Per Florida folklore, when the animals make tracks, it's time to take notice.
When critters of all species travel together, it's to save their own hides from an approaching hurricane.
Hey.
Check who's headed for higher ground.
Gov. Charlie Crist has failed to offer the City of Miami a hand up out from under the Julia Tuttle Causeway as discussed by the Miami Herald's Fred Grimm, 6/4/09:
(...)(City Commissioner) Sarnoff and City Manager Pete Hernandez rightly described the makeshift encampment as an unsanitary, festering mess. Except Sarnoff seems to think the solution is to make a disgraceful situation even worse.
To give him credit, however, he has managed an extraordinary feat, creating unlikely allies out of the ACLU and the Florida Department of Corrections.
Sarnoff's flawed reasoning began when he addressed the letter to a governor who would sooner give up his private plane than take on a politically risky problem like homeless sex offenders. For months now, Crist has been ignoring pleas from South Florida politicians to find a statewide alternative to these crazy local laws.
And Sarnoff and Hernandez surely know that Miami, of all places, can't go around busting homeless folk. The city was thoroughly whacked in U.S. District Court 13 years ago for regularly rounding up street people like dog catchers going after strays.
To resolve the embarrassing lawsuit, the city signed a consent decree pledging that Miami policemen would refrain from chasing homeless squatters off public property unless they were relocated to a proper shelter.
But Miami's homeless shelters -- and essentially all of South Florida's affordable housing -- fall within forbidden zones. Homeless shelters can't take in the Tuttle Causeway castaways.
Valerie Jonas, who worked on the original homeless lawsuit, made it clear Wednesday that the ACLU would charge back into federal court if the city cops violate the 1996 decree out on the Tuttle.
Besides, sex offenders stuck under the causeway aren't there by chance. DOC parole officers, unable to find suitable housing, told them that the middle of Biscayne Bay would be their only legal address in Miami-Dade County. They're loitering on state property because the state put them there. Which would make the city's next venture in federal court even more tenuous.
INSANE LAWS
A homeless camp in the middle of the bay, of course, is a mad, awful predicament. But the solution is to enact saner laws, replacing the over-reaching, insane hodgepodge of city and county residency restrictions that leave sex offenders with no place to live.
But rather than reform the residency ordinances that made them homeless, Sarnoff wants sex offenders busted for being homeless. It's no more a solution than Picnic #4 is a park.
NBC's To Catch a Predator. Canceled.
Controversy finally canceled Dateline NBC’s popular “To Catch a Predator” series. Although it wasn’t the only program to profit from the sordid world of sexual abuse, it was the first to transform audiences’ strange fascination with sexual crimes into a commodity.
To produce the show, Dateline NBC paid the controversial citizens’ organization Perverted-Justice.com, which recruits volunteers to pose as underage Internet users to lure online predators to pursue sexual liaisons. Dateline producers funded the organization, which then staged confrontations between the predators and reporter Chris Hansen, who grilled them before their arrests.
Although Dateline producers marketed the program as an investigation, which reports the news as it currently exists, they were, in fact, helping to produce the news themselves by spearheading antipredator initiatives alongside Perverted-Justice.
There lies one of the show’s significant moral blemishes: A journalist’s responsibility is to report the news, not create it and then cover it.
(...)
And catching a slap as the eye of the storm slowly passes over....
A central player in the prosecution of an East Bay doctor arrested in a televised sex-predator sting in Petaluma has been ordered to appear before a Sonoma County judge to explain how crucial data on his computer apparently was lost.Computer chat logs reflecting sexually tinged online conversations gathered by a decoy affiliated with a vigilante group are key to the prosecution of Dr. Maurice Wolin, 51, of Piedmont.
Wolin, along with 28 others, was arrested in August 2006 during a three-day sting law enforcement conducted in partnership with a group called Perverted Justice and the NBC-TV show "To Catch a Predator."
He is challenging the authenticity of the online chats police say he engaged in with the decoy, Xavier Von Erck, a founder of the online group. Von Erck and other online decoys posed as young teens who arranged to meet adult men ostensibly for sex.
Von Erck, who calls members of his group "evil vigilantes," testified that the chats were saved on his home computer hard drive. But after a judge late last year ordered that mirror images of the hard drive be turned over to defense attorneys, Von Erck told prosecutors his hard drive had crashed in February 2007 and the data was irretrievably lost.
(...)"To date, no legally sufficient evidence of Mr. Von Erck's claim has been presented to this court," Judge Arthur Andy Wick wrote in an order made public this week.
Von Erck didn't mention the crash during his testimony at Wolin's lengthy preliminary hearing in September 2007.
Staebell said Von Erck only recently notified his investigators of the crash. He said the chats were also preserved on Perverted Justice's main proxy server at a remote location.
Wick tentatively ruled last month that prosecutors needed to provide a fuller explanation of Von Erck's claim and the current status of the hard drive. On Tuesday he issued a more specific, written ruling.
Wick ordered that Von Erck appear before the court June 15 and bring with him his computer hard drive "in whatever condition it is in."
(...)
"It was like being in the eye of a hurricane. You'd wake up in a concert and think, Wow, how did I get here?"
--John Lennon
