Speaker Dean Cannon, Hero

Dean Cannon had the right stage and the right message, but whether the media heard him remains to be seen.

At last Wednesday's AP Florida Legislative Planning Session, the speaker of the House chose to use most of his time at the podium talking to reporters and editors about the growing rift between the Capitol press corps and the leadership in the Florida Legislature.

"Given the dynamics of accountability and scrutiny," Cannon said, "a healthy tension should always exist between a legislature and the editors and reporters of Florida’s news outlets. But I will admit that over the last few years, I have watched that tension become strained and then that strain grow into outright hostility."

House Speaker Dean Cannon

Which brings me to why Cannon is my hero:

In his speech he had the guts to "straighten out" the profession I've served my whole working life -- a profession in which journalists sometimes slip into a kind of fantasyland where they suddenly believe they've been annointed rather than entrusted.

He gave an example, citing a few lines in a speech last year when he criticized the Supreme Court's handling of the Legislature's proposed constitutional amendments. In so doing, he said, he ignited the wrath of newspaper editorial boards across the state.

"When you manage to get an enterprise (the press) that is founded on the basic idea that criticism of government is healthy and necessary to say 'how dare you criticize a branch of government,' then you know something has gone very wrong," Cannon said.

Perhaps the Winter Park Republican had the moxie to point out the little hiccup in the press's practice of First Amendment vigilance because he knows a thing or two. He majored in journalism as an undergrad at the University of Florida. It's given him a healthy respect for the First Amendment, for accountability, scrutiny, transparency -- and fair play.

Read his speech for yourself. You'll see Speaker Dean Cannon had something he needed to say. And he came to the AP meeting prepared.



Bill-Happy Legislators, Zeroes

Just because legislators can't spend any money this year doesn't mean they've come to Tallahassee to sit on their hands. They're going to write bills, goldurnit. That's what they promised the folks back home, that's what they're going to deliver.

All 160 of them.

So here we are in the critical moments of the presession, at best with six to10 major issues to be resolved -- and we're trying to see over a mountain of bad, nuisance or utterly puff-useless bills.

Let's look at a few: