Orlando Cops and the Krispy Kreme Meth Incident.

Daniel Rushing buys a Krispy Kreme doughnut every other week. (July 27, 2016) (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda / Orlando Sentinel)

Daniel Rushing buys a Krispy Kreme doughnut every other week. (July 27, 2016) (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda / Orlando Sentinel)

Orlando cops decided to arrest a 64 year old man who was guilty of driving and doughnut eating – everyone be careful, if you’re going to do the same, stay away from the glazed!

Daniel Rushing treats himself to a Krispy Kreme doughnut every other Wednesday. He used to eat them in his car.

Not anymore.

Not since a pair of Orlando police officers pulled him over, spotted four tiny flakes of glaze on his floorboard and arrested him, saying they were pieces of crystal methamphetamine. The officers did two roadside drug tests and both came back positive for the illegal substance, according to his arrest report.

He was handcuffed, arrested, taken to the county jail and strip searched, he said. A state crime lab, however, did another test several weeks later and cleared him.

“It was incredible,” he said. “It feels scary when you haven’t done anything wrong and get arrested. … It’s just a terrible feeling.”

[…]

That’s when she spotted “a rock like substance on the floor board where his feet were,” she wrote. “I recognized through my eleven years of training and experience as a law enforcement officer the substance to be some sort of narcotic,” she wrote.

She asked for permission to search his vehicle, the report says, and Rushing agreed. “I didn’t have anything to hide,” he said. “I’ll never let anyone search my car again.”

Riggs-Hopkins and other officers spotted three other pieces of the suspicious substance in his car, according to the report.

“I kept telling them, ‘That’s … glaze from a doughnut. … They tried to say it was crack cocaine at first, then they said, ‘No, it’s meth, crystal meth.'” His arrest report confirms that he tried to tell them.

[…]

She booked him into the county jail on a charge of possession of methamphetamine with a firearm. He was locked up for about 10 hours before his release on $2,500 bond, he said.

According to FDLE, an analyst in its Orlando crime lab did not try to identify what police found in his car. She only checked to determine whether it was an illegal drug and confirmed that it was not.

Three days later, the State Attorney’s Office in Orlando filed paperwork, saying that it was dropping the case.

Rushing, who retired after 25 years as an Orlando parks department employee, has hired a lawyer and is asking the city to pay him damages.

“I got arrested for no reason at all,” he said.

[…]

The Orlando Police Department did not explain why the two drug field tests that Riggs-Hopkins conducted were wrong.

When asked how many other road-side drug tests have produced false positive results, an OPD spokeswoman wrote, “At this time, we have no responsive records. … There is no mechanism in place for easily tracking the number of, or results of, field drug testing.”

FDLE spokeswoman Molly Best wrote that her agency has no information about the prevalence of false-positive field drug tests.

The New York Times reported on July 7 that its review of FDLE data showed that 21 percent of the time, drug evidence that was listed by local authorities as methamphetamine turned out to be something else.

In its statement, OPD described the arrest as a lawful one.

Full story at the Orlando Sentinel.

The Cost of McCrory.

Gov. Pat McCrory (R-NC) (nc.gov, Screengrab)

Gov. Pat McCrory (R-NC) (nc.gov, Screengrab)

The costs keep mounting in NC, and going by all appearances, McCrory simply doesn’t care in the least. I keep trying to figure out why there is this pig-headed obstinacy in hanging on to HB 2, and all I can come up with is that McCrory is doing this to save face. Or he thinks this is face-saving, because it seems to me that any idiot could figure out the costs far outweigh any perceived benefit.

The price tag for keeping North Carolina’s HB2 on the books just keeps getting more and more expensive.

In a review by the Associate Press, Gov. Pat McCrory and state legislative leaders have run up more than $176,000 in legal fees to defend the law, which prevents transgender people from using restrooms and changing rooms matching their gender identity.

That’s likely not the total because some firms have yet to bill the state for their work on the legal battle between the state and the Department of Justice.

State taxpayers will have to eat those real costs, in addition to the estimated $100 million in lost potential revenue after the NBA withdrew the 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte over the controversial law.

There’s also that $500,000 that was pulled out of the state’s disaster relief fund a while back. Taxpayers cannot be happy with this, any more than the massive tab some Arizona taxpayers are faced with over Arpaio. I don’t know why people keep such assholes in office, but it’s time to kick them out on their arses, and get competent representation.

Via Out.

Meet Chalice, Transgender Comic Hero.

alters_collage

For the most part, comic books have always kept relatively quiet in a self-contained corner of the entertainment landscape. It’s one of the most inclusive forms of media, dating back to the original X-Men being one big allegory for minorities of all kinds, looked down upon by society and forced to live as second class citizens.

