Good news! We’ve finally found a bipartisan issue that has united Democrats and Republicans across the state of Florida! Republican Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen have signed on to support a bill alongside Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson and Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Ted Deutch, Alcee Hastings, Frederica…
Some notes up front: Paul Congemi, who is running for mayor of St. Petersburg, Florida, is not going to become the mayor. He’s a fringe candidate who’s run in the last three mayoral elections. According to the Tampa Bay Times, he only received a few hundred votes in each…
Every five years, Miami-Dade County convenes a task force to propose changes to the county charter, which basically serves as the “constitution” for a 2.7 million-person metropolis. In 2012, Miami’s ultrapowerful lobbyist class was banned from serving on that Charter Review Task Force out of fear they’d introduce self-serving new…
All the palm trees in the world can’t fan away the stress of maxing out your credit cards while trapped in a hateful marriage based exclusively on money, prestige, and Botox injections. Such is life in Miami: For the last eight years running, the city has ranked as one of…
In February, the Miami-Dade County Commission made a Faustian bargain: The county said it would start holding undocumented people in jail for the feds, all to shed its label as a “sanctuary” community and avoid President Donald Trump’s scorn. Given that some 156,000 undocumented people live in Miami, this terrified…
After a Homestead cop tried to run him off the road, Eric McDonough started keeping tabs on the local police. The Homestead resident, who has a doctorate in organic thermochemistry, started filming cops, criticizing the department at public meetings, and demanding the city institute a body-camera program. As a thank-you, McDonough…
All political scandals run through Miami. The Magic City is a lawless Casablanca of sorts, a town where the world’s worst rich people all congregate, party together, and hatch crackpot schemes to defraud taxpayers and/or tip presidential races. In 2000, a bunch of GOP operatives caused a ruckus outside County…
The public has largely forgotten that Florida Gov. Rick Scott — a loose conglomeration of bats that accidentally got trapped inside a suit — once ran a hospital system that stole a record amount of money from poor, sick people. Scott ran Columba/HCA hospital system, which in 1997 got caught…
Senate Republicans released a new version of their Obamacare repeal yesterday. They called the bill a “tamer” version of the barbaric law they originally pitched, but the new measure would still hack deep cuts to Medicaid funding for poor people. According to all currently available science, cutting Medicaid kills poor people…
In February, Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado proposed a law banning Airbnb-style rentals in two-thirds of his city, stunning the company, which says it previously had a cordial relationship with city officials. Regalado claimed for months that the crackdown was designed to protect residents from living next to de facto hotel rooms.
Miami Beach’s Citi Bike rental program is extremely simple: You pay a small fee, pick a bike off a rack, and ride it to another rack and leave it there. LimeBike, a Silicon Valley startup, is trying to streamline that process even further by removing the need for bike racks. You simply leave the bike on the sidewalk when you’re done, and the brakes lock automatically.
Yesterday, Major League Baseball, the City of Miami, and our beloved Miami Marlins teamed up to provide locals and visitors alike with an opportunity to take part in South Florida’s favorite pastime: standing outside in a thick wool throwback baseball jersey as Miami’s noontime July sun cooks off the top three layers of skin.
Earlier today, Donald Trump Jr. released astonishing email correspondence with Rob Goldstone, a Russia-tied PR magnate who brokered a secret meeting with the elder Trump’s presidential campaign to hand over documents that were “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
Since the 1990s, police departments across the nation have reevaluated when to chase suspects. If someone flees, cops’ first instinct is to follow; thousands of TV episodes, back to Miami Vice and Starsky and Hutch, have trained the public that a cop’s number one job is to chase down perpetrators, with no apparent concern for public property or consequences.
If Vice President Mike Pence, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, and the rest of President Donald Trump’s team of voter-suppressing ghouls want to create an extremely creepy database of the nation’s voter rolls, the group will have to fight through Miami thanks to a new lawsuit from the Florida ACLU and Florida Immigration Coalition.
Remember three years ago, when the City of Fort Lauderdale passed a series of extremely restrictive laws that basically outlawed feeding the homeless in public, arrested a 90-year-old for giving food to the poor, and got slapped down by a judge in one of the biggest public-relations fiascos in Florida history?
Florida’s rainy season began so slowly this year that farmers worried they would spend the summer under drought conditions. But then, in late June, a month’s worth of rain suddenly poured on Florida in just one week. The deluge swelled the artificially managed water levels in the Everglades, flooding the habitats of deer, endangered birds, and other critical animals and plants.
This week, New Times took a deep dive into what authorities allege to have been a huge “purple drank” ring that supplied codeine-and-promethazine laced cough syrup (A.K.A. “liquid heroin”) to hip-hop stars including Chris Brown and Lil Wayne. Harrison Garcia, the group’s alleged ringleader, was arrested earlier this year, and…
Under Mayor Jack Seiler, Fort Lauderdale has been harassing homeless people for years. In 2014, the city made it illegal to feed the homeless and arrested a 90-year-old Good Samaritan, Arnold Abbott, for giving needy people food. After that debacle grew into a national embarrassment, a judge invalidated that law…
Sen. Marco Rubio seems likely to vote for the Senate’s Obamacare replacement that effectively puts poor people through a meat grinder and turns them into Soylent Green. Both the Senate and House plans sharply cut Medicaid funding for the poor while giving the rich massive tax cuts, and are among the least popular bills in American history, according to recent polls.
Nothing motivates your constituents quite like actively trying to kill them. Today left-leaning organizers across the nation are protesting at Senate and congressional offices, demanding that GOP lawmakers abandon plans to nuke Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act and to replace them with the legal equivalent of paper clips and twine.
The case of former City of Miami Police Officers Reynaldo Irias and Yesid Ortiz remains strange: Both are being sued for allegedly falsely arresting and injuring an ex-Marine because the veteran tried to record the two cops harassing him. In a move that made matters much more interesting, both officers also resigned earlier this year, on the same day, by turning in identical resignation letters.
