We made it to Friday. Good work. Your regularly scheduled Scott Harrell Shit returns Monday.
But before we crack our lunchbeers, let's look at Thursday, without which we couldn't have done it.
The nation is once again reeling in the wake of another mass shooting, this time at a community college in Southwest Florida, where a gunman killed nine (and was shot by police). It's unclear what the shooter's motive was or whether he got his guns legally. Thursday night, a visibly fed-up President Obama said the only way we can prevent more mass shootings is to stop electing people who scrawl "I <3 Marion Hammer" all over their notebooks. Phosphate giant Mosaic was ordered to set aside a $1.8 billion fund to deal safely with "60 billion pounds of hazardous waste at three central Florida and one Louisiana phosphate manufacturing facilities." The company's radioactive phosphogypsum stacks and chemical waste pose an obvious scary, scary threat to the surrounding environment, and have been known to spill over into surrounding lands and waterways. But don't worry, the industry probably argues, those three-eyed fish you're catching in the Alafia River aren't mutated; they're "enhanced."
Speaking of people really not giving a crap about Florida's natural lands and wildlife, a judge denied environmentalists' request to halt the Florida black bear hunt scheduled for Oct. 24 in anticipation of an accurate census of the state's bear population, making national village idiot Ted Nugent's visit to the state imminent.
Speaking of people we'd rather not host, Mike Huckabee and Donald Trump (both part-time Florida residents) have been confirmed as attending the November GOP summit in Orlando.
This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2015.