Oh Hey There’s A Shark In The Middle Of The Road, Guess The State: Your Florida Roundup

Let us take a break from the perpetual celebration of the arrival of Editrix Jr., our future overlord, peace be upon her , to remind ourselves that all is not so precious and beautiful in the world, and places like Florida still exist. To wit:  Where the fuck else would you find a headline like this ?

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OAK HILL -- A truck carrying several sharks crashed on I-95 in Volusia County as heavy storms crossed Central Florida on Wednesday afternoon.

According to the Florida Highway Patrol, the trailer crashed after a tire became separated from the vehicle near Oak Hill. The semi traveled into the median and stopped at a tree line.

One shark died. The others are fine.

Speaking of Sharks

Marco Fucking Rubio, that vacuous little cypher, Miami’s pride and joy. The New York Times took a run at our thirsty boy-king this week , pointing out that while he has Big Plans for our economy — which we imagine mainly involves instructing The Poors to waddle over to Wall Street, drop trou and let Jamie Dimon have his way with them — he’s not been quite so good managing his own money, of which he does not have much even though he is a Senate Republican, a job title that basically comes with a seven-figure bank account.

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Among the serious contenders for the presidency, Mr. Rubio stands out for his youth, for his meteoric political rise — and for the persistent doubts about his financial management, to the point that Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign flagged the issue when vetting Mr. Rubio as a possible running mate in 2012, interviews show.

Many of those troubles have played out in an unusually public way, leading even some of his supporters to worry. As he rose in politics, he sometimes intermingled personal and political money — using a state Republican Party credit card years ago to pay for a paving project at his home and for travel to a family reunion, and putting his relatives on campaign payrolls.

Other moves seemed simply unwise: A few weeks ago, he disclosed that he had liquidated a $68,000 retirement account, a move that is widely discouraged by financial experts and that probably cost him about $24,000 in taxes and penalties.

In the past week, he sustained a new loss when he sold his second home in Florida’s capital, Tallahassee, for $18,000 less than he and a friend paid for it a decade ago. The house had previously faced foreclosure after Mr. Rubio and his friend failed to make mortgage payments for five months.

Fiscal responsibility for thee, not for me!

Probably the worst part of this is not Marco buying a big, dumb boat; if you live in Miami and are not A Poor, you have to have a boat, it’s the law. Using the state party credit card to pave his driveway, though: not cool. Neither is this : “There are multiple instances of Rubio putting family members in important political roles, the Times said. His wife Jeanette, for instance, served as the treasurer of a pro-Rubio political action committee, which Rubio called a bad idea.”

Rubio, being Rubio, is now using the Times “hit piece” to raise money, and it will probably work because Republicans are exactly that gullible. Just make the checks out to “cash,” guys.

More Sharks!

Jeb Fucking Bush. Scion of The Smart Bush, brother of The Dumb Bush, a self-declared Hispanic American whose pedigree is as gringo as they come (except for the place he sticks his sperm stick every now and again).

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Ol’ Jeb, who is quickly finding new and inventive ways to squander a cakewalk over imbeciles to the GOP nomination, was back in the news this week defending a book he wrote in 1995 about how single moms are dirty sluts and should be shamed so that they stop slutting everywhere .

One of the reasons more young women are giving birth out of wedlock and more young men are walking away from their paternal obligations is that there is no longer a stigma attached to this behavior, no reason to feel shame.

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That is not how you win the vagina vote, Jeb! And so Team Jeb is trying to walk this back, saying that reporters reporting on the crazy shit a now-presidential candidate wrote back in the day is NO FAIR and a CHEAP SHOT. Jebby announced that his views had “evolved” — just like Barack Obama’s views on The Gays have evolved, shut up liberal media — only not really :

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“My views have evolved over time, but my views about the importance of dads being involved in the lives of their children hasn’t changed at all,” Bush told reporters in Warsaw, according to MSNBC.

“In fact, since 1995 … this was a book about cultural indicators [and] the country has moved in the wrong direction,” he added. “We have a 40-plus percent out-of-wedlock birth rate.”

