Thursday, February 21, 2008

Central Florida Strikes Again



I don't know what it is about the Tampa area, where only last Saturday we heard and saw how a sheriff's deputy had dumped a quadriplegic out of his wheelchair, just for the hell of it, while evidently forgetting about that damn surveillance camera on the wall.

Here's a new candidate for Moron of the Week, Central Florida Division. Via the T.S.A. web site.

Here's the link.

Benjamin Baines Jr. was busted at security at Tampa International Airport last Sunday when the magnetometer at the checkpoint alerted T.S.A. screeners to the concealed box-cutter this master criminal was carrying inside a hollowed-out book.

"Relatives say he's a good kid ..." a local newspaper reports.

They always say that, if you ask relatives. Note all those brain-dead stories on what an otherwise nice, oppressed guy the homicidal maniac who hacked the Manhattan psychologist to death with a meat clever was. He just forgot to take his meds, is all.

Anyway, Baines was arrested, pleaded guilty, and got a 30-day jail sentence. Besides the "artfully concealed" weapon (we have steadily defined down "art." And when did pop singers start becoming "artists," by the way? Don't get me started.) he had a Koran, a Bible and "rap music lyrics referencing police, drugs and guns," we are informed.

Diversity in carry-ons!

A relative, evidently overlooking the weapon artfully concealed in a hollowed-out book, which is a trick I think I first saw in a Jimmy Cagney movie, said Baines was arrested merely because "he was black and carrying the Koran."

Baines says he just plumb forgot all about the knife. No one seems to have thought it especially important to ask why he'd hollowed out a book to carry it in -- which seems to me to be prima facie evidence of criminal intent.

Maybe he was off his meds.

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