Good morning! It's a little chilly out today, so make sure you wear your padded buccaneer captain's coat.
So a bunch of middle-aged men dressed as pirates fake-accosted the mayor of Tampa, so he could fake-refuse their demands and thus kick off several weekends' worth of public intoxication. This would be embarrassing, except every city in America has its own thing where it tries to turn itself into a living light-beer commercial for a bit every year. So here's to you, I guess, Swashbuckling Men of Influence.
Toys"R"Us is shuttering two Tampa Bay locations, one in Tampa and one in St. Pete, as part of a nationwide swath of bankruptcy-induced closings. Economic authorities are blaming the growth of online shopping and "the fulfillment economy," and not the fact that for decades most parents would rather rupture their own eardrums with a hot soldering iron than endure a trip to Toys"R"Us.
A few representatives with a particularly weak grasp of the concept of separation of church and state have introduced a bill to the Florida legislature requiring all schools and school administration buildings to bear the words "In God we trust." Their second choice for a slogan, "Warning: facts inside," just seemed a little too curt and fearmonger-y.
And finally, a petition to get a constitutional amendment restoring voting rights for felons who've paid their debt to society on the November state ballot has far surpassed its required number of signatures, and the issue will appear on the ballot as Amendment 4. Somewhere in Tallahassee a group text between white dudes elected to law-and-order positions is causing phones to smoke.
This article appears in Jan 18-25, 2018.