In his long municipal career, Pat Salerno has shown two consistent tendencies: bringing big-money, landscape-changing projects to fruition and rubbing other government officials the wrong way with his management style. Six years after that latter habit got him run out of Sunrise, Salerno abruptly resigned this morning as Coral Gables…
Miami is looking ever more likely to be the gravitational center of the GOP battle for 2016’s Presidential race. Locally grown Sen. Marco Rubio has already promised to make a call within the next year about whether to toss his hat into the wide-open Republican field and now the man…
Florida’s beer laws are already about as logical as David Samson’s Survivor strategy. Thanks to the oversized influence of big money distributors, antiquated laws like one banning 64-ounce growlers (which are legal in 47 other states) stay on the books. Craft brewers have spent four years trying to change that…
Rick Scott’s 2010 campaign was such a Tea Party-assisted, out-of-nowhere effort that many Floridians barely had time to fully comprehend his past. Well, this time around Democratic groups have ample time to remind voters of the governor’s checkered business past. Democratic political committee American Bridge is out with a new…
Another Florida legislative session. Another bill that would allow for destination casinos in Miami-Dade. Another quiet death? With the legislative session hitting the halfway point, House Speaker Will Weatherford admitted today that it’s looking more and more likely neither the House nor Senate will take action on the bill this…
Ever since Marco Rubio was first elected to the senate over four years ago he’s carried out his career like a guy who may one day run for president, but he rarely openly talks about those ambitions. Well, at a Reuters Health Summit in Washington he openly addressed his future…
A few months before the 2012 presidential election, Gov. Rick Scott sold a massive voter purge as a way to eliminate hundreds of “non-citizens” who were supposedly threatening democracy. Instead, the effort was a xenophobic joke. In Miami alone, hundreds of mostly Latino voters were forced to prove their citizenship…
“As I travel the district, I hear the exact same things,” Florida Republican congressional candidate Jacob A. Rush writes on his campaign website. “People are nervous; they don’t understand their government anymore — it literally makes no sense.” Rush, however, has now been outed as an active member of an…
Imagine this scenario: A hurricane is about to pummel Dade County. Hundreds of thousands of panicked, jumpy residents sit on traffic-clogged escape routes, all trying desperately to get to safety. And now a simple question: Should all those people, even those without legal concealed carry permits, be allowed to carry…
When Gov. Rick Scott’s campaign finance co-chairman Mike Fernandez resigned abruptly last week, he said he wanted to spend more time with his family. Insiders speculate he might have been frustrated with the direction of the troubled campaign. Yet, now it’s come to light that Fernandez was also upset about…
All signs point toward Floridians approving a medical marijuana proposal on November’s ballot, but the legislature could ease the Sunshine State toward some legalized pot all on their own during this month’s session. One measure, which would kick start research funding into medical marijuana and legalize a non-euphoric strain for…
For the first time since Miami teen Trayvon Martin’s death, legislators are poised to approve a substantial reform to the state’s “Stand Your Ground” law. A bill that looks likely to pass the House this week would add warning shots to the protections under the law — a response to…
In Florida, you can get married if you’re a 13-year-old who accidentally knocks up his girlfriend, but not if you’re in a committed adult relationship with someone of the same sex. Rep. Cynthia Stafford, a Miami Democrat, wants to change that. No, not the part about allowing gays to marry,…
Poll numbers about how many Floridians support legalizing medical marijuana seem to be all over the place — well, except below the 60 percent necessary it would need to pass. A new University of North Florida poll shows that 74 percent of Floridians intend to vote to legalize medicinal pot…
They don’t agree about much up in Tallahassee, but apparently every state senator is against “revenge porn.” A bill that would make it illegal to post explicit photos of another person online without his or her permission passed the state senate unanimously today. See also: Miami Revenge Porn Victim Holly…
The right wing’s most influential techno hermit, Matt Drudge, lives in a mansion out in the Redland and was driving around Southwest Dade yesterday when he saw two things that freaked him out: the word “Obamacare” and the Spanish language. He tweeted a picture of a van touting an Obamacare…
Charlie Crist may be running on a “man of the people” platform, but that hasn’t stopped him from moving to Florida’s most expensive and exclusive zip code. Crist and his wife Carol Rome are apparently spending so much time in South Florida that they’re now renting a condo on ritzy…
On the one hand, mass drug testing laws are inherently evil and unconstitutional. But on the other, required screening for the same elected officials who keep trying to force drug tests on welfare recipients and minimum wage-earning state employees would be beautifully ironic — especially in the wake of one…
Protests have rumbled through President Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela for the past month, but in a televised press conference today, Hugo Chavez’s successor seemed more concerned with what was going on in Miami and Washington, D.C. Maduro singled out Senator Marco Rubio and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinene as leaders of a “Miami…
Gen. John F. Kelly, the chief of the Miami-based U.S. Southern Command, gave a surprisingly candid testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday. He said that because of budget cuts and inadequate funding he’s only able to stop about 26 percent of illegal drugs that head from Latin America…
Reubin Askew, the Democratic Governor who helped bring Florida into the modern age, died early this morning at the age of 85. Rated as one of the top ten governors of the 20th century by Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Askew’s legacy still resonates throughout the state. He…
Because there are no two phrases Americans still recovering from the recession like to hear in the same sentence more than “Bush” and “Wall Street,” Bloomberg News reports that Wall Street’s money men are really hot on the idea of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush running for president in 2016…
