Rambling on before I ramble off to work on this Friday morning...

--- Remember the post yesterday about the young man who was appealing his one year suspension from school for inadvertantly bringing a knife to a football game after an afternoon of fishing? The appeal before the seven member Polk County School Board was scheduled for yesterday, but was put back a month due to a paperwork snafu in the district office. So now the kid is screwed again for a month because someone in the Bartow office didn't do their job.

The young man has paid quite enough for his mistake. He spent the night in a juvenile detention facility, and he has not been to class since the incident in September (two appeals held up and the superintendent decided not to reduce the punishment per a mediator's recommendation). His mother refuses to send him to one of the district's two "alternative schools" for problem students (he has only had previous minor problems with tardiness; no violent behaviour), and will likely enroll him in a private school in the meantime. IMHO, count the time out of class as a suspension and bring him back into the fold.

--- Also in the Lakeland Ledger this morning is a puff piece about Rev. Jay Dennis of Lakeland's First Baptist Church at the Mall. He is the one --- along with State Rep. John Stargel (R-64-Lakeland) --- who authored the propsed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Although 2004->Ch0741->Section%20212#0741.212">there is such a ban already in place in the Florida Statutes, the right wing is so afraid that "activist judges" will overturn such state laws and feel the only way to protect the traditional definiation is to amend the state constitution.

--- And it just so happens that Rev. Jerry Falwell is back in the news, starting a reincarnation of his old Moral Majority from the Reagan era.