Florida’s mostly Republican legislators can barely pass basic laws like tax cuts or budget plans without tripping over themselves or spiraling into intra-party screaming matches. They’re so bad at writing their own laws that, as the Miami Herald astutely pointed out last week, gigantic companies like Florida Power & Light have to write laws for them. The current Legislature is a Stygian pit of bad ideas.
If you were to take the words of Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Ted Deutch, and pretty much any other Democratic congressperson in the Sunshine State at face value, Donald Trump is an unstable, proto-fascist warmonger, uncontrollable narcissist, and serial sexual predator who should never have been able to come near any sort of missile-launching device.
Charles Kinsey, an unarmed black man, was simply trying to help Arnaldo Rios Soto — an autistic man holding a toy truck — out of the street last July when North Miami Police Officer Jonathan Aledda shot Kinsey in the leg. Now, yet another officer involved in the case has told investigators that Aledda was warned before he shot that neither Kinsey nor the autistic man had a gun, according to a transcript of his testimony obtained by New Times.
About 1,000 people have already registered for Miami’s March for Science.
Marco Rubio spent most of last year lambasting Donald Trump as a “con artist” with tiny genitals who is totally unfit to lead the nation. But since last night, at least, he’s been the Don’s single best spokesman on cable news and the internet. Rubio has been everywhere to loudly defend the Trump administration’s about-face last night away from keeping war criminal Bashar al-Assad in power to dropping Tomahawk missiles on Syrian airfields.
Miami’s spring break 2017 was one for the books. It began with a bikini-clad tourist twerking on a cop, continued with a gravity-defying feat of twerking atop a car on the MacArthur Causeway, and ended with a clubgoer twerking on the bumper of a car stopped in traffic near Ocean Drive after last call.
Carlos Beruff has virtually no political qualifications. He’s rich, openly racist, and good friends with Florida’s governor. The real-estate developer and major political donor ran for U.S. Senate against Marco Rubio last year and lost. In that time, he called Barack Obama an “animal,” called for a ban on all immigration from the Middle East, and reveled in being dubbed the “Cuban-American Donald Trump.” Voters heavily rejected him.
Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s uniquely unqualified secretary of education, isn’t particularly good at thinking on her feet. Asked why there ought to be guns in school during her confirmation hearing this year, she infamously opined that schools might need to protect themselves from bears.
There are 21 million people in Florida, millions of whom will eventually qualify for the medical-grade marijuana that voters approved in November. Very soon, a hell of a lot of weed will be legally sold in the Sunshine State. And so far, lawmakers have given exactly seven companies the right to grow and sell all of that pot.
Miami Beach is 53 percent Hispanic, so you’d be forgiven for assuming its 46 boards and committees would reflect those demographics. But a recent survey shows that’s not the case — as of last month, just 17 percent of those appointed by city commissioners were Hispanic. Black residents are also…
Earlier this week, the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office released an hourlong interview by North Miami Police Chief Gary Eugene — a move that sparked a new media firestorm over last July’s police shooting of Charles Kinsey, an unarmed black man lying in the street with his hands up. In the interview, Eugene describes a police department in disarray…
Charles Kinsey’s shooting went viral last year thanks to shaky cell-phone footage that showed the unarmed behavioral technician with his arms in the air, begging police not to fire just before a North Miami cop shot him.
Same-sex marriage has been legal in Florida for two whole years, yet under state law, employers in the Sunshine State are still well within their rights to fire or refuse to hire people solely because they’re gay. Likewise, landlords can boot tenants or refuse to rent to them based on their sexual orientation.
The next week of Miami Heat basketball is important, which is miraculous considering where the team sat in the standings three months ago. The Heat is desperately trying to make the playoffs after starting the season 11-30. For exactly half a season, the Heat was the second-worst team in the NBA.
Moments before North Miami Police Officer Jonathan Aledda shot unarmed behavioral technician Charles Kinsey last July 18, another cop on the scene warned there was no gun, only a toy. After the shooting, an assistant chief repeatedly lied to the police chief, and City Manager Larry Spring ignored vital evidence.
Thanks to Donald Trump, the nation is already expected to lose $1.6 billion in tourism from Mexican travelers, who are overwhelmingly skipping the States and flying to Canada. On a local level, economic analysts worry that the so-called Trump effect from his xenophobic rhetoric and attempted Muslim bans is also discouraging Latin American tourists from venturing onto U.S. soil.
If working women in Florida were paid the same as comparable men, the number of women living in poverty would drop by 50 percent.
At the beginning of North Miami Beach’s meeting last night about a plan to privatize its water system, City Manager Ana Garcia asked residents to trust the city based on the commission’s track record. That was an odd appeal, considering that Mayor George Vallejo is the subject of an…
If we’re going to legalize, we ought to expunge the criminal record of every person ever convicted of a marijuana crime. For years, white people bought their weed from the brothers. Even the white guy who sold the stuff got it from an African-American. Yet a disproportionate number of blacks have spent years in jail for trafficking and possession.
Alone in his car on the side of the highway, Corey Jones made his tenth call for help. Tinny music echoed through the speaker of the 31-year-old drummer’s iPhone. A streetlight shrouded the gray Hyundai Santa Fe in orange and highlighted bunches of trees along the I-95 ramp where the…
Floatopia-style parties — where attendees bring inflatable rafts and get hellaciously drunk on the ocean — would be totally fine if people just cleaned up after themselves. But instead, partygoers have treated the ocean like an open garbage can and left beer cans, food wrappers, loose garbage, and all sorts of marine-life-killing flotsam drifting in the current.
Florida lawmakers have, over the past ten years, quietly siphoned $1.3 billion away from a $1.8 billion, statewide fund for affordable housing, the Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times Tallahassee Bureau reported Friday. Asked whether this is a problem, Miami Republican state Rep. Carlos Trujillo basically flipped his hometown — which is trapped in an unprecedented affordability crisis — the bird.
