It appears the Lakeland City Commission will hold a vote of sorts on whether to allow same sex employees to include their committed partners on the city’s health insurance policy and other basic benefits enjoyed by...

Back in 2010, before Marshall Goodman came under investigation for his expensive taste in Star Wars toys and general incompetence, the ex-USFP poobah hired former Polk County Commissioner Jack Myers to a $50,000-per-year...

Let’s just recap for a second: A rogue senator from Lake Wales or Winter Haven or wherever’s he from managed to cower virtually everyone outside of Lakeland into accepting an unaccredited, unloved, unbuilt...

The Ledger tells me that Paul Doering, professor emeritus at the University of Florida school of Pharmacy, is a consultant for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). If that’s true, it confirms everything I’ve come...

I’ve been very busy at work and peddling my Age of Barbarity wares, so I apologize for the absence. I probably shouldn’t do this, but I just noticed a couple of really instructive comments from Skeptical...

I received a heads up late Wednesday afternoon from City Manager Doug Thomas that city staff will update commissioners on the results of their survey of nearby local governments that have adopted same sex benefits for...

The Great Migration, the mass emigration of black men and women out of the South between roughly 1915 and 1960, is one of the most significant American upheavals of the 20th Century. As an historical development that...

A frequent commenter of ours has become obsessed with which racial box George Zimmerman checks on Census forms. To him, it seems to unravel the point of my Trayvon article from a few days ago. I think he thinks the point of...

On Saturday, February 23, 1923, in downtown Gainesville, a black man named Arthur Johnson shot and killed a white road construction worker named Hugh Cross. Johnson and another man had passed Cross on a sidewalk,...

After much self-promotion and reference here, Age of Barbarity: The Forgotten Fight for the Soul of Florida is now ready for purchase for $25 from the CreateSpace online store. Here is the link. This is print-on-demand. You...

Language is a funny thing. Our use of it tends to trap us in shorthand that mismatches the object or concepts we are describing and the words we use to do the describing. We see useful current examples of this at home and...

Dear fellow members of the Lakeland Montessori community: There’s a parent at a well-known and well-regarded non-traditional school in Polk County whose honesty and courage I have come to admire deeply. This person...

Some of you may have seen on my Facebook page that I now have a hardcopy proof for my book, Age of Barbarity: The Forgotten Fight for the Soul of Florida. We are literally weeks and some minor copyediting away from...

I would argue that the Lakeland we love today, the Lakeland that provides an unmatched per dollar quality of life, is the child of two equally loving parents: Lakeland Electric and Publix. In a fanciful mood, you might even...

I want to thank the Lakeland City Commission for its respectful and serious attention to my request yesterday to consider same sex/domestic partner benefits. On behalf of the 10 or so people who attended in support, and...

[Late writer's note: A very critical reader points out correctly, as near as I can tell, that actually only 37.5 percent of a school's ranking is tied to reaching Level 3 of 5 on the FCAT test. Another 12.5 percent is tied...

It’s time to correct an oversight. It’s time to join almost every other significant I-4 Corridor local government outside of Polk County and extend same sex partner and parent benefits to gay and lesbian city of...

There’s a key difference between the way I calculate a school or district’s “performance” on the FCAT test and the way the geniuses at DOE do it in their school/district grades and rankings. For me,...

On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave arguably his most famous speech. A group of Rochester, New York white abolitionists had asked him to help them commemorate and celebrate the July 4th. Douglass did something rather...

There was a time, when I was a younger and more foolish man, back when the newspaper industry overran with milk and honey, that I thought Lakeland was likely a whistlestop on my express train to Vanity Fair. When I first...

Our new local media overlords are not nice — or very competent — people. First, Halifax Media and the New York Times Co. sent all employees at the regional newspapers Halifax bought (The Ledger, Sarasota...

So, I see that “a group of teachers and community leaders” wants to make Lakeland High a charter. Where to begin? I can’t remotely sort out LHS’s internal and external community politics. So...

Let me first stipulate that I am very happy for the people on the ground at Mulberry High and Lake Wales High and the other high schools that improved their school grades en masse. They did not make the absurd and dishonest...

I have long thought, based on experience as a parent and kid, that school “gifted” programs are largely silly wastes of time. But the lure of that status sticker on the rear window of your Escalade is powerful, I...

It’s been almost a month since I began detailing, with actual data and analysis, how the teachers and students of the McKeel Empire (like most wealthy schools) systematically underachieve–as defined by the FCAT...