Category Archives: Florida

Columns: More than one route to the Hill for speaker is a political roundup column that's mostly about how Flordians are not warming to Rep. Byrd, the loathsome, craven, special-interest sellout who is the Speaker of the Florida House. This despite Speaker Byrd's tri-weekly spam emails to everyone in the state, his phoney push polls, and piles of special interest campaign money.

But the really interesting thing in this St. Petersburg Times column is the final tidbit, one that is catnip for constitutional law junkies (spotted via Flablog):

State legislators took this week off, but is it legal?

The Florida Constitution says the Legislature cannot adjourn its 60-day session for more than 72 consecutive hours without passing a concurrent resolution. The House and Senate passed no resolution when they left town last week, merely recessing for 10 days for Passover and the Easter holidays.

Former House Dean Carl Ogden says lawmakers could be forced to call themselves back into special session and re-file all of the bills that are pending or face having anything they do declared invalid by a court.

Indeed, the Florida Constitution states in Article III, Section 3, paragraph (e) that “Neither house shall adjourn for more than seventy-two consecutive hours except pursuant to concurrent resolution.”

Whether it follows that an excessive adjournment amounts to the end of the session isn't 100% obvious to me, although it makes sense if the only other alternative is to say that it's a political question for which there is no relief (always an awful answer in my book). A quick and dirty Westlaw search found little in the way of relevant caselaw. In light of State ex rel. Landis v. Thompson, 125 Fla. 466, 170 So. 464 (1936) (Legislative day can only be terminated by adjournment or some actual dispersing of assembled membership amounting to same thing), the viewpoint that an excessive adjourment terminates the session certainly seems arguble. I think Mr. Ogden has a point, and that the legislature becomes functus officio after 72 hours adjournment without a concurrent resolution. Meaning no more laws this year unless a special session is called…which indeed requires re-introducing them all.

In “Starve The Beast”, Junior Division, Steve Koppelman brings me the news of three really lousy ballot initiative ideas being promoted in Florida:

One would somehow “protect patient rights” by limiting malpractice suits. I guess doctors and their insurance companies are patients too sometimes.

Another would require the state to further tax gambling operations and earmark the money for schools. If decades of experience with lotteries and gambling taxation nationwide have taught us anything, it's that “earmarking” the proceeds for education means those proceeds quickly become the only source of education funds and that educational spending doesn't budge upward one bit, as the liberated money once put towards education gets redirected to all manner of other things.

So the medical and insurance lobbies are trying an end run around the trial-lawyer and civil-liberties lobbies. All right. That's to be expected. And yet another generation in yet another state thinks that it's found a magical way to double school funding when all it's really found is a way to give the legislature an incentive to deploy slot machines at every gas station, motel and convenience store in the state. Think Nevada. All right again. That's to be expected.

But then there's that other ballot initiative in the trifecta, the one that would increase the homestead property tax exemption from $25,000 to $50,000. At a time when the crush of newcomers to Florida has schools filling their parking lots with mobile classrooms attached to the mobile classrooms, looming water supply problems to address, and ever-growing demand for more police, more firefighters, more roads, more teachers, more, more, more, there's this.

Despite this, I do not support the Governor and gerrymandered Republican legislature's plan to make it harder to pass ballot initiatives. The Republicans are still smarting from the requirement that they shrink class sizes in schools, which may well require a tax increase — something Jeb wants to avoid at all costs in order to further his Presidential ambitions.

This state is not a progressive bastion, but it is more progressive than the regressive legislature. As they say, this is no accident, but a result of the way the Republicans have drawn the legislative districts plus the fact that the liberal elements are often in urban concentrations. So the ballot initiatives, for all that they are sometimes wacky are a Very Good Thing both in principle and often in practice. And if I don't always agree with the outcomes, much less the proposals, well, that's democracy.

School bus drivers around the nation know not to give a ride to wild animals with large teeth. Except, of course, here in Florida where Gator goes for ride on the bus.

As the article says, “Eleven students. One bus driver. One alligator.” (Spotted via Flablog).

Ok, my headline is accurate, but could be slightly misleading, as you might have thought I meant a different sort of Gator. Things like that seem to be required if you live in the eye of the Hurricanes.

The Poor Man has the links: Election Monitors Coming To Florida — “Catholic peace group Pax Christi USA has announced that it will be sending election monitors to Florida to watch for voting irregularities in the 2004 elections.” The Poor Man also has a long quote from Pax Christi Executive Director Dave Robinson explaining just why Florida deserves this treatment.

I was looking forward to voting in a contested primary. But with Florida due to vote next Tuesday, it doesn't look as if my vote is going to count: now that Kerry has effectively wrapped up the nomination our primary becomes something of a meaningless ritual.

Not that in Florida we can ever take having our vote count for granted….

I thought spam came from Taiwan, China and Korea these days. I was wrong.

AOL puts heat on alleged Sunshine State spammers: America Online reported on Wednesday that it has filed a civil suit against four Florida-based individuals who the company believes are responsible for sending massive amounts of spam e-mail to its members.

The giant Internet service provider said it brought the case in the U.S. District Court of Florida, Orlando Division, because the so-called “Sunshine State spammers” violated the Virginia Computer Crimes Act, the federal Computer Fraud & Abuse Act and Florida common law, by sending an avalanche of unsolicited e-mail to its subscribers. In the suit, AOL seeks damages of $1.6 million in addition to other forms of compensation, including potential asset forfeiture.

According to Dulles, Va.-based AOL, the Florida defendants teamed up with parties in Thailand to barrage AOL members with more than 35 million spam messages over the course of several years. The company said it first became aware of the group in January 2003 via a wave of 1.5 million user complaints and immediately launched an investigation into the spammer's operations. The scheme reportedly involved an onslaught of e-mail messages loaded with hypertext links advertising low mortgage rate offers for AOL members.

As part of its investigation, AOL said it was able to procure some 40 pages of text taken from instant-messaging conversations held between the defendants and their alleged Thailand partners. In those conversations, seized under a court order, the parties openly referred to AOL as a potential “goldmine” for spam and detailed their methods for evading the company's spam protection tools.

…

Florida is known as something of a hotbed for spam-related activity, with the Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) identifying three of the world's top 10 known spammers as residing in the state, more than any other in the United States.

I guess at least it shows not everything is outsourced…