Blown awake: Young Republicans with spunk
When Hoosier Republican Glenn Murphy Jr. abruptly resigned from his posts as chairman of both the Clark County Republican Party and the Young Republican National Federation, bloggers nationwide dashed to their online thesauri for clever oral sex synonyms. That’s because Murphy apparently didn’t resign to take a new job (after “praying with his family”), as he claimed in a statement, but because of another kind of job altogether: The Clark County Sherriff’s Department is investigating Murphy for alleged “criminal deviate conduct” after a 22-year-old young Republican accused chairman Murphy of fellating him while he slept.
Murphy, 33, has not been charged with a crime, but the widely googlable police report details the accusation: After a raucous night of drunken Republican debauchery, Murphy and his young Republican friends went to sleep. The victim later awoke to find Murphy “doing things” to his young Republican penis. From there, the report gets much worse. Murphy contends the act was consensual, presumably at least until the man woke up. Murphy, who was Clark County Republican Party chairman for seven years, was charged with a similar allegation in 1998 by a 21-year-old male, who also claimed Murphy assaulted him in his sleep. Those charges were dropped.
In other Republican fellatio news, Florida legislator Bob Allen completed the neat trifecta of infuriating African Americans, homosexuals and Republicans in one fell swoop last week. He is refusing to resign after being arrested for offering $20 to an undercover police officer to allow him to perform oral sex on the officer in a public park men’s room. Allen is charged with solicitation of prostitution.
Taking a bad situation and making it much worse, Allen claimed he offered the officer money and sex because he was afraid of him because he was black. Further digging in, the ample-chinned Allen said that because there were other black men in the park, he expected to be robbed. Oral sex plus 20 bucks seemed like the smart way out.
Allen, who until his arrest was John McCain’s campaign manager in Florida, is a longtime foe of gay rights and a staunch supporter of a state amendment to ban gay marriage. He also opposed a bill that would curb bullying of gay students. Perhaps most poetic of all, he sponsored a bill to strengthen Florida’s ban on public sex. If he is convicted, he faces up to a year in prison, partly on the strength of his own legislation. —Jim Welp
Scooter that made cross-country trip stolen
“Fee,” the red 49cc scooter that Louisvillian Scott Garner drove from Louisville to Portland, Ore., and back (“The Speed of Slow,” LEO Aug. 1, 2007), was stolen early Tuesday morning. It was parked in front of Garner’s employer, CityScoot, at the corner of Baxter Avenue and Lexington Road.
“I don’t care what kind of condition I get her back in,” Garner told me late Tuesday morning. “I just want her back. I am so completely devastated.”
The road trip took Garner and his scooter more than eight months (with a winter stopover in Portland) and about 11,000 miles. He said he’s ridden the 2006 Yamaha Vino every day since he’s had it. He named the scooter “Fee” after the Phish song.
Garner filed a police report and posted online at the Louisville scooter group Scootervul (www.scootervul.com), in the hopes that scoring up some attention will help turn Fee up. The scooter’s handlebars were locked, as was its back wheel. “It must’ve been two people. That’s the only way it could’ve been stolen — two people and a truck or van,” he said.
Metro police did not respond to a request for comment before LEO’s press deadline. —Stephen George
Die Hard: The battle for the asteroid
The virtues of living in a big river town are many, from the cool paddle-wheel boats to the fireworks on the bridge. Bring on an environmental cataclysm, however, and the Mighty Ohio works against us.
The impact of an asteroid, for instance, in either adjacent ocean will bring rains that would drop Noah in a coma, flooding the river beyond all measure, unleashing infrastructural chaos and public bedlam on a par with, and perhaps even surpassing, Restore 64.
But former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart is on the job, lobbying NASA and the European Space Agency to institute aggressive initiatives to more accurately track near-Earth asteroids, and develop both early-warning collision detection systems and means of deflecting asteroids that pose a civilization-ending threat, per the movie “Armageddon.”
Schweickart, a member of the Apollo 9 mission in 1969, has co-founded the B612 Foundation to encourage the development of technology to mitigate the dangers of such asteroids, which number in the hundreds and even today can be projected to pass disturbingly close to Earth. His latest initiative is to bring NASA into compliance with recently passed federal legislation compelling the agency to catalog and track most of the near-Earth asteroids. Today, it is estimated that there is a two-percent chance of an asteroid collision with the Earth during this century.
Finally, Schweickart is calling for crash programs from both NASA and the ESA to implement technology capable of controlled asteroid deflection by 2015. Somebody give Bruce Willis a heads-up. —Scott Robinson
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