Politics & Government

Since his son’s death at MSD, Manuel Oliver has been traveling the country painting murals. On Saturday he featured Matt Gaetz gripping an assault rifle.

Florida politicians are giving a lot of cover to extremists and racists as of late. Here’s a handy list of officials who have yet to suffer major consequences for propping up white supremacists, Islamophobes, conspiracy theorists, and the like.

Ralph Andrade, a registered lobbyist for Beach Towing who has also worked for Tremont, is fighting to stop a City of Miami Beach audit allegedly showing rampant violations by the two companies. The latest audit is expected to be released next week, and, apparently, the findings are not favorable to the tow-truck industry.

On April 17, Gruters held a news conference to support SB 168, the anti-“sanctuary city” bill he’s pushing that would force towns to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Immigrant-rights groups say the bill, if it became law, would rip apart families just to appease some racist Republican voters.

State Sen. Joe Gruters has a hideously racist sign outside his office that purports to show the “Faces of Criminal Illegals Deported from Sarasota County.” According to a video posted online yesterday by activist Thomas Kennedy, Gruters apparently saw no issue with keeping this abominable sign up while a child begged him not to pass a bill that would hurt his family.

Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber was so irked by a Memorial Day weekend event flyer with a bikini-clad woman and the tag line “No rules!! Anything goes!”, he included it in an email blast to residents explaining why the city needs, well, more rules. Attaching a screenshot censoring the woman’s body, he declared, “Ocean Drive should be the postcard image for our city — not a stretch where residents are sometimes afraid to go and visitors think anything goes.”

Miami officials have long been supportive of the First Tee, a nonprofit that teaches golf and life lessons to thousands of kids at the city-owned Melreese Country Club. City leaders lined up for a ribbon-cutting ceremony when the charity opened a new learning center in 2013 and praised it for helping local youngsters. More recently, Mayor Francis Suarez became an honorary chairman of the nonprofit’s Young Ambassadors Board.

According to a recently departed staffer, Wayne Messam’s campaign team didn’t receive their paychecks Monday as expected. As a result, multiple staffers have resigned this week, the source says.

Bruce Ryan, president of the Florida Custom Car Association, is working with Florida lawmakers to legalize so-called “underbody” lights. Ryan is better known online as OG Magnum, the white-haired, tattooed, dancing “hip-hop grandpa” who’s amassed 238,000 Instagram followers and hung out with numerous rap icons.

Democratic presidential candidate Wayne Messam has condemned Joe Biden, who has been accused of inappropriately touching women. But during his tenure as mayor of Miramar, Messam supported two top city administrators who have also been accused of harassing women.

Florida Sen. Rick Scott today posted a tweet calling for the U.S. military to invade Venezuela, a move that foreign policy experts have warned would be a massive bloodbath and spark a prolonged humanitarian crisis or civil war.

On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union cautioned immigrants and people of color about traveling to Florida. The travel advisory comes in response to two “anti-sanctuary” bills currently moving through the state Legislature.

Last month, GOP legislators introduced bills that would require offenders to pay back court fees before they become eligible to vote. The Florida ACLU will hold sit-ins to urge lawmakers to oppose any further restrictions on felon voting rights.

A Florida bill that would force minors to get parental consent for abortions passed the House Judiciary Committee yesterday. The ACLU warns the bill will hurt underage girls if enacted.

On Wednesday morning, Parkland dad Fred Guttenberg posted a photo of the letter his family received from the NRA condemning gun-control “extremists” who “threaten your individual liberties.” Guttenberg responded, “My daughter was the only one to lose freedom.”

Arguably the most important rule for visiting South Beach is this: Watch out for overzealous towing companies. Tow companies for years have preyed on unsuspecting tourists and residents alike — in 2013, New Times wrote in a longform feature that Miami Beach’s towing companies were orchestrating a “decades-long, politically sanctioned operation to hold people’s cars for ransom for hundreds of dollars” and were raking in millions each year by outright tricking drivers into parking illegally using all sorts of schemes.

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…