Author: patd

The Guardian:
It is one of the nation’s favorite jokes – with an entire state as the punchline. And at its center stands Florida Man, the mythical yet mercurial figure whose bizarre real-world antics have come to personify the perceived craziness of life in the Sunshine State.
Briefly, back in the spring, Florida Man became a global social media phenomenon. Internet users were encouraged to Google the phrase along with their birth date to see just what shenanigans involving nakedness, alcohol, exotic wild animals, or sometimes all three, Florida Man had got up to on their special day.
Millions around the world were enthralled to discover tales of drunken Florida citizens crashing their lawnmowers into police cars, pulling alligators from their yoga pants during routine traffic stops or setting fire to their houses while trying to barbecue cookies in the nude.

But if the Florida Man challenge has faded from the collective psyche, Florida Man as a newsmaker clearly has not. Already this week he has picked a fight with a tree, dumped live catfish on a woman’s lawn while posing as an FBI agent and been arrested for shooting hoops in a public park in the buff.

And only last month the Easter Bunny was caught brawling on a sidewalk in Orlando.
Little wonder, perhaps, that some are attempting to monetize the concept by trademarking the term Florida Man and selling T-shirts and coffee mugs, and a cable network is pressing ahead with plans to give the state’s most dysfunctional superhero his own primetime TV show.
“You find weird stuff going on anywhere you find people, but Florida is absolutely the gold standard,” said Craig Pittman, a Tampa Bay Times journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller Oh! Florida.
Florida Man, Pittman says: “could be anyone from the 21 million people in Florida, male or female. It’s become this all-encompassing stereotype of a bungling, often inebriated person and doing something ridiculous or clearly insane, and the very least incongruous.
“You can trace it back to the 2000 election recount. Until then we didn’t have that kind of reputation, then the three weeks we spent trying to figure out who the president was going to be based on people squinting at little hanging chads in Palm Beach county convinced people that maybe the folks in Florida are not as bright as we thought.”
From then, Florida’s reputation as the weirdest, wildest, wackiest state was secure. In 2001, the news aggregation site fark.com gave the state its own topic tagline. Twitter’s @_floridaman handle launched in 2013 and is closing in on half a million followers.

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Newsweek:
George Conway, attorney and husband to White House advisor Kellyanne Conway, shredded President Donald Trump’s attack on Rep. Justin Amash on Sunday with what could best be described as a “lie-by-lie” breakdown of the president’s tweets.
After Amash became on Saturday the first Republican lawmaker to publicly declare that Trump had engaged in an impeachable offense while in office, the president fired back Sunday morning at the congressman with a series of angry tweets, where he called Amash a “loser” and maintained his own innocence.
[…]
Hours later, Conway attempted to tear Trump’s tweets apart by claiming the president lied on almost every point he made.
“You never stop lying, do you?,” the attorney tweeted, alongside a reshare of Trump’s attacks on Amash.
Conway flagged a series of quotes Trump’s tweets — that the Mueller report was “son NO COLLUSION,” that the special counsel had concluded there had been “ultimately, NO OBSTRUCTION,” that one can’t obstruct “when there is no crime,” that the “crimes were committed by the other side” — as “LIES.”
The only statement Conway flagged as “TRUE” was Trump’s assertion that Amash had played “right into our opponents hands.” Conway’s reasoning? “[Y]ou seem to oppose justice and the rule of law, so, at least on this one, TRUE.”

“Shall We Gather At The River” 

New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The intelligence that caused the White House to escalate its warnings about a threat from Iran came from photographs of missiles on small boats in the Persian Gulf that were put on board by Iranian paramilitary forces, three American officials said.
Overhead imagery showed fully assembled missiles, stoking fears that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps would fire them at United States naval ships. Additional pieces of intelligence picked up threats against commercial shipping and potential attacks by Arab militias with Iran ties on American troops in Iraq.
But just how alarmed the Trump administration should be over the new intelligence is a subject of fierce debate among the White House, the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and America’s allies.
The photographs presented a different kind of threat than previously seen from Iran, said the three officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about it publicly. Taken with the other intelligence, the photographs could indicate that Iran is preparing to attack United States forces. That is the view of John R. Bolton, President Trump’s hard-line national security adviser, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

But other officials — including Europeans, Iraqis, members of both parties in Congress and some senior officials within the Trump administration — said Iran’s moves might mostly be defensive against what Tehran believes are provocative acts by Washington.
Either way, the questions about the underlying intelligence, and complaints by lawmakers that they had not been briefed on it, reflect a deep mistrust of Mr. Trump’s national security team.

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