Lead Stories *According to an October Wall Street Journal profile, Randall C. Hutchens is one jailbird making a comfortable living behind bars as he serves out a two-year sentence for tax evasion. He files $5000 stockholder-fraud lawsuits in California small-claims courts and so far has received settlement checks in various…
Hiaasen? He’s Outta Here. Dave Barry is History. The City Desk Can Take a Hike. The Investigative Team is Toast. New York Times Subscription 1-800-631-2500 Anyone know if the Miami Herald employs the same accountants Wayne Huizenga used for the Marlins’ books when they were “losing” all that money? According…
When the Subject Is Castro, Bid Farewell to Rationality As usual it is New Times that provides us with two excellent pieces about how the Cuban issue is treated: Jacob Bernstein’s article describing how Bernardo Benes’s life was destroyed by so-called Cuban patriots (“Twice Exiled,” November 12) and Jim DeFede’s…
Lead Stories *In September a Tennessee appeals court rejected a woman’s challenge to a child custody ruling that she said endangers her twelve-year-old son. According to the court: “Record does not support finding that unsupervised visitation with husband puts child in danger. (T)here is not one whisper of anything improper…
Let the Light Shine on Miami’s Haitians Finally Haitians are being recognized for their strengths and candor. Kathy Glasgow’s article on Marleine Bastien (“The Catalyst,” November 5), shed positive light on Haitians who are often depicted as mindless, AIDS-infected, voodoo-practicing refugees. I can only hope that the blatant racism suffered…
Lead Stories *In October the New York Times reported on an emerging mental health condition called “uplift anxiety,” in which Prozac users who were uplifted by the drug grieve for their former selves because, in the words of a writer who has overcome depression: “The most fundamental aspect of yourself…
Last week voters in Colorado’s Second Congressional District elected a new representative to replace David Skaggs, a respected Democrat who is retiring after serving twelve years in the House of Representatives. Ordinarily the departure of a congressman whose district is more than 1500 miles away would pass without much notice…
Lead Story *A University of California professor’s request to see FBI records on Groucho Marx was granted in September. Included in the records were reports of Marx’s friendships with other liberal Hollywood types and public quotes by Marx critical of the United States, some obviously made just for laughs. Despite…
Free Weekly Throws Election! Evil Reigns! If Jeb Bush is elected governor on November 3, it will in large part be due to the lackluster performance of New Times during this election season. As readers will presumably have noticed, New Times deliberately chose to ignore Florida’s elections until the very…
Lead Stories *Public relations executive Jim O’Connor opened the Cuss Control Academy in Chicago in September; he charges $300 for a five-day program promoting patience and less-hostile language. In a Chicago Sun-Times story about the class, a Northwestern University professor pointed out that discouraging profanity might create “a loss of…
Jeb Bush and I first met in 1994 during his run for governor. For six days I crisscrossed the state with him in a motor home, listening to more stump speeches than I care to remember. How often during that week did he invoke the hokey phrase And when I…
Kropola: Retirement for the Ethically Challenged I read with great interest Ted B. Kissell’s article “The Naming Game” (October 22) regarding school board member Dr. Michael M. Krop. Perhaps Dr. Krop should designate Krop High School as a dental magnet academy. That way he could collect an extra salary as…
After spending the past year at war with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Howard Gary has agreed to a truce; he will remain the government’s star witness in the bribery case against former Miami-Dade County Commissioner Jim Burke, California financier Calvin Grigsby, and Burke’s former chief of staff Billy Hardemon. Of…
Ibarguen: Nice Boy, Fine Adult This is in response to Jacob Bernstein’s article about [Miami Herald publisher] Alberto IbargYen (“Hatchet Man,” October 15). Alberto and I trained in the same Peace Corps group. We lived and studied in close quarters at the YMCA in Tucson. Out of 56 people, 36…
Lead Stories *In August a Virginia Circuit Court, ruling in the divorce case of Glaze v. Glaze, said that “sexual intercourse” was not a legal requirement for having “sexual relations.” The court did rule, however, that sexual intercourse was necessary for the ground of “adultery,” and since Mrs. Glaze was…
Merrill Crews is the Republican Party candidate for the Florida House of Representatives in District 119, which encompasses a large portion southern Miami-Dade County. His campaign brochure features a picture of him with his wife and children, and a second snapshot of him with the family pet, a black Labrador…
Lead Stories *World’s greatest athletes: According to Pacific Dunlop, the company supplying condoms for the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, Olympic officials have requested 51 condoms per participant for the seventeen-day event. Said one athlete interviewed by the London Daily Telegraph: “Three per day sounds too many.” *Five people…
So What If He Spent 22 Years in Prison, He’s Still a Crybaby What an amazing cast of characters in Jacob Bernstein’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Litigant” (October 8)! A vicious gossip so envious of anyone truly famous that she grasps at anything despite the truth. A crybaby…
Lead Stories *And Perrier and bowls of red M&Ms: When authorities raided a cockfighting operation near Gadsden, Alabama, in July, they found not only a restaurant and 250-seat theater for patrons but two air-conditioned trailers in which the roosters hung out before their matches; one trailer offered piped-in country music…
Your Elected Representatives Will Now Insult You Jim DeFede’s story “How to Save the Neighborhood” (September 24) describes a group of citizens trying to protect their neighborhood from a development that violates county regulations. Grinding down citizen opposition is a tradition-bound tactic, and in Miami-Dade County it is public sport:…
Lead Stories *This past summer the city councils of Fostoria, Ohio, and Victoria, British Columbia, adopted codes of conduct for their citizens, in Fostoria to provide a “moral compass” and in Victoria to restore “courteous behavior.” Fostoria implores people to “try to do what is right and try to help…
Around 6:00 a.m. Friday morning, with the worst of Hurricane Georges still a few hours away, Doug Hawley is totaling up the register receipts at Jack’s Bait and Tackle. “Fifty-six dollars in the last six hours,” he tells his brother Gary, disappointment evident in his voice. “Not too many people…
