The stupidity is fast, furious and funny this week. Enjoy!
- Kentucky’s state Office of Charitable Gaming has won a $36,300 grant from homeland security funds to prevent terrorists from playing bingo. “It’s almost ludicrous,” said Rick Bentley, a Henry Clay High School sports booster as he volunteered last Thursday at a noisy, smoke-filled Lexington bingo parlor. “The thought would never even enter my mind.”
- New York state attorney general Eliot Spitzer, continuing his campaign of Native American and smoker harassment, has coerced United Parcel Service into refusing to ship cigarettes. Spitzer wants to collect taxes from cigarettes sold on Indian reservations in the state and prevent them from being sold to anyone from outside the reservations without paying state cigarette taxes.
- Remember those $2,000 FEMA debit cards issued to Katrina victims? It turns out that at least 51,000 of them were fraudulently obtained. We’re going to have to build a dozen new prisons to hold all those people. Or let the non-violent drug offenders go.
- And I saved the best for last. Among the state of Florida’s biggest targets for terrorists are the live mermaids of Weeki Wachee Springs in Weeki Wachee, and the fake dinosaurs at Dinosaur World, in Plant City. The sites are listed on the Department of Homeland Security’s list of sites it wants “hardened” against terrorist attacks under its Buffer Zone Protection Program. (PDF)
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Lenny Zimmermann
Oct 27, 2005
The thing that ticks me off the most is that with Katrina fund debit cards getting into the hands of the fraudulent, the way those crooks use the cards ends up giving New Orleans a really, really bad reputation. Sometimes that rep is deserved, I’ll give you that (more generally true in the State legislature, though, IMHO), but even so for a city that has so much national attention shining on it right now that survives, economically, on tourism, these kinds of blows at that city’s reputation could have devastating economic consequences for a city that, especially at this time, can ill afford it. The misplaced blame being placed on the city, as opposed to the individual crooks responsible, is certainly a grave travesty, just as all of the wildly inacurate rumors of the supposed improprieties occuring in the Superdome where so vastly publicized, yet not much follow-up has occurred in the national media to apologize for the spreading of those false rumors.
It just disgusts me and pains me deeply the injustice of it all.
Benjamin Geiger
Oct 29, 2005
I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but Dinosaur World is the last place I’d expect a terrorist to hit. It ranks right up there with the port-a-potties at the construction zone in Haines City.
I literally didn’t realize that Dinosaur World was still open. I drive by it a couple times per week (I live near Orlando and attend classes in Tampa) and it looks derelict. It has a severe ‘Lester’s Possum Park’ atmosphere to it.