Now, living in the most socially progressive age to date, comic books have flourished, their ever-present trend of inclusion benefiting from the change in global tone regarding the LGBT community, people of color, and other historically underappreciated groups.

In Alters, the first-ever superhero book with a central transgender protagonist by a mainstream writer (Paul Jenkins), a young woman, while transitioning from male to female, discovers she has great power. Now, faced with the discrimination transgender people face on top of that those with mutant-like powers face, life becomes doubly complicated.

The diversity in Alters is also found off the pages, in the team behind creating its main character, Chalice. “It means a lot to me to see trans people represented, especially so prominently,” said Tamra Bonnvillain, a trans colorist for Alters. “So many times in the past we’ve been represented as throwaway characters, and even a lot of more recent positive trans characters are in minor roles.”

Alters #1 goes on sale September 7.

Via Out.

Astronomy Photographer of the Year.

I, uh, just no words. The heart-aching beauty of our planet, the universe, everything. Just a few here, click over for the full short list.

5000

 Flash Point. Brad Goldpaint (USA) The Perseid Meteor Shower shoots across the sky in the early hours of 13 August, 2015, appearing to cascade from Mount Shasta in California, USA. The composite image features roughly 65 meteors captured by the photographer between 12:30am and 4:30am.

Photograph: Brad Goldpaint/Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2016/National Maritime Museum.

2958

A Fork, a Spoon and a Moon. Andrew Caldwell ( New Zealand) A Royal Spoonbill sits atop of a branch basking in the glow of the nearly full moon in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand.

Photograph: Andrew Caldwell/Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2016/National Maritime Museum.

 6688

Seven Magic Points. Rune Engebø (Norway). The rusty red swirls of the circular, iron sculpture Seven Magic Points in Brattebergan, Norway mirror the rippling aurora above.

Photograph: Rune Engebø/Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2016/National Maritime Museum.

Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2016 shortlist – in pictures.

Rubio Starring at Anti-LGBT Rally.

Marco Rubio. Wikimedia Commons.

Marco Rubio. Wikimedia Commons.

When Marco Rubio cited the deadly attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando as a reason he was changing his mind and running for re-election to the U.S. Senate, many LGBT allies immediately noted that the Florida senator and failed presidential candidate has never been an ally of the LGBT community.

“To be using the tragedy in Orlando as a time to reflect on his Senate career, when his career and his promises on the campaign trail have been anti-LGBTQ consistently, it’s just staggering to think he would be using this moment for his own personal ambitions,” said Jay Brown of the Human Rights Campaign at the time.

It comes as no surprise, then, to see that Rubio is slated to address an event in Orlando next month that will feature some of the country’s most vehement anti-LGBT activists.

The Orlando-based Liberty Counsel Action, an extreme anti-LGBTgroup whose affiliate is famous for representing Kentucky clerk Kim Davis in her stand against the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision, announced in an email today that the Florida Renewal Project will be hosting an event called “Rediscovering God in America” in August. The event will be headlined by Rubio, who will speak alongside anti-LGBT activists David Barton, Bill Federer, Ken Graves and Mat Staver.

[…]

The event will put Rubio in the company of some of the most extreme anti-gay activists in the country:

  • David Lane, whose organization is hosting the event, believes that gay rights will lead to the “utter destruction” of the U.S. and “car bombs in Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Des Moines, Iowa.” (Learn more about David Lane here).
  • Mat Staver, whose Liberty Counsel Action sent out the invitation to the event and who is scheduled to speak, has gained a national reputation by representing Davis and Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore through the affiliated Liberty Counsel. Last month, Staver denounced memorial gatherings for the victims of the Orlando nightclub attack as “homosexual love fests.” Staver has claimed that gay people are “demonic,” seek to abuse children and are similar to terrorists, and has warned that gay rights victories could lead to “forced homosexuality” and “another civil war.” At the same time, he has praised countries that outlaw same-sex relationships. (Learn more about Mat Staver here).
  • David Barton, a Republican Party activist who styles himself as a historian, thinks that God is justly preventing a cure for HIV/AIDS because it is a divine “penalty” for homosexuality, and has lamented that public schools try to “force” students “to be homosexual” when homosexuality really should be regulated by the government. (Learn more about David Barton here).
  • Maine pastor Ken Graves preaches against “militant homofascism” that he says “seeks to take over our land and make it Sodom” and argues that gay people cannot build happy families because they are “depressed.”

Via Right Wing Watch.