Category: Florida

Perhaps someone should start taking out ads and distributing leaflets warning visitors to this state that they run the risk of meeting a dangerously impaired Floridian on the road. Armed, as it were, with poor motor skills and/or dementia. Maybe that will prompt the state to get serious about culling the ranks of its unsafe senior motorists.

The most recent example of the problem – and its tragic implications – was the 93-year-old Pinellas Park man who fatally hit a pedestrian and drove another three miles with the body lodged in the car’s windshield. Ralph Parker, the motorist, thought the body had dropped from the sky. He suffers from dementia.

According to Florida’s Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, drivers 80 and older are required to pass a vision test – nothing more — to renew their license. It’s good for six years, absent a traffic conviction or accident.

By then, as was the case with Parker, it could be too late. Adequate vision – albeit with a touch of dementia, hearing deficits and poor reaction time — will still result in a validly-renewed Florida driver’s license.

In a state with some 270,000 elderly drivers, this is unconscionable.

Sure, the issue is emotionally charged, and any effort at screening will be met with resistance in certain quarters — notably AARP, which has a history of stonewalling age-based restrictions on older drivers. The specter of age bias and the heavy hand of government intrusion will be raised.

But public safety trumps all other agendas. So should common sense.

Right now, unfortunately, it’s largely left to families to play the heavy – and the grim reaper – by asking for a senior’s car keys. Arguably, not enough do.

The state has to step in and set some meaningful, legal limits – and, yes, there’s a level of arbitrariness that is inevitable, whether it’s 75, 70 or the onset of Social Security. But serious screening – a physical, a field test and a vision test – must be part of any effective licensing procedure. Helping our elderly stay safe, while looking out for everyone else, should be the goal.

Perhaps Gov. Jeb Bush could get behind a campaign to start seriously screening elderly drivers — and avoiding unnecessary, tragic – and inevitable – deaths on the road. It might even be a better legacy issue than FCATs, privatization and Wilma response. It may even pre-empt another leaflet distribution to tourists.

The Florida Department of Education recently announced that it’s releasing reading and math questions on fourth- and eighth-grade Florida Comprehensive Assessment Tests. A month ago, the DOE released questions from the 10th grade FCAT.

Notably not released was a reasonable, compassionate, common sense answer to this question: Why are you forcing high school seniors who were traumatically uprooted by Hurricane Katrina to abide by this state’s FCAT requirement for graduation?

“No FCAT passing grade, no diploma,” was the institutional answer. “No exceptions.”

In other words, these seniors – who didn’t have the benefit of taking the test in the 10th and 11th grades and may have passed comparable tests in Louisiana – had more success adjusting to a natural disaster than Florida’s bureaucracy.

Two weeks ago Donna Shalala, president of the University of Miami, came to town to sing the praises of campus diversity. She told members of the National Association for College Admission Counseling that the global economy demanded no less than students who have been exposed to those of different races, religions and backgrounds while they were in school. She cited UM’s student body, which is about 28 per cent Hispanic and 10 per cent black, as a good example of a university walking the walk of diversity.

And in order for universities such as UM to continue to attract a sufficiently diverse student body, they had to rethink the way they did business, explained Shalala. She pointed to UM’s Ramadan-sensitive meal plan for Muslim students as a prime example.

Other speakers at the Tampa Convention Center also spoke to the need to recruit minorities as well as first-generation students.

Well and good, of course. It would be remiss of any university to deign to prepare students for a global economy in a hermetically-sealed environment where everybody looked and worshipped the same.

What’s typically missing from such higher education gatherings, however, are those officials who also make the very public case for ideological diversity. It almost never happens because diversity at the university level is almost never defined outside the easily quantifiable, politically safe criteria of race, religion and ethnic background. And that’s because those who do the defining are all from the same lockstep liberal camp. And if you’re not, well, why aren’t you at Bob Jones University?

How illogical is it that where faculty and students are on the political spectrum — and the subsequent impact on their world views across a myriad of subjects — is rarely cited as a diversity priority? How counterintuitive is it that what university people actually think is a non-factor in strivings for inclusion and diversity? Shouldn’t preparation for the marketplace of ideas include a robust diversity of them as part of the educational experience?

How ironic that on the day Shalala spoke, the big news out of the University of Florida was the protest march, led by a UF dean, on the student newspaper, the “Independent Florida Alligator.” The newspaper had run a racial-parody cartoon featuring rapper Kanye “Bush doesn’t care about black people” West holding a “race card” and a less-than-pleased Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The latter was reprimanding West in popular rapper parlance. As in “Nigga Please!”

UF officials didn’t see any First Amendment issues. They didn’t see rights – only wrongs. They didn’t see another way of looking at America’s racial double standards. They didn’t see satire – only insensitivity. They saw a politically incorrect time bomb that could make post-affirmative action, minority recruitment and retention even harder.

No chagrin-and-bear-it response when the subject has anything to do with (a protected) race. UF officials demanded an apology from the newspaper.

They certainly didn’t demand one from the activist dean. Nor did they demand that campus diversity include free and – this version of – unpopular speech.

But perhaps UF is making progress on its minority meal plans.

It’s not quite stop-the-presses news, but it is now official.

Long-shot, wild card Al Fox is in the race to succeed Jim Davis in Congress.

And that means something else is also a certainty.

The other Democratic candidates – Hillsborough County Commissioner Kathy Castor, State Senator Les Miller and Tampa attorneys Michael Steinberg and Scott Farrell — will not be able to finesse their positions and hedge their bets on Cuba. They won’t be able to maintain the incongruous position that while it’s inhumane for the Bush Administration to have tightened the screws on Cuban family visitations and remittances, it remains quite acceptably humane to maintain the long-running, counterproductive and cruel economic embargo. At least not without being called on it.

The 61-year-old Ybor City native and long-time Washington insider and lobbyist says Cuba is “the one issue that nobody else has.”

For sure, nobody else has his take. He’s vehemently opposed to the embargo and in favor of sitting down with Fidel Castro and normalizing relations. That’s a gutsy – some would say ill-advised and still politically untenable position — for a Florida politician.

His reasoning:

*”My position is what’s best for America, not what’s best for Cuba. The embargo is a relic of the Cold War. It costs us buckets of money.”

*”I support sitting down with the Cuban government as it is. It’s a sovereign country, and we don’t have to like it. For that matter, I don’t like North Korea or Saudi Arabia.”

While Fox insists he’s not a one-issue candidate, this is the one issue that will draw the most attention and generate the most debate heat.

He’ll likely not be the next U.S. Representative from District 11, but Al Fox will make sure the winner doesn’t get a pass on Cuba.

Let’s see how long Katherine Harris can keep this up. The make-up make over, apparently, has commenced. Finally.

When she officially kicked off her senatorial campaign last week, she actually sounded sort of self-effacing and what passed for funny on the stump. She noted impishly that the polls have her trailing (incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson) by “an eyelash.”

It’s the appropriate approach. The challenge for her well-regarded media maven Adam Goodman is keeping her on task and no reverting to “poor-me” media-conspiracy theories.To recap: Harris recently had to explain what she meant when she alleged that newspapers had blindsided her with doctored photos. “

Perhaps Adam Goodman should declare his candidacy for the Senate. As the media consultant/spokesman/interpreter/apologist for the Katherine Harris senatorial campaign, he’s out in front more often than she is.

This time it’s to explain what Harris meant by alleging that newspaper cheap shots included doctored photos. “