For starters, you have to understand that cops never, ever under any circumstance like to admit publicly when they have royally screwed up.

And that explains why, even as 23-year-old Rachel Hoffman was being laid to rest - a murder victim in a drug sting gone horribly awry, the Tallahassee Police Department was still reacting to the case as if it had nothing to do with this young woman’s demise.

Hoffman, a graduate of Florida State University was abducted during a Tallahasseee Police Department drug investigation. Her body was found several days later and two suspects - the focus of the original drug investigation - have been arrested.

By any reasonable standard in the hierarchy of drug trafficking Rachel Hoffman would never be confused with Pablo Escobar.

To be sure, Hoffman was no angel, having been busted on drug charges involving the possession of more than 20 grams of marijuana and ecstasy. And, in looking to catch a break on a possible jail term, without the knowledge of her attorney, Hoffman agreed to become an informant in making a case against two alleged drug dealers under suspicion, Deneilo Bradshaw, 23 and Andrea Green 25.

As part of the drug sting, Hoffman allegedly arranged to buy 1,500 ecstasy pills, some cocaine and a gun from Bradshaw and Green.

But something went horribly wrong. At the public park where the drug deal was supposed to go down, Hoffman called investigators to say the location had been changed. And despite warnings from detectives not to leave the park, Hoffman hung up. Her body was found two days later.

Rightfully so, the Tallahasseee Police Department has been criticized for its handling of the case.

Why was Hoffman not kept in visual contact with detectives during the operation?

Why was a young woman, who was hardly a career criminal, thrust into such a potentially dangerous criminal investigation?

Why did she hang up? Or did someone do it for her? We’ll probably never know.

And why was her legal counsel not consulted and informed about his client’s dealings with a police agency, which would have influenced the status of the criminal charges she was facing?

Meanwhile, a Tally department spokesman attempted to shift the blame to Hoffman for her own murder, citing the terminated phone call and the fact she violated “protocol” by leaving the park.

But how do police officials know she left the park voluntarily?

This was a young woman, a civilian untrained in police investigative procedures thrust into the middle of a drug sting because she was driven by anxiety over her own legal problem.

The Palm Harbor area woman was laid to rest earlier this week.

And perhaps the police will cynically argue that aside from the homicide thing, Rachel Hoffman turned out to be one swell informant.

After all, Bradshaw and Green are in jail aren’t they?

---

There are probably many reasons why the Italian airline Alitalia seems to be almost always teetering on the verge of bankruptcy - here is one of them.

To be sure, our family vacation in Greece was a dream trip.

We visited many of the country’s historical icons sucn as the Parthenon. We ate well. Drank well and even the Bombshell of the Balkans was able to reconnect with long-lost family members.

And to be more than fair, our flights aboard Alitalia from New York to Rome to Athens and returning back to the United States from Athens to Milan to New York, were very comfortable with commendable on-board service.

No problem - until we landed at JFK in New York.

It was then we discovered Zeus the Younger’s luggage, alas, had been lost.

And indeed is was the loss of his personal belongings, which prompted this letter from a Jessica Morales, Customer Relations Representative for the airline, dated May 5, 2008.

In the letter Ms, Morales stated that in order to process Plato the Younger’s lost baggage claim, the airline would require:
1) The original “property irregularity report” from JFK.
2) The original clear copy of his Alitalia ticket.
3) A copy his bag tag.
And 4) “Receipts where applicable.”

He was also told: “It is important that we receive this information within the next 30 days or your claim may no longer be honored. Upon receipt of the above requested information and documentation, we will investigate your claim. You will then be notified in writing as to how we will conclude the matter.”

Oh, did I mentioned the letter from Alitalia was dated May 5, 2008? And oh did I mention we took this ill-fated trip aboard Alitalia in - May, 2007?

It has taken Alitalia literally one full year to finally get around to dealing with a lost baggage claim - literally 365 days. And they were snitty about it, too!

It may come as something of a surprise to Alitalia, but hardly to the rest of us, that after a year since the flight home, the odds of a 21-year-old college student still being in possession of the paperwork demanded by the airline is about the same as Barry Bonds keeping a paper trail of every time he met with his, ... uh, “trainer.”

