BRENT BATTEN

But in spite of Camping’s amateurish gaffe of speaking prematurely in plain English about the ascension of the righteous into heaven, he seems to have prophet-ed nicely. He’s reportedly worth, through his radio network, some $72 million. He dropped into ...

If the end had come, it would have halted once and for all the effort to reroute U.S. 41 around downtown Naples. From the looks of it, the second coming might be the only thing that will.

It will be difficult for the free spenders in Washington to characterize the budget plan being forwarded by U.S. Rep. Connie Mack and others as extreme. They’ll do it, but it will be difficult.

The letter, from someone purporting to be a successful restaurateur in Collier County for the past 16 years, is telling, not just in what it says about the role of migrant workers in our economy but in what it says ...

Things are at a stage where Hiller can’t get her colleagues to acknowledge she has a good point, even when she has one.

A veteran defense attorney says good intentions or not, judges just can’t order people held on charges that don’t yet exist.

Democrats want to draw a line in the sand. Naples has sand.

Muslim sensitivities carry a lot of weight these days.

I was going to write a column about all the annoyances in my life. I changed my mind.

Imagine waking up on Nov. 7, 2012 to a headline, “Presidential race too close to call, Florida ballots in dispute _ again.”

It is universally agreed that the latest search for a Collier County school superintendent was superior to the one preceding it.

Getting the right person the right way is only one step toward a successful superintendency.

The president had a perfect opportunity to pay a little more and limit the itemized deductions of a wealthy taxpayer _ himself _ and chose not to do so.

The folks at Third Way, a policy institute in Washington, D.C., have devised a tax receipt calculator that shows you how your money is being spent.

Televised bi-weekly meetings of the Collier County Commission have taken on a soap opera quality with all the elements of a tangled yarn.

It’s been long apparent that what a politician says isn’t always what he means. A device that could discern the true meaning would be especially helpful these days.

The odds of a hurricane hitting Collier County this year are about the same as the odds of the Marlins winning the World Series.

I learned that Everglades National Park doesn’t shut down, even when Everglades National Park is shut down.

Schiffer, marketing specialist for Silverspot cinema at The Mercato, has made it her mission to get the film “Atlas Shrugged” shown in Naples on April 15, the day of its limited national release.

Designers say the effect on their industry clashes with the stated purpose of the bill worse than purple portieres and a lime green etagere.

If Senate Bill 736 was a boot stomping on the status quo of public education in Florida, then the other boot is about to fall.

Like many of the lobbying groups that operate in Tallahassee, the NCSR is funded by people with a lot to gain or lose financially depending on what happens to the bills they target.

Airport officials insist that the self-imposed 75,000-pound limit on planes using the airport is safe and the extensions are being built to handle planes that large and no larger.

U.S. Rep. Connie Mack has scheduled a “major announcement” today regarding the race for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Democrat Bill Nelson.

You could say there’s budding interest in medical marijuana in Tallahassee.

That sounds like good growth management. It also sounds a lot like the state-required Growth Management Plan the county has had in place for years.

Small comfort, no doubt, to those who fought against a longer runway at Naples Airport, but the prohibition against larger jets there is set in concrete.

The decision against Bowen and his parents, Shawn Bowen and Elizabeth Lasanta, boiled down to this: While the dog may be of great benefit to the boy and his family as they conduct their lives, it is not necessary in ...

Somewhere between here and Sarasota someone lost 7,000 jobs.

Rail projects here and abroad have a track record of cost overruns and disappointing ridership.

What makes it even more remarkable is that in addition to all that, it will also find time to consider bills that, while no doubt important to their sponsors, don’t exactly rise to the standard of critical state concern.

Unlike the federal plan, I can absolutely guarantee there will be no cost overruns in the construction of new lines of travel.

We learned in 2006 and 2008, the main factor in the price of gasoline is the occupant of the White House.

It is in the area of criminal justice that the report departs furthest from accepted practice.

"If you can pay someone $52 million to play the game of baseball, certainly you can build your own stadium with your own money.”

Those intimate shops can prove intimidating to the average Joe who can’t tell Manet from a Monet or who thinks Renoir is most famous for manufacturing Le Car.

Spending $2 billion to build something will certainly create jobs in the near term. But if what they build isn’t useful or operates at a loss year after year, is it really an economic benefit?

Now comes an e-mail from Friends of Connie Mack, Mack’s campaign fundraising organization.

Mack has been touted as a possible challenger to Democrat Bill Nelson for Nelson’s Senate seat in 2012. He’s done little to quash that speculation.

As much as 25 percent of traffic on U.S. 41 is headed to points far removed from downtown, preliminary studies show.

Collectively, they seem to be saying that government simply cannot function with less money than it is now taking in.

At least the football game was good. That’s something, I guess.

Lots of people in Southwest Florida who aren’t football fans will be tuning in to watch the Super Bowl, many simply to see advertisers try to outdo each other in advancing specific beliefs.

While it sounds like a no-brainer, there’s been no meeting of the minds yet and a national Republican leader is starting to get antsy.

What happened to the Hiltons is an example of a rare but elusive glitch in the county’s state-of-the art emergency dispatch system.

States are lining up to set their presidential preference primary dates and Florida, as has been the case in recent years, will be key.

There are still those in the community who aren’t so savvy regarding the sort of fine dining that accompanies wine of such caliber.

National politics is a competitive field, to put it mildly, and its practitioners clearly aren’t about to adopt Milquetoast language to replace the combative verbiage to which they’ve become accustomed.

So, Collier County having apparently missed out on an opportunity to lure Jackson Laboratory and be home to one of the newest industries on the planet _ personalized medicine based on research into the human genome _ it is only ...

If you have the sense that the controversy over a St. Matthew’s House’s proposal to build a homeless shelter in Bonita Springs seems familiar, it’s probably because it is.