It turns out that incoming state House Speaker Marco Rubio of Miami is more than a free-spending interior decorator. He went right for big-insurance's jugular yesterday by demanding all the background data and analyses the industry uses to set its rates in Florida. (No can do, says the research firm that sells the data to insurers, because then any start-up could copy what we do and cut into our income.) (Can do, said Consumer Federation of America's insurance maven, Robert Hunter, because the secret research models are evidence of illegal collusive behavior by big insurance, since so many companies use the same models.) The suspicious part, of course, is that big insurance abruptly went from its 100-yr-tracking model to predict 101st-yr behavior, and instead started using a last-5-yr model to predict 6th-yr behavior, which unquestionably makes 2007 and beyond much, much scarier (and therefore, much more rate-intensive) than the 100-yr model ever would. [Tampa Tribune]
Loving Parents For the second time in a year, Dietrich Doerfler Sr. and his wife, of Casselberry, have been arrested for helping their severely-perverted adult son (a registered sex offender), who is locked up without bail on capital sex battery charges. Last yr, according to deputies, they helped shred his child porn so cops wouldn't find it. And now, according to deputies, the old man called up a young victim and offered her $1k if she'd decide not to testify against Dietrich Jr. [WKMG-TV (Orlando)]
"4NIKATE"? I Don't Get It Here's TheSmokingGun.com's collection of actual letters filed in Tallahassee complaining about various personalized license plates. And it's not just hypersensitive evangelicals here. [TheSmokingGun.com]
Your Daily Loser Computer porn suspect (in jail in Tampa on $1.8 million bail) John Hoagland was allowed a furlough to attend the funeral of his adult son and ex-wife in New York. Let us count the ways in which Mr. Hoagland has had a tough 60-plus years: in two tours in Vietnam, a head injury and Agent Orange exposure; struck by lightning; twice attempted suicide; injured in two different ultralight plane crashes (the latter, in 2002, leaving him disabled), and then of course allegedly a massive child-porn stash on his computer, and finally, his son and ex-wife, driving to see him from New York, killed in a one-car crash. [St. Petersburg Times]
More Things To Worry About Today Matthew Schlagheck, 23, nakedly cavorting in traffic to celebrate the minutes-old Gator win early Tuesday morning, was hit by a car and is in critical condition [Orlando Sentinel] . . . . . Another guy who needs a mugshot makeover before he faces a jury: accused Plant City carjacker John Mullaly [WTSP-TV (St. Petersburg)] . . . . . A utility worker in, er, Fruit Park (St. Johns County), was trapped waist-deep in a mud pit, and apparently it's not that easy to get someone out of a mud pit [Florida Times-Union] . . . . . Well, rape is not supposed to be about sex, but, still, authorities in Miramar say a 27-yr-old woman was raped merely out of payback because her husband owed the guy money, and, the kicker: When he said her husband's name, it wasn't her husband's name [Miami Herald] . . . . . A man was arrested in Orlando for hammering through a wall at Young's Food Market to get beer (which he later told police he was powerless to resist because of his addiction) [Florida Today] [Link Corrected] . . . . . Follow-Up: City Commissioner Bart Roper of Cooper City (Broward), who was arrested in November slumped over his steering wheel drunk as a skunk [The F State, 11-30-2006], told reporters yesterday that he won't resign and that he'd like to apologize but that his lawyer won't let him [Miami Herald] . . . . . Latest SUV in the bottom of the swimming pool: In Sanford, a guy knocked it into reverse while trying to jumpstart it, and, well, Jose Lopez barely got out in time [WFTV (Orlando)].
This article appears in Jan 10-16, 2007.