And now after 12 months of being treated with more indifference by Alitalia than George W. Bush eyeing the U.S. Constitution, the carrier is demanding we better come up with all the relevant documentation in the next 30 days - or else, they will continue to ignore us with even more fervent disreagrd than they have the preceding 12 months.

Tell you what Ms. Morales, it’s merely a sneaking suspicion but it’s become fairly apparent the recovery of our son’s luggage does not appear to be a big priority.

In the spirit of cross-Atlantic relations, we give up.

If you should happen upon the lad’s baggage, if you want, go ahead and keep it.

But we would advise you, whatever you do Ms. Morales do not open the bag. It’s contains mostly the dirty laundry of a college student accumulated after a 10-day Greek vacation - a year ago! No good will come of this.

And you think the canal of Venice are, uh, gamy!

---

Forget the wheel. Forget sliced bread. Forget scotch.

This may well go down as the greatest invention in the history of the world.

All hail - Kids Be Gone, a new device being installed at various locales around the nation designed to make teenagers, and other annoying children - go away.

I’ll take two.

According to its creators. Kids Be Gone is a wall-mounted box that emits loud, horrible, irritating sound at such a high-frequency decibel level only people roughly between the ages of 12 and early 20s can hear.

About a 1,000 units of Kids Be Gone have been sold in the United States and Canada, where they have been placed in areas where the youthful louts tend to congregate and loiter, generally just about anywhere I happen to be.

On second thought, I’ll take three.

Now if only the company that makes this wonderful, wonderful, wonderful item, could also produce a portable, hand-held version. Imagine the endless possibilities!

You are at a baseball game and there in front of you are two perfectly loathsome children engaged in beating each other up. ZAP! And off they go whining and holding their ears. And life is good.

You are in a movie theater trying to enjoy the film when a bunch of teenagers start babbling in total indifference to the rest of the patrons. Yep, this sure sounds like a call for Kids Be Gone! Ba-Bye.

Bratty children in the grocery stores, doltish kiddos with skateboards, even the misbehaving child in church - our prayers have been answered.

Really now can you think of a more important technological advance worthy of a Nobel Prize for something, than Kids Be Gone?

Come to think of it, I’ll take four.

---

It’s been said silence is golden - and deafening, too!

You could say, state Sen. Ronda Storms, R- You’re Alllllll Going To Hell!!!, has been hoisted on her own tongue.

Storms was being confronted last week on the Senate floor over her disingenuously titled “Academic Freedom Act,” which is little more than a ham-handed effort on her part to eventually wheedle the teaching of so-called “Intelligent Design” into the state’s biology classrooms, which just this year were allowed to enter the 21st Century to start teaching the settled science of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.

The Tug-Boat Annie of the Bible has denied in the past that her bill was indeed a stalking horse for the wizard-in-the-sky “Intelligent Design” advocates and it certainly would have been easy enough to merely restate her dubious position for the sake of her fellow senators.

Yet when she was asked repeatedly no fewer than four times by her colleagues whether, quite simply, the intent of her “Academic Freedom Act” (hardy-har-har) would allow science teachers supposedly teaching science to instead also teach “Intelligent Design” each time Maybelline’s worst nightmare ducked providing a direct answer.

Or perhaps, Valrico’s answer to the Tower of Babel preferred to that old adage, often attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than speak out and remove all doubt.”

In any event, you could say, by her vow of silence Storm’s fellow senators received their answer loud and clear and - scary.

---

Come this January, upon assuming office the next president of the United States will have to confront (in no particular order):
1) The war in Iraq.
2) An economy in free fall.
3) Rising gas prices.
4) Terrorism.
5) Global warming.
6) A crumbling infrastructure.
7) Restoring American credibility around the world.
8) A disgraceful public education system.
9) Rebuilding a stressed military.
10) A variety of complex multinational trade issues.

And then on the second day in office, things will really get busy.

So on Wednesday evening what consumed nearly the first 50 minutes of the ABC News Democratic presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama?

