Politics & Government

For now, the state’s headlong rush to allow more casinos in Miami-Dade looks to be dead in the water. But Miami Beach commissioners aren’t taking any chances when it comes to slot machines in SoBe. The commission voted this morning to push forward a zoning change that would ban all gambling establishments anywhere in the city.

Not many politicians are willing to get on a stage with Scientology leader David Miscavige and heap praise upon his organization. After all, Miscavige is at the center of a firestorm of abuse allegations, and his church has been accused of widespread human rights violations.

When Donald Trump signed his January executive order banning travel from seven majority-Muslim nations, Rafael A. Velasquez threw on a blazer, grabbed a megaphone, and stood in the rain outside Miami International Airport, screaming “Not my president!” and “Refugees are welcome here!” amid a tense standoff with airport security.

Miami-Dade County State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle announced last month that her office would not charge four prison guards responsible for the death of Darren Rainey, a black inmate with schizophrenia who was thrown inside a scalding-hot shower for close to two hours and died inside. The public was outraged:…

On January 25, President Donald Trump signed an executive order stripping federal funding from so-called “sanctuary cities,” which refuse to detain undocumented immigrants in their jails on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The vast majority of the nation’s big cities vowed to fight the ban.

Miami is blessed with both a remarkably flat landscape and hundreds of days worth of tropical sunshine. In any logical universe, the Magic City would be a haven for both urban cyclists and solar power. Instead, the 305 is one of the more dangerous biking cities in America and has…

The chant echoed through downtown Miami on Saturday morning: “Science, not silence!” Thousands marched from the new Frost Museum of Science south along Biscayne Blvd. with a message for Donald Trump’s administration: Science can’t be denied when it’s politically inconvenient.

Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine loves the Clinton family. He and Bill Clinton developed a friendship a few decades ago. Levine also spent the 2016 presidential election season riding a tour bus from state to state campaigning for Hillary Clinton’s doomed campaign.

Miami state Sen. Frank Artiles unleashed a bigoted tirade against his fellow lawmakers earlier this week, in which he reportedly said state Senate President Joe Negron was a “pussy,” called two Tallahassee lobbyists “faggots,” and used the N-word to refer to six white lawmakers — in front of a black legislator. Earlier this week, he apologized, only to try to fight for his job by continuing to lob insulting letters at his colleagues.

Last September, four Miami Dolphins players joined San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick in kneeling during the National Anthem to raise awareness about police brutality and black inequality. And like clockwork, a whole host of critics got irrationally upset about a few people peacefully protesting for civil rights without hurting anybody.

Donald Trump has been president for only 13 weeks (even if it feels like a brutal half-century in Twitter years), yet he’s already spent seven full weekends at Mar-a-Lago, his beachfront playground for the obscenely wealthy. That’s concerning for all kinds of reasons: the ethics of constantly pumping up a for-profit business run by his family, the security lapses in the sprawling mansion, the costs of protecting the president there.

Jose Felix “Pepi” Diaz (not to be confused with Miami-Dade County Commissioner Jose “Pepe” Diaz) was fired after two episodes on the reality show The Apprentice in 2006. He’d been tasked with coming up with a business proposal for Gillette, which was trying to sell some sort of five-razor-blade monstrosity to insecure men. Diaz ended up sleeping in on the day of his pitch and was fired for lack of leadership.

For all the debate, tears, and fury that President Trump’s short-lived “Muslim ban” caused, the public actually knows surprisingly little about what happened at airports. The exact techniques Customs and Border Protection agents used before courts quashed the ban have remained secret. And since the ban was suspended in February, Muslims across the nation, including Miami’s Muhammad Ali Jr., have been detained illegally anyway.

Donald Trump is so rich. Big-league (bigly?) wealthy. So wonderfully wealthy that he apparently owes a Miami paint store $300,000 for work at his Trump National Doral Miami resort. So wealthy he’s been fighting not to pay that $300,000 since last year. So wealthy that his lawyers officially lost an appeal yesterday and now he’s gotta pay that $300,000 or try to appeal all the way to the Florida Supreme Court.

Jack Seiler once served as the mayor of Wilton Manors, a Broward city with the second-highest proportion of same-sex couples in the whole country. Seiler, a Democrat, now serves as the mayor of nearby Fort Lauderdale, which has its own long history of LGBTQ support. In fact, South Florida as a…

If you were to take the words of Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Ted Deutch, and pretty much any other Democratic congressperson in the Sunshine State at face value, Donald Trump is an unstable, proto-fascist warmonger, uncontrollable narcissist, and serial sexual predator who should never have been able to come near any sort of missile-launching device.

Miami Beach is 53 percent Hispanic, so you’d be forgiven for assuming its 46 boards and committees would reflect those demographics. But a recent survey shows that’s not the case — as of last month, just 17 percent of those appointed by city commissioners were Hispanic. Black residents are also…