"He left a very disturbing message with one of my staff people," said California state rep. Lorena Gonzalez. The caller: actor Rob Schneider, who said he would spend money to defeat Gonzalez because she supports a bill to eliminate the personal-belief exemption to vaccination laws. Gonzalez said Schneider was pleasant when she called him to discuss the issue. But "let's be honest," she went on, "that's 20 minutes of my life I'll never get back arguing [about science] with Deuce Bigalow, male gigolo."
Hey, don't click on email attachments. This lawyer did, which is why there's about $289,000 missing from his account and also why he prefers to remain anonymous.
HB 365 has been tabled, so it's still safe to wear tight-fitting beige clothing in Montana. The bill did not specifically ban yoga pants as was widely reported, but would have prohibited wearing any garment that "gives the appearance of or simulates" certain body parts, which the bill's sponsor apparently conceded that beige yoga pants might do. "Yoga pants should be illegal in public anyway," the sponsor said after a hearing, maybe semi-jokingly.
Jo-Lee Manning says her stepdad got a ticket on the Florida Turnpike in January for not stopping at a toll booth. That's news because he died in 1995. "Well, he's still responsible," said the helpful bureaucrat who answered Manning's call, defending Florida's right to its $5.61. According to the report, the Florida DOT says the error rate of its plate-scanning cameras is just .007%, but since they apparently give out 300,000 tickets every day, that's 21 wrongful charges per day. Probably not many of those people are dead, though.
Unfortunately not dead: Hampton, Florida, a crappy little town of 477 that was one of the nation's worst speed traps and which, as I mentioned here, was facing the death penalty for corruption. (Hampton "police" issued almost 13,000 tickets in just one year.) Turns out it managed to convince the state legislature it should not be abolished, partly by agreeing to give up the 1,200 feet of highway it had annexed solely for ticketing purposes.
A Minnesota man who claimed that the half-ounce bag of powder that police found in his car was "just vitamins" has been released because … it was just vitamins. An initial field test supposedly indicated it was meth, and bail was set at $250,000, which the defendant couldn't afford. This, and his refusal to plead guilty, meant he had to spend the next three months in jail, because that's how long it took prosecutors to get a more accurate test done. Are they really all that busy in Mankato, Minnesota? Maybe so.
