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Posted By: DJ

60 Minutes did an interview with novelist/journalist Carl Hiaasen a few months ago and I pulled the following quotes from the interview:

If you ask Hiaasen why all of this stuff seems to happen in Florida, he gives a standard reply: "The most common answer that people give is if you took the continental United States and you tilted it a little bit, all the sludge would drip all the way down the peninsula, all the way down this highway … right past my house."

The tourists eventually go home. But for Hiaasen, the larger problem is the thousand people who move here every day. Most of them, he says, are either running to something or from something. Many of them are retirees looking for a slice of paradise, and some are predators who consider them prey.

Another reason Florida has become so desirable for undesirables is it has the most generous bankruptcy laws in the country -- so people facing the prospect of jail or civil judgments buy houses here knowing they can’t be seized. A number of former executives from Tyco and WorldCom have already moved here, along with a few down and out celebrities.

Unfortunately, the craziness of Florida provides a certain anonymity to all sorts of wackos, even terrorists. And if the place wasn’t so dysfunctional, Hiaasen says maybe something could have been done about that.

"I was watching in the living room, and they started showing the pictures of Mohammed Atta and then the others in those photographs," says Hiaasen. "I said, 'I swear to God, those are Florida driver's licenses photographs.' At least nine of them, I believe, and possibly more had lived and worked and trained for their suicide mission here in Florida."

"And I always tell people, 'You think that was an accident? Where's the one place in the United States where the bar of bad behavior is so high that nobody's gonna notice these guys?'" adds Hiaasen. "Nobody's gonna think twice when they walk into a flight school and say, 'I'd like to get on a 757 simulator, but I don't need the part about where you land it. Just teach me how to fly it around.' And pay it in cash, and they say, 'Oh, right this way, Mr. Atta. Sit over here.'

DJ