Happy Cinco de Mayo! If you're the sort of person who wants the only thing they get right about Mexican culture is the pronunciation of its least expensive beer, let's get yesterday's news out of the way so you can go ahead and planning to leave work early and begin your quaff-a-thon in celebration of ... the Battle of Puebla. Mexican Independence Day, FYI, is September 16.
(If you'd like to celebrate something a little more locally oriented and feely-goody today, remember that it's also Give Day Tampa Bay.)
A Harvard study of upward mobility ranked Hillsborough County 98th out of the nation's 100 largest counties in terms of the ability of children growing up in poor homes to go on to earn more money and rise out of poverty. To be fair, though, that makes Hillsborough's poor only slightly more boned than everybody else in America, a country in which you basically have to be born to a hedge fund manager or invent the next Sham-Wow in order to not find yourself stealing rotten lettuce from your neighbor's toxic garden by 2021.
In Brandon, a man who had been out of prison for less than a day was arrested for sexually assaulting a woman who was letting him sleep at her place. "Well, you know, not to make personal judgments or anything, but if you're gonna invite a criminal into your house, then maybe you should take responsibility for that criminal doing criminal things," thought about a thousand affluent men who will never, ever be an even remotely similar situation, ever.
And finally, the minister of a church in Clearwater has accepted a plea deal in which he cops to cashing more than $750,000 in tax refund checks paid out to stolen identities. Yup — not paying taxes at all wasn't enough, dude had to collect on the taxes others actually paid.