Who said what when? Whose preacher is an moron? What did so and so mean when he or she blah-blahed this, or yada-yadaed that?

Nearly half of a two-hour debate was preoccupied with the dodging sniper gaffe, the crazy minister rants and serving on the board of some organization with an old, radical hippie.

It was embittering, is what it was.

At the same time, George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson, who proved to be about as effectively inquisitive as Barney Fife, treated the debate as if this was an election for Moose Lodge president.

Roughly 12 minutes was spent on Iraq, about 15 minutes on the economy. Another 12 minutes was dedicated to gun and gun control, about the same amount of time allotted to affirmative action.

Or put another way, this debate was more fixated on Obama’s comments on the non-issue of the bitterness or lack thereof of Pennsylvania voters than the candidate’s views on the matters of state, they as president would have to deal with after the swearing in.

There is a reason so many people distrust the news media.

Wednesday night, thanks to ABC’s treatment of a presidential debate as if it was the Q&A portion of the Miss American contest, the public has one more - legitimate - beef.

---

Just as it is probably true that no good deed goes unpunished, so too is it fair to say that on the campaign trail no attempt at candor goes undemagogued by one’s opponents.

In recent days, Democratic presidential candidate, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama has had his head handed to him for committing two of the most cardinal sins one can commit on the stump.

First he spoke, with unabashed premeditation, the truth. Next, he had the audacity of hope to treat voters as if they were mature and intelligent enough to understand what he was saying. Uh-oh.

And for that, he has been accused of “elitism” by both his Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton and presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain, both of whom have been part of the Washington “elite” for more than three decades. Go figure.

Even worse for Obama, he made his remarks in San Francisco, which the drive-by bloviators regard as more communistic than Ho Chi Minh City.

But what really was Obama’s so-called gaffe?

We hear politicians claim constantly about how they offer straight talk, an honest view, unabashed candor. And when they do, the pol gets slapped around like Curly Howard.

In speaking to a group of supporters at a fund-raiser, Obama observed he had sensed a growing feeling of anxiety among the electorate, noting: “And it’s not surprising then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

And they problem with the truth is ...?

This is probably why I would make for a lousy political consultant, because if I were advising Obama, my only advice would be that the senator didn’t go far enough.

Does anybody seriously doubt there isn’t a wave of anger, discontent and yes bitterness out there among the voting public?

We are bogged down in a debacle in Iraq, which was based on a tissue of lies and has cost more than 4,000 American lives, more than 30,000 casualties and has displaced almost five million Iraqis.

The war and occupation has been administered by a level of incompetence rivaling Laurel and Hardy trying to push a piano up a flight of stairs. More than $18 billion in taxpayer monies have been lost to corrupt Iraqis officials and indeed in some instances has been used to fund the insurgency.

Economists estimate the ultimate financial price for George Bush’s phony war in Iraq with cost three trillion dollars - and that money will be borrowed.

Bitter? You better believe it.

In 2002, oil cost around $25-a-barrel. It is now $110-a-barrel, helping to fuel a recession.

Americans are losing their jobs and their homes to foreclosure.

It costs more to fill your tank, buy a loaf of bread or send your kid to school.

Bitter? Duh!

It is also true that in difficult times, people in small towns and large cities tend to turn more inwardly to their faiths.

Church attendance spiked in the weeks and months after the terrorists attacks of Sept. 11.

And it also true that in times of economic uncertainly, when people worry about their jobs, their futures, those fears are often self-defensively directed toward all manner of groups or issues.

Flip around the radio dial at almost any given moment and the anti-immigrant blabbering is cacophonous. Barack Obama simply dared to call attention to it.

It is certainly probable Obama’s remarks may well damage his poll numbers and perhaps even widen the gap of his likely defeat in the upcoming Pennsylvania primary.

No doubt, for the Obama camp that will be a disappointing, but hardly a bitter moment.

For how can you be bitter when you’re right?

---

A very simple question.

