You know those missing e-mails in the Hollywood Sludge case? Well, first of all, they almost surely weren't done from Mayor Giulianti's official city e-mail. As Trevor Aaronson pointed out in his story "Mayor Mara, Annotated," the mayor for years has been using her AOL account -- [email protected] -- to send e-mails regarding city business (check out the piece -- it's a hoot). Now the State Attorney's Office sent the subpoena to the city -- did they check out the AOL account. Mara has likely deleted those e-mails, but, again as Trevor pointed out to me today, they should still exist in the bowels of AOL's information empire.
I've also heard that City Attorney Dan Abbott was on the Jim DeFede Show morning and confirmed that, yes, the vast majority of the e-mails the mayor sent regarding the Schwing Bioset deal were from her personal account. I don't know if the State Attorney went down this route or not. Maybe some of y'all could e-mail Mara and ask her about it.
After the jump: A New Florida License Plate and Wakefield and Petrelis on the Foley Scandal.
-- Here's the latest idea wending its way through the bureaucracy trying to become a license plate? It's from the the Florida chapter of the International Society of Arboriculture and the slogan is "Trees Are Cool." That's right, "Trees Are Cool." Wonder how much they paid an ad agency to come up with that one? Might as well have just gone with, "Choose Trees."
-- Remember the "girlfriend" pictured in the Palm Beach Post's Mark Foley photograph from 1990? Well, Rebecca Wakefield, in her new online publication, dug up some interesting on the woman, Juliann Rico Allison, who is now attorney for the Miami-Dade School Board. Makes for interesting reading and the Pulp feels a bit like a grandfather, since Wakefield got the idea for the story from our post.
-- San Francisco blogger Michael Petrelis dug up Time Magazine's history of Mark Foley stories and found a good bit of contradiction from writer John Cloud. Basically, Cloud ignored the issue of Foley's sexuality when he wrote about the congressman's hilarious crusade against a nudist camp. But after the scandal broke, Cloud suddenly found religion and wrote:
"Mark Foley wants you to know that he is a gay man." That's what Foley's lawyer said last week, in an echo of former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey's line "I am a gay American." But the most relevant fact about Foley was not that he is gay--it's that he spent a lifetime hiding it. True, in recent years the Congressman was seen in the company of a male dermatologist in his district. Even so, in 2003 Foley revealed the deep shame he felt about his homosexuality when he called the rumor mill about his gay life "revolting."
As Petrelis, a noted gay human rights activist, put it: "Sure, Foley spent a lifetime hiding his homosexuality, but he was actively and ably helped in keeping that closet door nailed shut with assistance from mainstream reporters, including Cloud."
This, too, is a bit of proud Pulp offspring, since Petrelis informed me that he got the idea to look up Time's double-standard when he saw this post.
