Well, she must be. She's 31 yrs old and a political novice, running for a
city council seat in Tampa, yet she's apparently so breathtakingly promising
that a couple dozen employees of a car dealership in town (and some of their
relatives, even) have all donated the maximum $500 each to her campaign,
despite the fact that some of them don't even live in Tampa and some of them
don't look on paper like the kind of people with $500 to squander. And the
few contacted by the St. Petersburg Times said the candidate had
promised them nothing, nothing at all. Wow, what a candidate! Or, it could
be that the dealer himself is so disgusted with the incumbent guy's refusing
to let him expand his business that he's behind all the donations.
That must not be true, though, because, when the Times asked him
that, he denied it, so, Case Closed. [St. Petersburg Times]
Classic Palm Beach Potboiler
Fred Keller's re-trial started this week in West Palm Beach, where yet
another group of rapt jurors will decide whether he murdered his wife, 34
(half his age), to keep her from getting half of his $69m in their divorce.
Though Keller could have lived very well on $34.5m, the prosecutor pointed
out, "He did not want her to be his equal . . .." So Keller says it happened
like this, see: Keller and the wife and her brother met to sign some papers,
and the brother reached down and pulled out a small black thing, which was
really a cell phone but which Keller naturally assumed was a gun. So Keller
reached into his briefcase and pulled out his own gun, getting the drop on
the apparently extremely slow-to-shoot brother. The brother rushed Keller,
and they struggled, and while the gun was slightly within the brother's
control, it fired, killing the wife (but it wasn't enough in the brother's
control that he could shoot Keller). Then, Keller got control of the gun,
and shot the brother twice (but not fatally). Somewhere along the line,
Keller got a superficial gunshot wound. The brother will give way-different
testimony. [Palm Beach Post]
Pasco's Nudity Double Standard
The county may house more nudists per capita than anywhere else in the
country, but that doesn't mean women can dance nude in strip clubs. Nudists,
not "lewd"; nude dancers, "lewd." Except that to a lot of Pasco citizens who
form juries, nude dancing (even of the lap variety) isn't lewd, either.
Three more dancers were acquitted in jury trials recently, but no matter,
said a sheriff's spokesman. As long as other dancers are pleading guilty to
misdemeanors (because of time and closure issues), they'll keep sending
undercover deputies in to arrest the strippers. (However, deputies are
sometimes part of the problem, e.g., one admitted on the witness stand that
he personally wasn't offended at what he saw, and another said, yeah, sure,
he bought lap dances on his own time. Dancers in those cases were
acquitted.) [Tampa Tribune]
Your Daily Loser Driver Ralph Aviv, a bank loan officer, allegedly and fatally and
resoundingly smashed into a 250-lb. pedestrian late at night in Miami Beach,
but decided to keep going, to his dad's condo several miles north in
Aventura and turn in for the night. When police finally arrived, they were
doubtful that his blood-alcohol was still high enough to be good evidence,
but they were pretty sure they could use the glass shards still in his neck
(from his car's windshield). [Miami Herald]
More Things To Worry About Today The apparently exceptionally annoying Riviera Beach citizen, Fane Lozman,
had his disorderly-conduct charge dropped (stemming from his irritating
rants to the city council about its plans to redevelop the waterfront, where
Lozman lives in his houseboat) [Palm Beach Post] . . . . . State party pols
are contemplating moving the presidential primary up to February or so to
make it more influential, but then so are several other states, so
eventually the party nomination will be sewn up by January, in time for both
parties to be sick of their chosen candidates by the time the party
conventions roll around [Palm Beach Post] . . . . . Victoria's Secret at
Treasure Coast mall in Jensen Beach reported 400 pairs of $9 pink designer
panties stolen over the weekend, which is not exactly a huge money deal so
it might be just a guy with a big problem [TCPalm.com] . . . . . The state
Senate must have been proud of itself for passing that insurance-reform
package yesterday, but, really? singing "Kumbaya" on the floor? [New York
Times]
This article appears in Jan 17-23, 2007.