When the first work place murders occur as a result of the passage of the Florida’s newly legislated “Take Your Guns To Work” law, who should the grieving surviving family members send the burial expenses? Gov. Charlie Crist, who is expected to sign this nonsense into law? The Florida Legislature, which now made it easier for nut jobs in the office to start killing people?

Or perhaps the National Rifle Association and its Steve and Eydie of the Lock & Load crowd, former Florida House member, mortician Dennis Baxley and lobbyist Marion Hammer, who argued people with concealed weapons permits could take their weapons to the workplace, thus trumping the private property rights of employers to set the ground-rules of what is acceptable conduct on company grounds.

If you needed any argument about the rank hypocritical stupidity of this law, consider that the new statute would exempt certain workplaces like nuclear power plants, hospitals, jails and schools to continue to ban employees from bringing their weapons to work.

Why is that?

If the notion that citizens should be free to take their little guns onto the grounds of their employer as some sort of perverse adherence to the Second Amendment, why then shouldn’t that same “right” also extend to schools, nuclear power plants, jails and hospitals?

Well there’s a very simple reason why.

Workplace violence is a serious, national problem. The exemptions underscore rather vividly that the authors of the “Sucking Up To The NRA” bill understood quite clearly that there are indeed crazy, twisted, unhinged people in the workplace, who if they had easy access to a weapon would become even scarier whack-jobs who talk to themselves in the next cubicle.

So if it’s worth protecting employees who work in schools, power plants, hospitals and jails, why are other workers suddenly so expendable simply to lather up a powerful special interest group?

Even more surreal. The new law could well be found unconstitutional, as it was in Oklahoma.

Or put another way, this damaged, ridiculous legislation might already be legally DOA.

Well, better dead in the courts before the body bags start to pile up.

---

This was supposed to be an entry about Charlton Heston, the late actor who came to symbolize the very essence of the BIG, I tell ya, big epic movie.

Back in 1979, when I was the film critic for the Ministry of Truth, Heston, then 55, came to here to participate in a Canadian Club Pro-Celeb Tennis Classic event at the Bayfront Center. As a mega-star of his stature with “The Ten Commandments,” “Ben-Hur” and “Planet of the Apes” under his belt, the actor certainly didn’t have to make time for a scribbler of my humble journalistic bloodlines.

But he did and the result was a fairly wide-ranging interview in which Heston discussed his approach to roles, the art of move-making at the time and his own calculation of his worth to a fim, noting he never demanded the multimillion dollar salaries his peers insisted upon, preferring instead to take a percentage of the film’s gross.

“I think if the picture’s not a hit, then, I don’t deserve a million dollars,” Heston smiled. “Nobody is.”

Despite whether you agreed with Heston’s later image as an advocate for the NRA, the actor was classic, old-school Hollywood - courtly, gracious and unpretentious. Indeed, not long after my piece ran, Heston sent a handwritten letter, thanking me for MY time to talk to him. It was a very classy gesture.

In preparing to write this, I had to pull the actual newspaper clipping of the story from our archives.

Since about 1990, everything you have read in The Tampa Tribune has been electronically preserved. But prior to that year, the history of this newspaper has been kept in a series of massive vaults - on the original paper it was first printed upon.

As you might imagine, given Charlton Heston’s career, his clip file was thick with entries, including one yellowed story from 1953.

But it was first clip that fell out of Heston’s file, which brought back a flood of memories.

It was dated, Dec. 19, 1978, a wire story written by Jane Gregory for the Chicago Sun-Times Wire Service about Charlton Heston and a book he had authored, “The Actor’s Life.”

By-lines are fairly innocuous things in this business. Most people pay very little attention to them, unless, of course, what they just read had royally peeved them off and they want to know who to blame.

I had probably even read Jane Gregory’s piece on Heston at the time and forgotten about it. Many years later though, as fate would it, I would work with Jane Gregory, work with her up until the day she died in the newsroom.

Jane was one of those people you run across in this racket from time to time, a true jack of all trades. She had covered breaking news and crime, entertainment and fashion, a little bit of everything.

But she was hardly the stereotypical hard-boiled Chicago reporter. This was a gracious, elegant, soft-spoken woman of great wit and literacy.

