County anti-bias rule likely to pop up in '06Look for a sure-to-be-controversial anti-discrimination ordinance to come up for debate early next year for Orange County.
Commissioner Mildred Fernandez said last week that she has asked legal staff to look at other counties and come up with a measure for Orange, one that would focus largely on outlawing housing discrimination in unincorporated parts of the county.
Gay-rights champions have ramped up pressure on Orange to pass a wide-ranging ordinance that would erect barriers against all types of discrimination, especially sexual orientation -- much like Orlando passed in 2002. It's not clear whether the Fernandez measure will go as far as Orlando's did, which includes small fines for violators.
But for the past year, nothing at all has happened on the Orange County front.
Mayor Rich Crotty blocked an earlier attempt by Fernandez to bring forth a measure, saying that discrimination, particularly against gays, is not a serious issue in Orange. So activists are pushing again, and Fernandez said last week she plans to push ahead. Crotty indicated he would not get in the way if it came up early next year.
Still, Fernandez cautioned about what she plans to bring forward: "I don't know if it's exactly what they want."
Perjury-defense funds, aisle 7
The developer behind the contentious Winter Garden Village at Fowler Groves shopping center project is now helping I. "Scooter" Libby fight perjury and obstructing-justice charges.
Melvin Sembler, a former ambassador to Italy, is a longtime political bank roller and founder of The Sembler Co., which has won approval to build the 1.1 million-square-foot mall.
Now Sembler is helping to head up a legal-defense fund for Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff. Libby is accused of lying during a probe into whether administration war supporters tried to unmask a CIA agent. The agent's husband publicly challenged Bush's allegation that Iraq bought uranium from Niger to build a weapon of mass destruction.
It was one of the scarier supporting points Bush made for going to war. The documents supporting that claim were forgeries.
Interestingly, those fake Niger papers give Winter Garden's future mall magnate another claim to fame in the rush-to-Iraq war story: As Newsweek points out, those forged documents arrived through the Italian embassy when Sembler was the U.S. ambassador at the time.
David Damron of the Sentinel staff compiled this report.http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/loc ... nes-orangeYou cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.
--Albert Einstein
