Politics & Government

The president of the United States has spent more than a third of his time in office at his personal properties and a fourth at his golf clubs, Business Insider reported this week.

This was the year when Miami politics went full drunken circus. Donald Trump repeatedly gave prime seats to a notorious former Miami cult member who once stood trial for murder. His top adviser had a secret South Florida history tied to drug dealers and mystery apartments. And Marco Rubio continued to be a spineless embarrassment.

Ever since Republican Miami Rep. Carlos Curbelo voted this year for the so-called “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” the much-maligned tax overhaul that cuts taxes for the country’s wealthiest people while doing relatively squat for the poor (and undermining the Affordable Care Act), he has repeatedly called the bill a…

It was early morning in the Florida Capitol, and Sen. Jack Latvala — among the most powerful men in the Senate — was furious. He wanted doughnuts, and there were no doughnuts to be found. He was so angry he berated a junior staffer for the Senate majority leader, who then called in Rachel Perrin Rogers, a high-ranking aide.

The Florida legislature is run by cold, dead-eyed lunatics, lecherous men, and vampires without the parts of their brains that let them feel empathy. Tallahassee is such a horrid place that it’s barely even news when someone proposes letting people openly carry shotguns while riding mountain bikes, or putting a…

Local snail-person and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio surfaced yesterday and briefly set Washington, D.C., ablaze by saying he wouldn’t vote for the much-maligned Republican tax-cut package unless it did more for working families.

Florida Democrats are, for the most part, huge failures. Democrats outnumber Republicans in both Miami-Dade County and in the state as a whole — but they’re so terrible at messaging that local and state politics are dominated by GOP wackadoodles. During Donald Trump’s first year in office, one would think…

Wherever he’s brought his giant inflatable caricature of Donald Trump as a snaggle-toothed rat, John Post Lee has been amazed by the response from others horrified by the regime. But when he started calling around and looking for a place to set up his signature balloon during Miami Art Week, the…

Two weeks ago, financial analyst Matthew Hanna, a 35-year-old from Brickell, released a $25 trivia card game on Amazon that measures players’ levels of racism and political correctness. The game, he says, provides a platform for constructive dialogue — a response to the tense political climate in the country.

Donald Trump’s decision yesterday to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel pissed off the United Nations, the European Union, virtually all of America’s allies, Palestinian people everywhere, and even the pope. Intelligence analysts are so worried about an upswell of violence that U.S. diplomats have been ordered to stay away from the city until further notice.

Next time you see a cruise ship at PortMiami, consider this: Because of a loophole in the U.S. tax code, the companies that rake in billions of dollars each year selling cruises to Kid Rock fans and spring breakers pay no corporate income tax.

During this year’s state legislative session, a bill transparently designed to cripple labor unions came close enough to passing that Florida public schoolteachers had to go on a PR blitz to beg lawmakers not to rip their rights away. Teachers, nurses, housekeepers, and every other union-protected industry breathed a sigh of relief when the measure failed during the 2017 legislative session — but the bill has been revived verbatim for 2018 and yesterday passed through its first voting hurdle toward becoming law.

Regularly reading Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s Twitter feed is a great way to step into the mind of someone with a cerebral hemorrhage. Sentences made mere hours apart contradict one another, phrases lose all meaning, concepts such as “dignity” and “self-respect” are put through a figurative wood chipper.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a hall-of-fame-level cretin, plans to vote on a tax bill that will redistribute billions of dollars from the poor to the rich, exacerbate the nation’s terrifying problems with income inequality, and force more poor Americans into bankruptcy while cutting taxes for major corporations and conglomerates. Because Rubio is a monster…

For weeks, Donald Trump gleefully boasted about the job his administration had done in helping Puerto Rico weather the monstrous Hurricane Maria, particularly noting that only 16 people had supposedly been killed. “Look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and… you look at what happened here,” Trump said of the death toll in New Orleans…

Joshua Cooper, a Tallahassee political consultant paid more than $500,000 by Florida Gov. Rick Scott to dig up dirt on Scott’s enemies over the years, swears the photo above was simply a snapshot taken at an unfortunate angle. Cooper is adamant the photo absolutely does not show him holding an ice penis next to a mannequin’s groin.

Americans are blessed to live in a nation where cable companies can’t charge consumers extra money to access Netflix or block them from reading the New York Times online just for the heck of it. But telecom companies sure seem like they want that power, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is now chaired by a former Verizon lawyer and internet-service-provider lackey.

For a world-class city, the median income in Miami-Dade County is astoundingly low — a paltry $44,000, according to county estimates. Donald Trump rode into office by promising to help poor Americans get rich, but according to a city-by-city analysis of the new tax plan he and Senate Republicans are proposing,…