowledge, including many in the Republican Party, may differ. Well, they’re not the governor of Florida. I yield to no one in doing what’s best for this state. And I’m confident that the people of Florida will endorse these priorities.”

We now hear serious talk among lawmakers about making every high school student take at least one online course in order to graduate. In the brave new world of higher ed, it’s now estimated that Florida college students are taking nearly 30 percent of their classes online.

Two points.

Indeed, this would help prepare high school students for the virtual realities they will confront at the next level.

However, let’s learn from the online cheating scandal among Florida State student-athletes. Think through how exams will be administered. Nobody benefits from virtual monitoring.

Sure, USF, by virtue of that win over Florida State, can stake a legitimate claim to membership in this state’s “Big Four” football schools. But of much more significance is its number two status among the state’s research universities. With $380 million in research grants, USF is second only to the University of Florida.

In a fit of constitutional pique, U.S. Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, the Brooksville Republican, has fired off a letter to President Obama reminding him of his “obligation to obtain Congressional consent” before accepting his Nobel Peace Prize. Her blog-based research yielded a provision that restricts a president, while in office, from accepting a gift from a foreign state. There was also the ostensible precedent of President Theodore Roosevelt, the 1906 Nobel winner, consulting Congress about setting up a special (Industrial Peace) Committee with the Peace Prize money.

 

A consensus of legal scholars is that the Nobel Foundation, a private institution, is not tantamount to a “foreign state.”

 

As we well know, the president’s Nobel selection remains an understandably controversial one. But the point is now moot.

 

What Rep. Brown-Waite has done is give grandstanding a bad name.

Since 1976, Florida has exonerated 23 inmates on death row. The number of executions during that same period is 68. For every three executions, there is one exoneration. That’s a sobering statistic.

 

So is this. Florida is the only state that permits jurors to make a recommendation of death based on a simple majority vote.

Put it this way: The ultimate penalty imposed by an eminently imperfect system could include as many as five jurors who don’t believe death is the proper punishment. A jury-room tie-breaker to recommend death? Surely, fallible human beings can do better.

Walt Disney World has been playing it smart in Florida since those 1960s dummy corporations were designed to avoid a land-speculation boom. Since then it has enjoyed favored status. Think: Reedy Creek Improvement District and WDW immunity from land-use laws.

 

Disney’s tourist-mecca status, however, has had obvious synergistic impacts on Florida. On occasion, enlightened self-interest has been a complementary key. That’s been notably revisited recently.

 

Disney is now a major player in Florida’s pitch to the feds for $2.5 billion in stimulus money to help launch a high-speed rail line between Orlando and Tampa within five years. Disney has said it will give the state up to 50 acres for a rail station. It will also extend transportation to the station and use its considerable land-use clout. The feds want “shovel-ready” projects in key transportation corridors, but they’re also impressed by private-sector buy-in. Disney on board helps the rail cause.

 

On a more pedestrian level, Disney has now begun a new promotional give-away – one that rewards those making positive societal contributions. Specifically, it’s giving free passes to those who volunteer at select charities.

 

Of course, it’s smart marketing – and those with free passes don’t get free refreshments or free Mouse Ears. But it also promotes volunteerism and affords free publicity for the benefiting nonprofits.

 

It’s classic win-win – not unlike having a 150-mph train accommodating those traveling between Tampa and Disney-proximate Orlando.

Finally, there’s more than hope for optimism at Florida A&M University law school. Now there’s a concrete reason. The 7-year-old, Orlando-based school is accredited. And it wouldn’t have happened without a beefed-up, better-credentialed faculty and stabilized leadership. Median LSAT scores are up, although not yet significantly.

 

Two other issues remain unaddressed.

 

First, the FAMU passage rate for the Florida Bar is unacceptably low at 53 percent. The state average is 80 percent.

 

Second, do we really need more lawyers?