City of Lake Worth

Mulvehill was not happy about the "riff-raff."

​Poor Lake Worth. The hippie, quirky, crunchy little stepchild of Palm Beach got a brief shout-out in the New York Times "Frugal Traveler" blog this week, but the fifteen minutes of fame only angered a city official.

In a story about how to tour the town of Palm Beach on less than $200 a day -- a bargain, perhaps, if you live on the Upper West Side-- reporter Seth Kugel deigned to acknowledge Lake Worth. He called it "a nice enough town, though it lacks the elitist Palm Beach feel you came for. Admittedly, the decadent raspberry stuffed granola French toast for under $10 at Benny's on the Beach makes the temporary exposure to the riff-raff tolerable."

To be fair, Kugel did not specifically mention the homeless men who gather in the downtown plaza every morning, or the unwashed dudes who strum guitars on the corner of Lake Avenue and L Street. He may even have been kidding about the "riff-raff," since he was focused on high-brow Palm Beach.
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Guarding your deals.

​When the Pulp tried to ask Broward Sheriff Al Lamberti a question about campaign donations on his Facebook page last month, the sheriff responded sternly, unfriended our editor, and removed the post. In his initial response, he wrote, "This is my personal Facebook page and you are disrespecting my prior posts that I do not mix personal with business."More >>

Ann Coulter is just one of many hotheads.

​Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, Lou Dobbs, Dick Morris --  a cornucopia of right-wing talking heads call South Florida home. According to today's New York Times, this makes the area "A Conservative Beachhead in the Sunshine." The Times notes that after Limbaugh moved to Palm Beach in the mid-'90s, Coulter and other groupies followed.

We're flattered, of course. It's about time those Manhattan elitists noticed the Red Scare we face every day. What's funny, though, is that by focusing on conservative media stars, the Times failed to mention some of the most powerful and visible right-wing personalities here.

Take David Koch. Along with his brother, Charles, this oil baron and former Libertarian Party vice presidential candidate is one of the billionaire sugar daddies behind
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The Borders store in Plantation

​Call it another nail in the coffin for shiny, nice-smelling print media, or an long-overdue corporate reform -- Borders Books is packing up and leaving Broward County.

It's only two stores, but it's a good portion of the local book-selling landscape: Broward has six Barnes & Noble stores and a smattering of independent bookshops. Despite its aggressive push to sell e-readers, Borders has fallen victim to a nationwide trend of rapidly declining paper book sales.

Yesterday, Borders filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy relief in New York federal court. The chain's president, Mike Edwards, said that the company plans to More >>

​The Florida Society of Pain Management Providers, the largest pain-clinic-supported lobbying organization in the state, has harshly criticized two recent articles in the Palm Beach Post, claiming the paper printed erroneous statistics about pain clinics in Palm Beach County, even after being notified in writing.

Most of the organization's problems are with Monday's story by Michael LaForgia (who was named Best Palm Beach Post Writer by New Times two years ago).
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​The Florida Society of Pain Management Providers, the largest pain-clinic-supported lobbying organization in the state, has harshly criticized two recent articles in the Palm Beach Post, claiming the paper printed erroneous statistics about pain clinics in Palm Beach County, even after being notified in writing.

Most of the organization's problems are with Monday's story by Michael LaForgia (who was named Best Palm Beach Post Writer by New Times two years ago).
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​Never has the word dickwad been used with such eloquence.

If you don't frequent the journalism aggregate website Gangrey.com, you are missing out on some of the best writing in the country (in addition to an occasional New Times story).

But more recently, you've been missing a very entertaining (and very nasty) war of words among some of America's best magazine writers -- all inspired by the most controversial member of the LeBroshades.

Here's what happened:

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BSO, feel free to use this image for any scheduled "litter recognition" classes.

​Last week, we brought you the sad tale of Darrin Podder, handcuffed and hauled to jail by Broward Sheriff's deputies for "littering" a 20-foot tree on a construction site in Pompano Beach that he'd been hired to landscape by Butters Construction.

Podder was in the middle of replacing a row of six dead trees when two BSO deputies showed up, arrested him on a vaguely worded Florida littering statute, and impounded his $40,000 backhoe. He'd moved the first dead tree to the swale at the unfinished Butter construction site across the street. When he was finished planting the new trees, he was going to load all the dead trees up on his backhoe and cart them off, just the way it was specified in his contract. But Podder never got the chance.

Although the arrest happened two years ago, and a lawsuit was settled in Podder's favor for $32,500 in damages a couple of weeks ago against Broward Sheriff's Office, the memory of what happened that day still rankles.

We asked him if there was a takeaway lesson from the experience.
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Darrin Podder's "litter."

​When Darrin Podder went to dig up some dead trees from a construction site in Pompano Beach on June 5, 2008, he had no idea he'd end up in handcuffs being led away to jail. Podder didn't know littering was a felony. He didn't even know he was littering.

Like a lot of people, Podder wasn't too clear on what Florida Statute 403.413, the "Florida Litter Law," really means. That isn't too surprising, considering the BSO deputies who arrested Podder that day didn't really know either. In fact, FS 403.413 appears to be a statute in desperate need of cleaning up.

Podder, a landscaper, had gone to replant some trees at the newly constructed Carver Homes Redevelopment Project. He'd previously planted six trees along the swale there, but the trees  died. So he went over to fix the problem. Podder was planning to dig up the dead trees with his backhoe and put them temporarily across the street at Phase II of the project, which was still unfinished. Then he was going to unload the new trees from his truck, plant them in the empty holes, load the dead trees onto his truck, and drive away. The job, he thought, wouldn't take more than a couple of hours.

But Podder had no sooner dug up the first 20-foot tree and moved it across the street with the backhoe when BSO deputy Willie Jones showed up. More >>

​We've been getting weekly updates from Boca Raton blogger Robert Feeley for some time now: Feeley's news parody, SPN (for StuPidassNews), is at least as ripe as The Onion, only it's completely homegrown. In SPN-land, Boca is "Beaver Falls," and Feeley's august news outlet is "The Only News Source that Guarantees 97 Percent Fact-Free Contempt."

SPN under Feeley's direction usually covers the national scene: Obama appoints Marcus Welby as health care czar; a terrorist gets an extreme makeover on Oprah; Cheney visits Chile to shoot looters; a middle-class task force issues its report:

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