As a former cocaine addict, Rep. Darryl Rouson, D-St. Petersburg, ought to know that no law will keep a user from his drug of choice.
Yet that’s the goal of the bill he sponsored and the House passed this week that bans retailers from selling bongs and pipes made of glass, stone, metal and acrylic.
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A few years ago I was back in my home state of Texas visiting relatives. I drove I-35 between Fort Worth and Waco, a road I had traveled, oh, maybe 10,000 times, when I spotted a sign advertising kolaches at the exit for the town of West.
I pulled off at that exit and 20 minutes later drove away happy.
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When Rick Scott first broke onto the scene in 2010, he hit the airwaves with brilliant campaign ads that sent the simple but effective message to a weary electorate. Over and over, he stuck to the message of “Let’s Get to Work.”
During a national recession, with Florida’s unemployment rate above the national average, the message of “Let’s Get to Work” appealed to many frustrated Floridians....
Perhaps my Twitter account had been hacked.
Maybe I had bumped my head.
There was even a conspiracy that I had succumbed to a political payoff.
Whatever the reason, my followers on Twitter...
The Florida Senate isn’t confident that the eight counties in the Florida Panhandle impacted the most by the 2010 BP oil disaster can be trusted to properly handle the millions of BP funds that are expected to come to Florida. And they have a point.
For the past two decades, counties, particularly Escambia and Okaloosa, have been synonymous with corruption. Four county commissioners in Escambia County...
When USA Today did its city-by-city rollout in 1982, Atlanta was second on the list, and Al Neuharth jetted in for a big news conference.
I'm sure the CEO of Gannett Co., who died last week at his Cocoa Beach home at age 89, had several different modes -- big business executive, manager, columnist, flamboyant public figure -- and on that morning, he seemed to revert to his 1960 Miami beat...
"In God we trust" may be the planet's most familiar national motto, appearing on trillions of U.S. coins and treasury bills circulating everywhere. But perhaps the time has come for a new one, more reflective of how the rest of the world sees us:
"In guns we trust."
If the NRA continues to have...
It was one of those weeks of revolting paradoxes, with mayhem to match.
On Monday the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon, initially killing three people and wounding 170. Two days later, a different sort of bomb went off when the U.S. Senate voted down the skimpiest of gun control legislation: making background checks universal, banning high-capacity gun magazines, and banning assault weapons, three...
Florida's Medicaid waiver program for persons with disabilities, iBudget Florida, has hit multiple snags and as many lawsuits during its slow implementation since being created by the Legislature in 2010.
The program was intended to give clients better access and more choices in the services they receive, providing the potential to lower spending, and thus creating an opportunity to reduce the number...
Paulette Wilson paid for her own health insurance policy before the economy tanked and she had to let it go.
The self-employed cosmetologist from Miami Gardens, who suffers from high blood pressure and diabetes, earned about $13,000 last year.
She relies on neighborhood clinics for a...
