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“What are we waiting for?” bellows a crinkly-eyed Burgess Meredith and moments later the Greatest. Training. Montage. Song. Ever. (Courtesy of Bill Conti) starts to play. As any boxing/movie/sports/Sylvester Stallone fan recognizes, I am, of course, referring to the goose-bump inducing scene from Rocky II in which Adrian, who has just woken from an inexplicable coma, tells the man who almost beat Apollo Creed that there is just one thing she wants Rocky to do for her. “Win.” Adrian’s words, like…

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An excited text message may have cost state Rep. Paul Renner his shot at the Speakership—or kept it in play, if you believe several freshmen House Republicans. That same text message, whoops, also may have violated Florida House Republican Caucus rules governing campaigning for leadership positions. As Matt Dixon of POLITICO Florida so capably reported, Renner “held an abrupt meeting of House freshman Republicans Thursday, just 15 minutes before the House was set to take the floor to pass its $81 billion…

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“Before we begin with agency business,” Gov. Rick Scott said at this week’s Cabinet meeting, “we have one more person to recognize.” To his surprise, it was CFO Jeff Atwater, who’s leaving Tallahassee after this Legislative Session to join Florida Atlantic University as VP and CFO “I don’t see this on the agenda,” Atwater said, laughing. He showed off his new FAU license plate, “Owlin,” after the school’s athletic teams, the Owls. “Jeff has fought to reduce burdensome regulations, protected…

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The $4-billion gap between the House and Senate budget plans got a lot smaller this week, courtesy of Gov. Rick Scott’s Low Income Pool (LIP) victory. Scott took a trip to Washington and returned home with $1.5 billion in new health care funding for Floridians. After refusing the prior administration’s mandate that LIP funds would only flow if Florida expanded Medicaid, Scott and Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) leadership secured a commitment from the Donald Trump administration to finance…

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Every four years, Charlie Cook and his Cook Political Report compile the Partisan Voter Index (PVI) for each of the 435 congressional districts. The index takes the presidential popular vote from the 2012 and 2016 elections and uses the average to form the baseline for each party (Democrats 51 percent and Republicans 48 percent). If Hillary Clinton won a district with 59 percent, that district would have a PVI of D+8. If Donald Trump won with 51 percent, the PVI…

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Earlier this week I was a little hard on my favorite Speaker of the Florida House, so today I need to butter him up. But he deserves it. Here’s why. You just have to love the way Richard Corcoran plays the game. Take for example the comments he made during an interview with the Florida Channel’s “Face to Face” program. As Steve Bousquet of the Tampa Bay Times noted, Corcoran casually laughed off predictions of a late-Session meltdown. “The speaker says such talk…

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