In 1984, I joined the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times and a year later became the paper’s television critic, where I had to pleasure to get know Jane back in the features department.

In the late 1980s the do-gooders at the Sun-Times successfully lobbied to have smokers like Jane and me banished from the newsroom and exiled to a small, windowless room complete with some ashtrays and a couple of computers.

The decor was lousy. The camaraderie was golden.

One afternoon, the smokers were taking out their invective on Henry Kisor, the book editor and truly lovely man, who in the opinion of the smoking room had writtten a somewhat too chummy, too flattering profile of Scott Turow.

As the barbs about Henry’s piece flowed back and forth, Jane gently acknowledged that she too, had found the piece boring and feigned falling asleep with her head in her hands.

Several minutes passed as everyone continued to gab about Henry’s story when someone noticed Jane was still pretending to be asleep.

Jane, though, was dead. Dead without a sound. Dead without calling the slightest attention to herself. Dead, as only Jane could be dead - understated literally to the very end.

Several hours later, after the body had been removed. One reporter ventured into the smoking area and after proceeding to sit down for a cigarette, realized about half-way into settling into chair, this had been where Jane was sitting when her heart simply - stopped. The reporter quickly straightened and found somewhere else to perch.

Jane died doing what she loved doing most, working in this often silly, insane, threatened business of newspapers.

No one was ever quite sure what caused Jane’s eerie demise, but after a while, we all agreed to blame her death on Henry Kisor.

Death by boredom. Jane would have liked the simplicity of that. But we never told Henry.

---

John McCain turning to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for advice on education is a bit like hiring the Donner Party to cater the inaugural ball.

But there was the presumptive Republican presidential nominee the other day extolling the Bush Junta years as some sort of golden age of education

“He’s very well-respected on many issues, but education is probably one where he has a national reputation,” McCain said, which makes you wonder if he was immediately led away with a shawl draped around his shoulders for a nice nap and some warm milk.

A “national reputation”?!?!?! Oh really? Good grief, Bush may well have a “national reputation,” but it is much more likely for turning Florida schools into the Jack Kevorkian of the Three Rs.

Over the course of eight long, insufferable years in Tallahassee where he spent his days posing for holy pictures, Jeb Bush managed to leave office with Florida public schools ranked behind Chernobyl, the Planet Zircon 9 and the Paleolithic Period.

And John McCain treasures Jeb Bush’s counsel on education? That’s like looking to Uday and Qusay for guidance on how to pick up women.

During the Bush regime, the Florida Supreme Court ruled the governor’s ham-handed private school voucher plan unconstitutional.

At the end of his term, high school graduation rates ranked anywhere from 48th to 50th in the nation.

And while Jeb Bush, turned into the Paula Dean of cooked books, claiming 75 percent of the state’s classrooms were A and B schools, his own brother’s U.S. Department of Education noted some 72 percent of Florida schools failed to meet federal standards.

During his governorship, Jeb Bush turned the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test into a weapon against teachers and students.

And now John McCain portrays Jeb Bush as some sort of perverse champion of education?

Oh dear. Isn’t that like turning to the Grim Reaper for advice on stand-up comedy?

---

As great moments in press flackery goes, this was a classic case of a profile in porridge.

It is the sad fate of the political press apparatchik to occasionally attempt to transform the complete hooey of the boss and try to turn their mealy-mouthed blubbering into something sounding even semi-bold, partly visionary, almost coherent.

Here, in its entirety is the press release sent out earlier today by the Florida Democratic Party under the guise of “News From The Florida Democratic Party.” You might want to get a strong cup of coffee.

“Joint Statement from Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Karen L. Thurman and Florida’s Democratic Congressional Delegation on Seating Florida’s Delegates.”

And that was just the headline. Here’s what followed.

“WASHINGTON, D.C. - After a joint meeting today among Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Karen L. Thurman and Florida’s Democratic Congressional Delegation, the participants issued this joint statement:

“We are all committed to doing everything we can to ensure that a Florida delegation is seated in Denver. We all agree that whatever the solution, it must have the support of both campaigns.

