Florida’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis not only has said and done racist things but also continues getting caught hanging out with racist nutjobs. New Times in April disclosed that he spoke at a virulently anti-Muslim event with Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos in 2017. Then the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting found that DeSantis appeared…
No matter your thoughts on the political and economic crises in Venezuela, the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, definitely should not be seen snacking on luxury meats while his constituents starve. This is something of a recurring problem for Maduro.
Just before the November 2016 election, a federal judge forced the Florida Division of Elections to allow rejected absentee-ballot voters to correct mistakes on their mailed-in forms. Yet somehow even more ballots ended up being rejected in that election than in 2012 — and younger voters and voters of color, who overwhelmingly lean to the left, had their ballots invalidated at a far higher rate.
For the past ten years, Rhyelle, a 72-year-old Sarasota County resident, hasn’t been able to cast a ballot. He is one of the roughly 1.5 million Floridians who lost their right to vote because, in 2008, he was convicted of a felony for growing marijuana for his personal use in his home.
When the Washington Post revealed earlier this month that Ron DeSantis, Florida’s #MAGA GOP gubernatorial candidate, had appeared at conferences organized by David Horowitz — a guy who has minimized the impact of slavery in American history and argued there’s a “race war” against white people — DeSantis lashed back and insisted he was the victim of a “smear campaign.”
Confronted earlier this year by investigators from the Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics & Public Trust, Miami Commissioner Joe Carollo admitted he showed up outside a valet parking lot for the Little Havana nightclub Ball & Chain around 1 o’clock on early morning in February. But he denied claims he whipped…
Medical marijuana is legal in Florida for the simple reason that more than 70 percent of voters wanted it to be legal. But despite that overwhelmingly clear mandate in November 2016, legislators in Tallahassee have dragged their feet on setting statewide rules like petulant kids getting hauled to the dentist.
Americans have the right to express their political beliefs without threats from the government. But according to a New York Times report published late yesterday, FBI agents are scouring Miami to knock on the doors of Cuban-Americans who have agitated to end the anti-Castro embargo.
Miami’s city charter is crystal clear: It’s flat-out illegal for elected officials to give direct orders to city staffers such as fire inspectors or code enforcement employees. If the mayor or a city commissioner breaks that edict, they can face a $500 fine, 60 days in jail, and immediate removal from office.
It’s impossible to know whether Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis is, in fact, a racist. But it’s sure easy to point out how often he does racist stuff or fraternizes with racist people. There’s that appearance next to Steve Bannon at an anti-Muslim conference and the time he used the…
In the 1990s, Miami Commissioner Joe Carollo didn’t get along with then-Mayor Stephen P. Clark. Carollo, a square-headed paranoiac who sees communist symbols in burnt toast and cloud formations, is not exactly an easy guy to get along with. But during a particularly nasty battle in 1996 over the then-extant Miami Arena…
In Little Havana, it was an open secret that Luis Posada Carriles had blown up a Cuban airliner in 1974, killing 73 people. And many observers later suspected Carriles was also behind a series of 1997 attacks on Cuban hotels that killed an Italian tourist and injured 11 others. But…
Bill Fuller, who co-owns the historic, infamous Little Havana bar Ball & Chain (as well as many other properties in the neighborhood), claims Miami commissioner and former mayor “Crazy Joe” Carollo has launched a political vendetta against him. The reason: Fuller kinda-sorta supported Carollo’s 2017 election opponent Alfie Leon.
The U.S. Capitol is filled with even more dumb, morally bankrupt, fame-hungry lunatics than usual. Today a group of octogenarian lawmakers is holding essentially a sham hearing on transparency and censorship in online media while Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, along with others, testifies on Capitol Hill.
As he’s done nearly every day since his daughter Jaime died in the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February, Fred Guttenberg spent this morning trying to push for gun control. Today he made his way to D.C. for Senate confirmation hearings on Brett Kavanaugh so he could ask Trump’s first Supreme Court pick where he stands on anti-gun-violence measures.
When investigators from the Miami-Dade County Commission on Ethics & Public Trust asked Stephen Miró, a former aide to Miami Commissioner Joe Carollo, whether the politician was using city resources to “selectively” attack Bill Fuller, the owner of Little Havana’s Ball & Chain, as vengeance for his support of Carollo’s opponent, Miró did not pull punches.
After enough racism scandals involving a particular political candidate, you’d think everyone might just admit that person is simply racist. Yet a whole lot of people — from bad-faith conservative pundits to easily fooled reporters — continue offering excuses for Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis’ infamous statement on Fox News that Andrew Gillum would “monkey… up” Florida.
Click on a page called “Tea Party,” which boasts 94,000 followers and claims to be “the oldest and largest #TeaParty group on Facebook,” and you’ll find that one of the first posts this morning is a glaringly racist meme showing side-by-side photos of Melania Trump and a heavily Photoshopped Michelle Obama with the headline “Make the White House Beautiful Again.”
This year, record numbers of women across Florida are mounting campaigns for office, most of them progressives motivated by anti-Trump fervor and emboldened by the Women’s March. The so-called Pink Wave had its first real test Tuesday, Primary Day. And the early returns suggest the wave is real.
After last night’s primary results made it official, Floridians assumed newly minted GOP gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis, a Confederate-flag bumper-sticker come to life, would run a wild, dog-whistling, and entirely Trumpian campaign against Democrat Andrew Gillum. But people perhaps didn’t expect DeSantis to start throwing around racial slurs this early…
The running joke among Florida political journalists is that the state’s inept Democratic Party runs a centrist from Tampa every single year for governor. The past few decades of Democratic gubernatorial candidates have been milquetoast centrists who love palling around with their Republican colleagues in Tallahassee and sharing stories about staggering home from bars during their time at FSU. Florida, it seems, does not create populist firebrands.
By 7 p.m., Floridians will know whether their usually inept state Democratic Party has chosen to anoint a hard-campaigning progressive with popular, grassroots support; a rich dude with a checkered track record as Miami Beach mayor; or a well-connected but boring centrist former congresswoman as the party’s next gubernatorial candidate…