See, guys, he was right about the sluts! This is a winning message, no doubt.

Speaking of Reptiles

Elsewhere in Florida, this is a headline:  Florida Woman Has Iguana Plunged from Her Clogged Toilet .

A Florida family got a slimy surprise from their clogged toilet.

Marian Lindquist, 51, called a plumber when she couldn’t get her toilet unclogged on Sunday, only to find out the problem backing up the system was an iguana, she told ABC News today.

“I heard the plumber scream, and I ran over to our bathroom where she was,” she said.

Lindquist, a probate lawyer, said even she couldn’t believe what she saw in her toilet bowl — a nearly 18-inch bright-green iguana — hooked to the plumber’s auger.

DNA tests have since confirmed the iguana to be the bastard child of our Reptile-in-Chief, Rick Scott.

Oh, right, Voldermort, he was doing stuff this week, too. Like helping Jeb lock up the Florida chick vote nice and solid .

Women will have to wait 24 hours before having an abortion under a bill Republican Gov. Rick Scott signed into law today, a reflective period supporters said they hoped would change some women’s minds before ending their pregnancies.

See, little ladies, if you just go and have a nice, long think about things, you’ll come to the right conclusion. This is not condescending at all.

Words of Advice

If you are plotting a crime, let alone a capital felony, it might be best not to do so on Facebook .

Daytona Beach Police, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are conducting a joint investigation into a Facebook post. […] The post, belonging to Jammal Longmire, calls for people to pickup guns and kill police officers, police said.

Police said the man in the picture is holding two assault rifles.

Words That Amuse Us

There’s a guy in Central Florida, where your Florida Correspondent used to live, who is on trial for murder, and he is being prosecuted by state attorney Jeff Ashton, who is famous to the kind of people who watch Nancy Grace. Ashton, you’ll recall, prosecuted the murder trial of one Casey Anthony, a lovely Central Florida mother who ALLEGEDLY murdered her own daughter. It was quite embarrassing, because duh of course she did it. What a loser.

Anyway, because Florida voters are idiots, Ashton somehow parlayed that rousing defeat into the top job at the DA’s office, which brings us to the courtroom this week, and David Damus, who may or may not be a murderer, we don’t know. Either way, he has an admirably quick wit :

The murder trial of David Damus lost its quiet courtroom decorum Wednesday when the accused killer took the stand in his own defense and had a heated exchange with Orange-Osceola State Attorney Jeff Ashton.

"When you lost the Casey Anthony case that made you look bad," Damus told Ashton, who was lead prosecutor in the Orlando mother's murder trial that attracted international attention. "It wouldn't make you look good if I turned out to be innocent."

And We Shall End With a Nice Time!

Yr Wonkette had previously noted the story of Cameron Boland, the Florida go-getter who was all ready to be a National Honor Society something or other but then had to go whore it up by exposing her bare shoulders . (“Dirty little slut,” Jeb Bush says into the mirror, while fapping, probably.)

Well. It turns out thatslut-shamingupholding basic moral principles does not in fact go over well, so the National Honor Society prudes have officially reconsidered. Hooray for bare shoulders !

As we Wonksplained:

For once, and probably never again, the state of Florida is actually the source of some Nice Time! You might remember the story last week about Cameron Boland, the junior at Fort Myers High School who was stripped of her elected position as her county’s National Honor Society “Historian” — really more of a social-media/press relations job — because she gave her campaign speech wearing a sundress with excessively thin straps. (We keep seeing them described as “spaghetti straps,” but those are at least linguini straps.) Anyhow, all the negative publicity the story generated seems to have shamed the school district, or at least made it say “Oh well, what the hell,” and now the Lee County School District’s superintendent has given Cameron back the “Historian” position. Another girl who also had her NHS job taken away for being bare-shouldered has been restored to the position of NHS president for Lee County. The girls will share their positions with the students who were chosen to replace them, so that all noses may remain safely in joint.

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See, good things do happen in Florida every once in a while. Usually after a healthy dose of shame.

That’s it for this week, Florida. Make Jeb Bush proud and keep slutting it up!