“While there may be differences of opinion in how we get there, we are all committed to ensuring that Florida’s delegation is seated in Denver. We’re committed to working with both campaigns to reach a solution as soon as realistically possible.

“We are laying the groundwork to ensure we win in Florida in November and spent time here today talking about how to do just that. We will continue to work towards a solution to ensure delegates are seated and logistics in place for a Florida delegation in Denver.”

Let’s see here. Thurman, Dean, along with the Florida congressional caucus, which includes U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, along with House members, Allen Boyd, Corrine Brown, Kathy Castor, Alcee Hastings, Ron Klein, Tim Mahoney, Kendrick Meek, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Robert Wexler ALL met to resolve the primary election debacle and this four paragraph pile of public relations claptrap was the best these towering political minds could come up with?!?!?

As well the press release announcing the Democrats had nothng to say was co-issued by three (count ‘em, three) party press minions, Stacie Paxton and Mark Bubriski and Alejandro Miyar. This wasn’t like drafting the Magna Carta. This was a yada-yda-yada-blah-blah-blah press release supposedly reflecting the combined views of 12 Democrats and the best they could come up with was: “we’re committed.”

Now there’s a “Ask not what your country can do for you,” moment.

---

Is it a relatively nice thing Cuba’s newest dictator, Raul Castro decreed the other that day that the island’s residents may now possess cell phones?

Probably. Maybe. We’ll see.

Yes, it is certainly true Cubans now armed with their cell phones will be able to call their exiled families in the United States and that is obviously a positive development.

But let’s face it, it’s pretty evident Raul Castro has no idea the techno-monster he has unleashed across his impoverished country.

Fidel’s younger brother probably felt he was enabling his countrymen to be able to call their families in America as well as each other across the nation.

Isn’t that precious?

We all know that once Cubans start getting their cell phones, well, they will start using them by insisting on calling people to talk to them.

No good will come from this.

In time, the streets will be clogged with Cubans in their 1957 Fords, blissfully gabbing away while traffic backs up behind them. Movie goers will be interrupted by ring tones. Young Cuban teenage girls will spend hours blabbing away with their friends - who happen to live next door! - yapping and yapping and yapping and yapping about nothing, absolutely nothing at all.

And, of course, with cell phone technology will come the ability to text message one another, which while Raul Castro might naively believe will enhance the flow of information among his citizens, we know from experience that texting merely streamlines the ability to send bad jokes, funny pictures and porn to one another.

If Raul Castro is going to permit cell phones, clearly access to the Internet can’t be far behind.

That means Havana will soon see a proliferation of Internet cafes, thus making it easier for Cubans to exchange bad jokes, funny pictures and, of course altogether now! - porn with one another.

Thus, we know now, the communist regime in Cuba won’t be brought down by a popular uprising, or an invasion. The Castro Brothers are ultimately going to be brought to their knees by the ultimate Capitalist weapon - the cellphone, which opens vistas for good and evil and don’t forget - porn, too.

Viva Nextel!

---

While it is certainly true Barack Obama needed the Jeremiah Wright brouhaha about as much as Nick Nolte needs an open bar tab, it would appear all the hand-wringing by the drive-by bloviators on the right-wing media airwaves have had precious little impact on the Illinois senator’s presidential campaign.

Despite a seeming “All Obama/All Jeremiah Wright/All The Time” preoccupation with the Democratic Party presidential nominee’s silly preacher on the Faux News Channel, as well as the dyspeptic fulminations of Rush Limbaugh his associate lap dogs like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, none of the foaming at the mouth phony indignation seems to have had much of an effect on the candidate’s polling numbers.

Indeed both a NBC/Wall Street Journal and a Pew Research Center national poll in the wake of the Jeremiah Wright kerfuffle showed Obama with a 49% to 39% lead over Hillary Clinton.

Indeed a California Public Policy Institute poll, found that 61% of the state’s voters held a positive few of Obama, compared to 45% for Clinton.

