Word: florida
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...Florida resident Clifford Phillips, who runs Casa Quivira with his Guatemalan wife, insists they're victims of the spreading anti-adoption hysteria and persecution. "This is an injustice that needs to be stopped now," says Phillips, arguing that Guatemala is treating him as if he were "guilty until proven innocent." The adoptions of two of the Casa Quivira children, in fact, were found to be legal, and those infants have since left for the U.S. But the rest have been removed to other private facilities, and nine were hospitalized with lung problems and other sicknesses...
...Geller's confusion is understandable for a number of reasons. Florida Democrats had, and have, little choice but to go along with the state's decision to leapfrog its primary from March to the front of the pack in January. First, they didn't have the votes to block it: Florida's legislature is controlled by the G.O.P., as is its Governor's mansion. More important, most Floridians want their primary moved up: the 2000 debacle may have subjected them to national ridicule, but it revealed the peninsula's new bellwether muscle - and they feel they deserve to flex...
...Telling them they don't deserve it isn't going to endear the Democratic Party to a state that is regularly referred to these days as the new California. In Florida, as Geller notes, national elections are often "poised on the edge of a razor blade. They can go either way." As a result, Florida's Democrats are dumbfounded that Dean and the DNC would put the state's 27 electoral votes at risk, not only by muffling its say in the Democratic nominating process - top Democratic candidates will be less likely to stump in Florida if the DNC sanctions...
...what? To make sure Florida and everyone else adhere to one of the most absurd presidential nominating processes in the free world? It's amusing to hear the DNC big shots argue that if Florida got its way in this case it would invite "chaos" in the primary system. One of the main reasons Florida wanted to move its primary up in the first place was to get ahead of the chaos that already exists. Third World countries like Mexico today hold more modern and truly democratic primaries than America's, whose Iowa- and New Hampshire-centric traditions seem...
...Meanwhile, Florida's Democrats are formulating a response - and don't bet on them caving in to the DNC. For one thing, the costs and logistics of arranging a separate, later primary election look prohibitive. More crucially, state party leaders like Geller simply believe Dean and the DNC are out of line. Florida's Democratic Senator, Bill Nelson, is threatening legal action to test whether poltiical parties actually have the kind of authority the DNC is trying to assert. And Geller says he even plans to urge Democratic donors in Florida, one of the country's most lucrative sources...