A year and a half after Hurricane Maria pummeled Puerto Rico, the island is still recovering. Borinqueños continue to face power outages and water shortages. The agriculture industry is rebuilding from the storm’s damage to local crops. But President Donald Trump and Congress are sparring over aid. After Senate Democrats blocked a…
The modern anti-immigrant movement in America was largely created by white nationalists and eugenicists. One of the nation’s loudest voices is a group called the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, which was founded in 1979 by John Tanton, a doctor who believed in eugenics. Tanton received funding from his…
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has turned in his report on alleged Russian interference to the Justice Department. Very few people know what Mueller has been up to for the last two-odd years — maybe he’s proved that Donald Trump met Vladimir Putin at a Cheesecake Factory in Volgograd, where they…
Florida’s Democratic Party is in deep trouble. The party that makes up the majority of Sunshine State voters (37 percent versus 35 percent Republican) didn’t get its people to the polls in 2018 and lost a U.S. Senate seat, the governor’s chair, and both houses of the state Legislature…
Typically, political issues in cushy, wealthy, coddled Coral Gables are boring. But every once in a while, the city’s mayor openly admits he’s planning to bulldoze an entire neighborhood full of poor people. Case in point: Gables Mayor Raúl Valdés-Fauli openly admitted in a city candidate debate last week that…
Despite years of alleged misconduct, Frank Pichel somehow still works in Miami politics. In 2000, he was suspended from his job as a City of Miami Police sergeant after being caught allegedly writing a fake incident report to cover for a buddy who beat a handcuffed detainee to death. In 2006…
According to Human Rights Watch, the Saudi attack on Yemen has sparked the single-worst humanitarian crisis in the world right now. Children are starving to death, cities lay in ruins, and a horrible cholera outbreak is ravaging the poverty-stricken nation. Innocent people live in constant fear they will be vaporized by…
Joe Gruters, the Florida senator, ex-Trump campaign chair in the Sunshine State, and current state Republican Party leader, has a pretty transparent message to undocumented immigrants: Don’t bother driving. As part of the deeply racist and controversial “anti-sanctuary city” bill he’s proposing, SB 168,…
When Twitter suspended multiple members of the Proud Boys for violating the site’s policy on “violent extremist groups” last fall, Enrique Tarrio, the Miami-based chairman of the right-wing group, was among those removed. But since Twitter doesn’t have a good way to stop a suspended user from simply making a new account, Tarrio was back on the platform in no time under a new name.
Throughout the 2016 Republican presidential primary, former Florida governor and current Miami businessman Jeb Bush was painted as the sensible, reasonable, and less transparently corrupt GOP alternative to Donald Trump. But it turns out that folks tied to Bush also apparently enjoy bouts of law-breaking…
The Democratic Party Monday chose Milwaukee as the site of its 2020 convention, snubbing Miami. That’s right. Milwaukee. The choice was expected despite last-minute efforts from former Miami Beach mayor and gubernatorial candidate Philip Levine and Democratic Party fundraiser Chris Korge.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio appears to have shared fake information over the past month as part of an attempt to oust Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, according to a scathing report published over the weekend by the New York Times. Rubio blamed Maduro’s forces for burning a bunch of American “aid” trucks…
A former Venezuelan vice president and five others, including three men with South Florida connections, were charged today with moving tens of thousands of dollars in cash from Venezuela to the United States in violation of federal sanctions and a drug-smuggling law. Tareck Zaidan El Aissami served as vice president…
The Miami Herald this morning broke a doozy of a story: Li “Cindy” Yang, the woman who founded the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, Florida — where Patriots owner Robert Kraft got caught allegedly paying for sex from trafficked women — watched the Patriots-Rams Super Bowl with Donald Trump.
The Orlando Sentinel is reporting this morning that a Boca Raton legislator, State Sen. Kevin Rader, has filed a bill to study moving the Florida capital from Tallahassee to Orlando. The two-page measure — and these babies are never two pages — suggests things like ease of travel and economic impact…
In 2017, Florida lawmakers bizarrely spent a bunch of time passing a bill forcing the state to display the phrase “In God We Trust” in public schools. As it turns out, this was just the beginning of a pro-Christian legislative push in Florida: State lawmakers — namely Jacksonville State Rep. Kim…
Hundreds of activists plan to rally this morning to shut down the Homestead Detention Center for unaccompanied minors. The center, which is the only one of its type in the nation, will soon — or maybe already has — double in capacity to 2,350, as a tent city in Tornillo…
All stories of fraud, theft, and scumbaggery flow through Miami at some point. And there is maybe no bigger swindle in U.S. history than Donald Trump’s hoodwinking of the American people in 2016 — a man with a brain made from congealed Wendy’s Frosties managed to win just enough states…
One of the most pressing issues for the pro-Trump wing of the internet is that it’s getting increasingly difficult to be racist and misinformed online nowadays. Since 2016, the world’s major social networking sites — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al. — have cracked down on hate speech, racism, propaganda, and conspiracy theories…
Jose Oliva is the first Florida House of Representatives speaker from Miami since Marco Rubio. Tomorrow, as he gavels in the state’s legislative session, the 46-year-old Hialeah Republican faces some of the thorniest issues in state history: pot, guns in school, and felon voting rights, to name a…
Matt Gaetz, Florida congressman and human worm, had a hell of a week. He defended someone associated with the alt-right, all but certainly committed a literal crime on Twitter, and topped it all off by defending a billionaire child-rapist. The sad part, of course, is that a lot of…
Miami-Dade County is not affordable. Rent is astronomical compared to the median income. But in many cases, lawmakers are hamstrung. They can force developers to set aside affordable units, but they can’t build complexes with reasonable rents.
