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account for the unrelenting weirdness?
    Reporters looking at the life of Rudy Eugene have founda pot-smoking, Bible-reading guy with money problems and a relatively minor rap sheet. So far there is no indication that the 31-year-old man was fixated on zombie lore, werewolves, vampires, or Hannibal Lecter.
    The most likely explanation for Eugene’s vicious behavior was a dose of bad drugs. A police officer speculated it was LSD, which in the old days wasn’t famous for causing spontaneous cannibalism. Maybe there’s a new version on the streets. Another widely suggested culprit is “bath salts,” synthetic crystals sold in some convenience stores that can cause hallucinations and violent outbursts.
    Still another possibility is that Eugene wasn’t high on anything. Perhaps he suffered a severe mental breakdown before confronting Poppo, who’d lived on the streets for four decades and had his own problems with the law.
    The autopsy’s toxicology report will provide some answers, but it won’t get South Florida off the hook.
    Whatever factors compelled Eugene to strip naked and gnaw on another man’s face, the hideous crime truly could have occurred anyplace where there’s bad dope and mental illness—which is to say, anyplace.
    It didn’t, though.
    And as the story (complete with video) continues to rocket through the blogs, posts, and tweets, the lack of disbelief resonates.
    Of course it’s Miami. Where else?

SURROUNDED ON THREE SIDES

    April 15, 2001
    Bush: Big Business’s Top Shill
    Seldom does a president turn out to be just as bad as predicted, but George W. Bush is rapidly making prophets of his shrillest enemies.
    During the election campaign, Democrats warned that a new Bush administration would be friendly toward polluters and hostile toward the environment.
    That’s what Democrats always say about Republicans, so many voters didn’t take it seriously. Who would have imagined that, in only three months, Bush would start to make Ronnie Reagan sound like Marjory Stoneman Douglas?
    In his budget package unveiled last week, George II asked Congress to cripple the Endangered Species Act by suspending the deadlines when government must respond to petitions for protecting imperiled wildlife. Echoing a complaint of the Clinton administration, the Bush White House says the Interior Department is swamped by lawsuits seeking “endangered” status for rare species of fish, plants, birds, reptiles, and mammals.
    Bush officials want a one-year moratorium that would effectively forestall any new court order protecting specific animals and their habitats. They say such decisions should come from within the agency, not from outside litigation.
    Unfortunately, litigation is the only thing that seems to work. The Endangered Species Act is despised by powerful segments of the business community, and the Interior Department never has been independently aggressive about enforcing it.
    If it weren’t for legal action by citizen groups and environmental organizations, no federal protection would exist for the Atlantic salmon, the northern spotted owl, and most ofthe 1,200 species that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service now lists as threatened.
    That’s not to say the law isn’t abused or that the listing process doesn’t need reform. But the notion of entrusting the fate of the nation’s dwindling wildlife to a political appointee—especially Interior Secretary Gale Norton—is laughably brazen.
    Critters sometimes get in the way of bulldozers, and that’s unacceptable to those who bankrolled Bush’s presidential campaign—developers, energy companies, the timber and mining industries. They’d love to see the Endangered Species Act trashed completely, and there’s no reason to expect Bush won’t try to oblige. Judging by his brief track record, he’ll do absolutely anything that industry wants.
    One of the president’s first executive actions was to throw out the federal rules on how much arsenic can be