Florida lawmakers to angry voters: We hear you

TALLAHASSEE --
What a difference an election can make.

As legislators return to Tallahassee for their two-month-long annual session, beginning Tuesday, they will tackle some of the state’s most intractable problems, and they vow to do it with a new tone.

From property insurance and foreclosure reform to implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, and shoring up the state’s embattled education system, the issues are complicated and challenging.

Much of the debate in recent years has been driven by ideology, but this year the Republican-led Legislature faces no election. After Florida voted to reelect Democrat Barack Obama, the political rhetoric of GOP leaders has inched closer to the middle. The Legislature is undergoing an image makeover.

“In recent years, we may have done things that were more politically driven than policy driven,’’ said Sen. John Thrasher, R-St. Augustine, the Senate Rules chairman, who is both a former speaker of the House and chairman of the Republican Party. “The longer you’re in, the more you realize you don’t know everything, and you may need to step back and adjust a little bit to move forward in a positive direction.”

Legislative leaders who campaigned against the president’s signature issue, healthcare reform, are now drafting legislation to implement it.

“The law is the law,’’ said Senate President Don Gaetz, R-Niceville. “A lot of my friends don’t want to believe that. They believe that they can nullify Obamacare or we can pretend that it didn’t pass … but we are a nation of laws, and not a nation that develops our public policy on the passion of the moment.”

In other areas, decades-long fights over whether to tax internet sales in Florida could be resolved with a bill getting unprecedented attention this year. For the first time in six years, legislators are prepared to take on the utility giants and rewrite a law that has given power companies free rein to charge customers for nuclear power plants before they are built. A bill to ban texting while driving is also getting new traction.

And to improve the Legislature’s low rankings in the polls, lawmakers are on track to pass two bills early in the session with broad bi-partisan support: a rewrite of the state’s ethics laws and another to restore early voting days back to 14 from eight after the Election Day embarrassment.

“Yes, the Legislature made a mistake in the bill that we passed in the last two years,’’ said Sen. Jack Latvala, R-Clearwater, who is shepherding the elections reform and ethics bills through the Senate. But he also blamed local elections supervisors for impeding early voting by failing to open more polling sites for it. “There’s enough blame to go around.”

Thrasher, who represents four northwest Florida counties, said voters sent him a message when, for the first time in his career, he lost one of his counties.

“All of us can learn from the past,’’ he said.

The election gave Democrats two new seats in the 40-member Senate, the first net gain in 30 years, and they picked up five seats in the 120-member House. Republicans still dominate with a 76-44 advantage in the House and a 26-14 majority in the Senate, but the margins ended the GOP’s veto-proof two-thirds majority.

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Modern Family Stars Get Stuck in Crowded Elevator

No good deed goes unpunished.

PICS: Candid Celeb Sightings

While on their way to a fundraiser for the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Kansas City on Friday night, three stars of ABC's hit sitcom Modern Family were trapped in a crowded elevator for almost an hour, ABC News reports.

Julie Bowen, Eric Stonestreet and Jesse Tyler Ferguson took pictures together during the ordeal, which Ferguson posted to his Twitter account.

"This is us right now. 45 minutes stuck in this elevator," Ferguson wrote, captioning the snapshot from the Sheraton Kansas City Hotel's third floor.

The actors were an hour late to the event after the Kansas City Fire Department rescued them, but they maintained a good sense of humor about their plight, reportedly joking about the ordeal on stage.

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Fallon’s new hours

NBC execs may finally be ready to send Jay Leno on his last Jaywalk.

The network plans to replace him on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, The Hollywood Reporter says, citing “high-level industry sources.”

Fallon will move into the 11:30 p.m. slot next year, after Leno’s contract expires, the Reporter says. NBC brass reportedly believe Fallon is better positioned to draw younger TV viewers sought by advertisers.

Insiders say Fallon is better suited to compete against ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, who in January called Leno a “sellout” whose comedy is unfunny. The network denied Leno’s departure.

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When the latest layoff story is about you

It’s an odd feeling reading in the newspaper about losing your job. I didn’t learn about being fired in the newspaper but the story of losing my position was there. Why I lost my job (along with more than a dozen of my colleagues) was the lead story in the business section of The Miami Herald on Feb. 22. It even had a picture of me right next to the paragraph describing how we lost our jobs with the public television program Nightly Business Report.

What’s nice about sharing your employment woes with the entire community is the outpouring of support you get. I received dozens of emails from friends, fans and colleagues across the country, expressing sympathy and pledging to help any way they could. It is humbling to hear how you have impacted people’s lives, especially those you don’t know directly. The range of emotions you feel when you face a job loss can be overwhelming, but a short email or voicemail from an associate can lift your spirits, giving you the strength to press on. The medium of the messages does not matter. A tweet of support, LinkedIn endorsement or text message of sympathy fuels the encouragement to face the anxiety of joblessness.

After news of my job elimination was in the newspaper and blogosphere, there were compassionate glances from fellow parents on the sidelines of the kids’ weekend soccer games. I didn’t have to break the news — most had already read about it. A pedestrian on the sidewalk stopped me in mid-stride to express his disappointment. The inevitable questions came: What are you going to do? Will you stay? Do you have anything you’re working on?

I am lucky my employment status was on the business front page. Thousands of other people are treated as statistics. As a business journalist, I have been guilty of that. Company layoffs numbering in the dozens as ours did rarely demand attention. The cuts have to be in the thousands to have any hope of getting much media attention. Even then, it’s only a number. The names of those losing their jobs are known only to their HR departments, in order to fill out the paperwork. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the nature of job loss. Each job cut is a story that begins en masse in boardrooms and offices but plays out individually in kitchens and living rooms across America.

In January, there were more than 1,300 mass layoffs of U.S. workers. A mass layoff impacts at least 50 people from a single company. More than 134,000 individuals were involved in such action, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. My job loss and that of my colleagues won’t show up in February’s report. There were too few of us. Some of us will appear in other employment data, but we will be just statistics. Each of those statistics has groceries to buy, bills to pay and hope for a new opportunity.

In a $16 trillion economy, it’s understandable that we become statistics. The stakes are just too big to pick up the noise from any of our individual unemployment stories. The weekly and government reports I have spent my career reporting on don’t ask why. They don’t ask who. They only ask how many. It’s our friends and family and colleagues who ask, “How can I help?”

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