We want to talk a little (okay, it is going to be a lot) about the saga of former Palm Bay City Attorney Andrew Lannon. There are some things that we have spoken about, and there are some things of which you may not be aware. We also want to comment on some recent developments.
On April 12, 2018, Lannon sent an email to the City Council announcing his resignation. We covered that in this post. We also covered the reason for his leaving in another post.
As it happens, we had an meeting with the Mayor Capote the following day – Friday the 14th.
As many of you know, we had been fighting with Lannon and in some regards Councilman Holton over the disclosure of the existence of emails that we knew the City had not disclosed. (See here, here, and here for the background.)
We contend that if the City wants to redact or not disclose emails, they may do so under two conditions:
First, they must provide the statutory or case law allowing the non-disclosure. Secondly, they must disclose the existence of the emails. The City cannot say, as Lannon and Holton did, “we withheld emails. Period.” The reason for the disclosure is so the requesting party can seek to have the emails made produced if they do not meet the criteria of the law. A petition is made to a judge who reviews the the emails and then determines whether the disclosure exemption is valid. However, if the City doesn’t disclose the reason they are claiming the exemption or the number of emails affected, etc., that legal safeguard is illegally voided by the City’s actions.
In correspondence with Lannon, he refused to disclose emails as required under the law. It is our belief that Lannon and therefore the City was acting outside of the Florida Statutes.
At a November Council meeting at which Lannon was not present, after we discussed the situation in front of the City Council, no one on the Council seemed to care about the City’s legal violations. Well, that’s not entirely true. Councilman Bailey asked then Assistant City Attorney Smith whether we were correct. (more…)
You may have heard of the lawsuit the Democratic National Convention has filed against everyone it seems over the Clinton loss in 2016 to Donald Trump.
The lawsuit, (seen below) is a hodgepodge of accusations that taken together, make no sense. None. Zero. Nada zilch.
(UPDATED with Orlando shooting of a carjacker at the bottom of this post.)
Florida Today Executive Editor Bob Gabordi has what can be described as an “interesting” opinion piece on the Florida Today site. By “interesting,” we mean one that is just really strange and lacking in so many things.
Let’s talk about ‘good guy’ without a gun who saved lives in Tennessee Waffle House
James Shaw Jr. is the guy who never gets mentioned in the gun debate. He’s the “good guy” without a gun.
Early Sunday morning, Shaw, 29, rushed a bad guy with a gun who had opened fire at a Waffle House near Nashville, Tennessee. The gunman killed four people and Shaw felt trapped, thinking he might be next.
Local police say Shaw decided not to be a victim and rushed the shooter, disarmed him and threw the assault rifle he was carrying over the Waffle House counter. He took his chance when he saw the gunman look down at his rifle, as if he had to reload. Thank God.
Why do we think heroes always have to have a gun?
Why do we not talk more about people like Shaw?
Yes, there are a lot of people who choose not to have a weapon. Yet as Garboldi states, James Shaw, Jr. was in a no-win situation. “Not wanting to be a victim,” the police and Garbordi say. What is missing is that the patrons in the restaurant were going to be victims because no one in Waffle House was carrying a weapon. You see, it is against Waffle House policy to allow weapons into their restaurant. They do make exceptions for law enforcement, but have known to refuse service to a National Guard Soldier wearing a side arm.
So let’s be clear about this: the shooter walked into a restaurant as a wolf amongst the sheep. Shaw was placed in the position of being a victim because of the choices others made for him and other patrons – choices that included banning weapons on the premises. (more…)
Last Saturday afternoon in Washington, D.C. an aide to Nancy Pelosi visited the Bishop of the Catholic Cathedral in D.C. He told the Cardinal that Nancy Pelosi would be attending the next day’s Mass, and asked if the Cardinal would kindly point out Pelosi to the congregation and say a few words that would include calling Pelosi a saint.
The Cardinal replied, “No. I don’t really like the woman, and there are issues of conflict with the Catholic Church over some of Pelosi’s views.” Pelosi’s aide then said, “Look, I’ll write a check here and now for a donation of $100,000 to you if you’ll just tell the congregation you see Pelosi as a saint.”
The Cardinal thought about it and said, “Well, the Church can use the money, so I’ll work your request into tomorrow’s sermon.” As Pelosi’s aide promised, Nancy Pelosi appeared for the Sunday worship and seated herself prominently at the forward left side of the center aisle. As promised, at the start of his sermon, the Cardinal pointed out that Ms. Pelosi was present.
The Cardinal went on to explain to the congregation, “While Ms. Pelosi’s presence is probably an honor to some, the woman is not numbered among my personal favorite personages. Some of her most egregious views are contrary to tenets of the Church, and she tends to flip-flop on many other issues. Nancy Pelosi is a petty, self-absorbed hypocrite, a thumb sucker, and a nit-wit. Nancy Pelosi is also a serial liar, a cheat, and a thief. I must say, Nancy Pelosi is the worst example of a Catholic I have ever personally witnessed. She married for money and is using her wealth to lie to the American people. She also has a reputation for shirking her Representative obligations both in Washington and in California . The woman is simply not to be trusted.”