And while all polls this early during a presidential candidate are merely snapshots in time and hardly indicative of how the numbers will ultimately fall in November, a case could certainly be made that after two weeks of fairly relentless critical reporting about his controversial minister, Obama appears to have weathered the storm pretty well.

Why is that?

Well for starters, it is rather doubtful the Limbaugh Axis of Demagoguery has much juice beyond his fellow travelers. Really now, can you imagine some liberal Democratic voters suddenly deciding to switch allegiances away from Obama, simply because Rush Limbaugh and his little friends got their bloomers in a wad?

And there is this. It’s merely a guess, but do you think it’s possible most people following Obama’s ministerial pickle concluded it was entirely possible that, like many churchgoers, Obama sat in that pew when he attended services and simply zoned out once Wright started ranting?

Quick now. If you attended church last Sunday, do you remember a single word your preacher uttered?

In the end the Jeremiah Wright dust-up may be remembered not so much for anything the crazy cleric said, but that anyone was paying any attention to notice in the first place.

And that’s the God’s honest truth.

---

As a keen piece of political strategy, this had to rank somewhere between Gary Hart telling reporters, “If you think I’m fooling around, fee free to follow me,” and Michael Dukakis riding around in that tank looking like a complete goofball.

Of allllllllllll her numerous and sundry shortcomings as a presidential candidate, what would you say would be Hillary Clinton’s greatest weakness? The voice that sounds like a badger in heat doesn’t count.

Would there be any great debate Hillary Clinton’s most daunting hurdle to overcome is that she has all the credibility of Fredo Corleone?

And yet, over the course of the last few days the former first lady has managed to step on her ..., well on her, ... uh, her Achilles’ Heel again and again and again.

Repeatedly, Clinton went out on the stump and plainly lied about a make believe experience in being shot at by snipers while on a trip to Bosnia in 1996.

In a tale that sounds almost like a sequel to “Air Force One,” Clinton recounted a harrowing landing in Tuzla while shots rang out, requiring her and her entourage, which included daughter Chelsea to race to the their vehicles braving a hail of bullets.

And it all a huge, steamy, stinking pile of ... phooey.

It didn’t take long before news footage of her actual landing in Bosnia emerged, portraying Clinton and her group casually strolling across the tarmac, greeting well-wishers and even pausing to listen to a small child recite a poem. And a vast array of witnesses who were present that day recall not the slightest hint of danger in the air.

Which brings us to a question. Is a candidate this delusional, this mendacious, this dense, fit to the president of the United States. I know, I know, we already have one of those.

A simple point. You’re Hillary Clinton. You already know one of your biggest negatives is that the public views you as someone they would not leave their bar changed unattended to if they found themselves sitting next to you in a saloon and nature called.

And yet you still insist on telling a whopper of a tall tale about snipers and bullets and DANGER, when you have to have known those snoopy reporters would check out the story.

Hillary Clinton, of all people, didn’t stop to think there would be video of her arrival in Bosnia. She had to know there was no proof of her and Chelsea making a mad dash for cover. It never dawned upon her that no one would believe the Secret Service would have allowed a First Lady and her daughter to be exposed to sniper fire?

Good grief, the dreadful comedian Sinbad (an admitted Barack Obama supporter), who was also on the trip has said the only drama that occurred in Bosnia was trying to decide where to eat at night.

For her part, Clinton has blamed this whole kerfuffle on being sleep deprrived on the campaign trail and simply, innocently misspeaking. And if you believe that, you probably also believe that stain on Monica Lewinsky’s dress was spaghetti sauce.

You could make a case the biggest threat to Hillary Clinton aren’t Bosnian snipers. It’s Hillary Clinton standing in front of a microphone.

Running for president is hard enough work, without the candidate deciding to shoot herself in the foot.

---

You may not realize just yet, but you just got sold down the river - on a rail.

Earlier this week, the Florida Legislature, otherwise known as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Tallahassee lobbyist corps of buffet tables, agreed to provide the choo-choo company, CSX Transportation freedom from being held responsible for any passenger train accidents, which might occur on its rail lines - even if CSX is at fault for the mishap.

And just whom would be left holding the bill for damages? Why that would be you, dear taxpayer, of course.

