Politics & Government

Miami officials have long been supportive of the First Tee, a nonprofit that teaches golf and life lessons to thousands of kids at the city-owned Melreese Country Club. City leaders lined up for a ribbon-cutting ceremony when the charity opened a new learning center in 2013 and praised it for helping local youngsters. More recently, Mayor Francis Suarez became an honorary chairman of the nonprofit’s Young Ambassadors Board.

According to a recently departed staffer, Wayne Messam’s campaign team didn’t receive their paychecks Monday as expected. As a result, multiple staffers have resigned this week, the source says.

Bruce Ryan, president of the Florida Custom Car Association, is working with Florida lawmakers to legalize so-called “underbody” lights. Ryan is better known online as OG Magnum, the white-haired, tattooed, dancing “hip-hop grandpa” who’s amassed 238,000 Instagram followers and hung out with numerous rap icons.

Democratic presidential candidate Wayne Messam has condemned Joe Biden, who has been accused of inappropriately touching women. But during his tenure as mayor of Miramar, Messam supported two top city administrators who have also been accused of harassing women.

Florida Sen. Rick Scott today posted a tweet calling for the U.S. military to invade Venezuela, a move that foreign policy experts have warned would be a massive bloodbath and spark a prolonged humanitarian crisis or civil war.

On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union cautioned immigrants and people of color about traveling to Florida. The travel advisory comes in response to two “anti-sanctuary” bills currently moving through the state Legislature.

Last month, GOP legislators introduced bills that would require offenders to pay back court fees before they become eligible to vote. The Florida ACLU will hold sit-ins to urge lawmakers to oppose any further restrictions on felon voting rights.

A Florida bill that would force minors to get parental consent for abortions passed the House Judiciary Committee yesterday. The ACLU warns the bill will hurt underage girls if enacted.

On Wednesday morning, Parkland dad Fred Guttenberg posted a photo of the letter his family received from the NRA condemning gun-control “extremists” who “threaten your individual liberties.” Guttenberg responded, “My daughter was the only one to lose freedom.”

Arguably the most important rule for visiting South Beach is this: Watch out for overzealous towing companies. Tow companies for years have preyed on unsuspecting tourists and residents alike — in 2013, New Times wrote in a longform feature that Miami Beach’s towing companies were orchestrating a “decades-long, politically sanctioned operation to hold people’s cars for ransom for hundreds of dollars” and were raking in millions each year by outright tricking drivers into parking illegally using all sorts of schemes.

A year and a half after Hurricane Maria pummeled Puerto Rico, the island is still recovering. Borinqueños continue to face power outages and water shortages. The agriculture industry is rebuilding from the storm’s damage to local crops. But President Donald Trump and Congress are sparring over aid. After Senate Democrats blocked a…

The modern anti-immigrant movement in America was largely created by white nationalists and eugenicists. One of the nation’s loudest voices is a group called the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, which was founded in 1979 by John Tanton, a doctor who believed in eugenics. Tanton received funding from his…

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has turned in his report on alleged Russian interference to the Justice Department. Very few people know what Mueller has been up to for the last two-odd years — maybe he’s proved that Donald Trump met Vladimir Putin at a Cheesecake Factory in Volgograd, where they…

Florida’s Democratic Party is in deep trouble. The party that makes up the majority of Sunshine State voters (37 percent versus 35 percent Republican) didn’t get its people to the polls in 2018 and lost a U.S. Senate seat, the governor’s chair, and both houses of the state Legislature…

Typically, political issues in cushy, wealthy, coddled Coral Gables are boring. But every once in a while, the city’s mayor openly admits he’s planning to bulldoze an entire neighborhood full of poor people. Case in point: Gables Mayor Raúl Valdés-Fauli openly admitted in a city candidate debate last week that…

Despite years of alleged misconduct, Frank Pichel somehow still works in Miami politics. In 2000, he was suspended from his job as a City of Miami Police sergeant after being caught allegedly writing a fake incident report to cover for a buddy who beat a handcuffed detainee to death. In 2006…

According to Human Rights Watch, the Saudi attack on Yemen has sparked the single-worst humanitarian crisis in the world right now. Children are starving to death, cities lay in ruins, and a horrible cholera outbreak is ravaging the poverty-stricken nation. Innocent people live in constant fear they will be vaporized by…

Joe Gruters, the Florida senator, ex-Trump campaign chair in the Sunshine State, and current state Republican Party leader, has a pretty transparent message to undocumented immigrants: Don’t bother driving. As part of the deeply racist and controversial “anti-sanctuary city” bill he’s proposing, SB 168,…

When Twitter suspended multiple members of the Proud Boys for violating the site’s policy on “violent extremist groups” last fall, Enrique Tarrio, the Miami-based chairman of the right-wing group, was among those removed. But since Twitter doesn’t have a good way to stop a suspended user from simply making a new account, Tarrio was back on the platform in no time under a new name.

Throughout the 2016 Republican presidential primary, former Florida governor and current Miami businessman Jeb Bush was painted as the sensible, reasonable, and less transparently corrupt GOP alternative to Donald Trump. But it turns out that folks tied to Bush also apparently enjoy bouts of law-breaking…

The Democratic Party Monday chose Milwaukee as the site of its 2020 convention, snubbing Miami. That’s right. Milwaukee. The choice was expected despite last-minute efforts from former Miami Beach mayor and gubernatorial candidate Philip Levine and Democratic Party fundraiser Chris Korge.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio appears to have shared fake information over the past month as part of an attempt to oust Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, according to a scathing report published over the weekend by the New York Times. Rubio blamed Maduro’s forces for burning a bunch of American “aid” trucks…