The Cardinal concluded. “But, when compared with Hillary Clinton, Ms. Pelosi is a saint.”
Former First Lady Barbara Bush passed away this past week and was laid to rest yesterday.
(Courtesy AF Branco at Comically Incorrect.)
The quote in Branco’s cartoon is from a commencement address Mrs. Bush gave to the 1990 graduating class of Wellesley College. Her appearance there would not be without controversy:
According to [Edward] McNally, a presidential speechwriter called to the East Wing to join the first lady’s team in preparing for graduation season, the address she would give at Wellesley was essentially the same as she would give at St. Louis University and other schools that year.
But Wellesley would be different. Students there had voted to invite African American writer Alice Walker, who declined. After Bush was announced, some seniors complained. Bush may have been a Smithie, but she had dropped out at 19 to marry a patrician young Navy pilot named George H.W. Bush. Not quite the Wellesley way, 150 of them said in a petition protesting the choice.
“To honor Barbara Bush as a commencement speaker is to honor a woman who has gained recognition through the achievements of her husband, which contravenes what we have been taught over the last four years at Wellesley,” it read.
The controversy grew. President Bush publicly defended his wife’s life choices. Pundits weighed in and Barbara Bush, who had never been a lightning rod, found herself at the center of a national debate about the nature of feminism that would continue for decades.
As you listen and watch the speech, you can see in Barbara Bush a certain class and grace that seems to be missing in politics and the public eye today. Instead of being vindictive and attacking those who had attacked her, she “flipped the script” and acknowledged the protests and then moved onto her message, refusing to be drawn into the trumped up controversy.
Her speech, her advice, and her exhortations are the stuff of legend.
You hear it all the time: the AR-15 rifle is a gun whose only function is to kill during wars. It is not good for home defense. No one would ever need a magazine that holds more than 10 rounds. Buy a shotgun instead for defense. It is the rhetoric from the left and so called “gun grabbers” (they are often the same group) that deny one thing: facts.
In a case where real world facts meets rhetoric, the winner was the real world facts.
GLEN ST. MARY, Fla – Three men say they were asleep inside a mobile home in Glen St. Mary about 4 a.m. Sunday when they heard a voice outside yell “Sheriff’s Office!” before the front door burst open.
In stormed a masked gunman who fired off a single round before two of the men inside, one armed with an AR-15 rifle and the other with a handgun, emerged from two bedrooms and opened fire.
Gunfire ripped into the masked gunman and two other intruders, who crumpled to the floor with multiple gunshot wounds.
Those details surfaced Tuesday when the Baker County Sheriff’s Office released an arrest report linked to this weekend’s home invasion turned deadly triple shooting.
Five people are charged in the case. Investigators suspect the home invasion escalated from an ongoing feud between two groups that was stoked by social media threats.
The victims told deputies they acted in self-defense when they turned their guns on the intruders, with one of them estimating he fired over 30 rounds from an AR-15 before the threat was over. (more…)
Stop us if you heard this one before: government agency requires dairy to label milk from a cow as an “imitation dairy product.”
If you have been paying attention and following this blog for a little bit, you may remember that in 2016 we covered the strange case of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumers Services (DACS) outlawed a farm that skimed the fat off of their milk creating “skim milk” from labeling the milk as “skim milk” because the DACS was following federal guidelines that say that if a creamery removes the fat from milk, it must also add vitamin A and D back into the milk. It is somewhat important to note that the DACS was following Federal Department of Agriculture guidelines on what could be called “skim milk.” The DACS did not have to follow those guidelines, but chose to do so.
For those creameries that are advertising their products to be “100% natural,” the labeling rule presents a problem in that the creamery cannot add the vitamins and claim to be “100% natural” (and they don’t want to add the vitamins) or their natural milk product had to be labeled as an “imitation milk product” under the law.
However, the ruling only applied to the State of Florida which brings us to the case of the South Mountain Creamery, a farm in western Maryland.
South Mountain has been legally selling its products in Maryland (which doesn’t have the ridiculous labeling requirements) and wanted to expand their market into Pennsylvania. Upon writing Pennsylvania officials, South Mountain was told that Pennsylvania labeling law is the same as the Maryland law but there was a problem.
Because the milk would be crossing state lines the milk would have to comply with federal labeling standards – the ones that require the natural skim milk to be labeled as “imitation milk” or “imitation dairy product.”
The owner of South Mountain Creamery, Randy Sowers, is taking the FDA to court and like the farm in Florida, is being represented by the Institute for Justice.
Now Randy is taking steps to stop the FDA’s ban of honest labels. He is suing the FDA in federal court in the Middle District of Pennsylvania for violating his constitutional right to free speech.
This means, of course, that federal tax dollars will be used to defend a non-nonsensical rule that was made by an unelected official in some back room years ago. (more…)