The CSX gift basket is part of a larger $491 million cooked up in secret deal in which the state will purchase 61 miles of rail tracks in Orlando, thus freeing up the company to expand its freight hub in Polk County.

So, let’s see here. CSX gets the secret $491 million. And if anything goes wrong, even if it’s the result of the company’s own misconduct, they are still free and clear from any liability. Sweet deal.

Which brings us to another issue the legislative lotion boys pondered this week.

For years now those crazy, wacky, fun-loving folks at the National Rifle Association have been pushing for a law, which would permit employees to bring their guns to work, as long as they remained locked up in their cars.

The move has long been opposed by another powerful lobby, Associated Industries of Florida, which has argued private business owners ought to have the right to dictate what can and can’t be brought onto private property. It’s a perfectly reasonable point of view.

And thus those profiles in courage in Tallahassee have found themselves caught between two very influential special interest groups, both quite capable of extracting tons of political flesh should they get annoyed.

So this week, state Sen. Michael Bennett introduced and won approval of a provision, which would protect private business owners from legal liability should an employee go a little wacko-mondo and start shooting people at work.

You know, when you have to anticipate bloody mayhem as a consequence of legislation you are about to pass, that alone might suggest perhaps this proposed law might be just a tad - insane.

Nevertheless since the bring your lethal weapon to work bill seems to be gaining momentum among the NRA lemmings in the Florida Legislature, one aspect of Bennett’s liability amendment has been overlooked.

If companies will be held harmless in the event a worker decides to start shooting, who should be eventually responsible for paying damages for allowing all this bloodshed to occur?

Since the taxpayers are already obligated to bail out CSX, perhaps Bennett might want to introduce language that would obligate the National Rifle Association and all the individual members of the Florida Legislature who voted for this hooey to be the ones to pay damages to the victims of workplace violence as a consequence of the Body Bag Act of 2008.

That would only be the fair thing to do, although admittedly the common sense train left the station in Tallahassee a long time ago.

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This is probably about as close as you can get to “journalistic groping.”

So there was Jeb Bush subjecting himself to a reportorial full body massage by the Florida Baptist Witness, which was asking the former junta leader about his life and opinions.

Jeb Bush insisted he didn’t enjoy being a “pundit” as he went on to commit first degree punditry on a wide variety of issues, which were about as revealing as a burka.

Except for one thing.

At one point, the Mandarin of Miami was punditzing about “21st Century” conservatism, when he dropped this load of ..., well, balderdash.

Conservatism in this century, Bush noted, should be a “… multi-faceted philosophy, including a progressive foreign policy that affirms the ‘Bush Doctrine,’ reforms government institutions, recognizes the global nature of the economy and cultivates a culture that supports the family.”

Of course, it was insane enough that the younger Bush sibling was promoting his brother’s foreign policy, which may well go down as one the great international relations failures in American history.

But then came this delusional line as Bush said he would “defer on these matters to Newt Gingrich, who I consider to be one of the more thoughtful, thinking conservatives in the country now who is doing a lot of work in these areas.”

Oh really?!?!?

Ahem, isn’t deferring to a bumptious windbag like Newt Gingrich on an issue like cultivating the family, a bit like looking to Uday & Qusay for guidance on how to pick up women?

Isn’t this the same Newt Gingrich, R-Family Man, who broached the topic of beginning divorce proceedings with his first wife, while she was being being treated for cancer?

Indeed, is this the same Newt Gingrich, R-Walton Mountain, who while running for Congress in 1978 using the campaign slogan “Let Our Family Represent Your Family” was carrying on an affair?

Oh and is this the very same Newt Gingrich, R-Ward Cleaver, (then married to Mrs. Gingrich Number Two) who led the impeachment charge against Bill Clinton, feigning moral outrage against the then president’s infidelity, while at the same time carrying on his own affair with a 33-year-old congressional aide?

Now this is the same Newt Gingrich, R-Daddy Dearest, Jeb Bush wants to defer to as an authority on cultivating a culture of family?

What family? The Borgias, perhaps? The Bushes?

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