Politics & Government

As Democrats go, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a dreadful candidate. Her donor pool is dominated by corporate raiders and predatory capitalists, the list of important bills she’s written is slim, and she helped drive her party toward catastrophic losses while she was the head of the Democratic National Committee. In theory, it should be easy to challenge her by refusing to take money from corporations, supporting single-payer health care, and generally being progressive in a post-Trump, post-Brexit world.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: By almost every expert analysis, the American Health Care Act is a moral nightmare that will seriously harm the poor and defenseless. Cutting $880 billion from Medicaid will bankrupt families and strip coverage from 200,000 poor black and Hispanic children in Florida. That should be reason enough not to support it.

Inside the Oval Office, President Trump sits behind the resolute desk. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio sits to his right, Miami Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart to his left. Both men whisper their plans on how to take down Raúl Castro. The two agree to conduct their negotiations in secrecy, passing handwritten notes to Trump through intermediaries like Gov. Rick Scott.

Just behind the Manuel Artime Theater, an elderly Cuban man in a fedora stood with a microphone. “Donald Trump is a true patriot that wants liberty for Cuba,” he hollered in Spanish into the mike. Then he offered his personal theory about why Barack Obama wasn’t hard enough on the regime: Obama, he yelled, was gay and in a homosexual relationship with Raúl Castro!

For Juan Morales, a graduate student at Florida International University, Vice President Mike Pence’s visit to his college campus today dredges up memories from when he was 14 years old of the brutally divisive politics in his homeland, Venezuela. At a school with a heavily immigrant and international student population, he…

In late June 2015, Giancarlo Sopo got off a plane in Havana, Cuba, where his cousins waited for him in a 1980s-era Lada. He wasn’t sure what they looked like, but was immediately embraced by his relatives, who recognized him from photos. He stayed for ten days in Santos Suarez, a suburb just outside the city, in the same home where his family had lived for four generations.

Donald Trump has a curious relationship with Miami. The Magic City, in many ways, represents everything Trump rails against. We live in a chaotic melting pot of people from around the world — and have one of the highest percentages of undocumented residents in the United States. Miami also voted heavily for Hillary Clinton, which is not the kind of move to endear yourself to a guy pathologically obsessed with whether he won the popular vote.

Marco Rubio wants you to know he’s very tough on Russia. He even sponsored a bill to rename the street outside the Russian embassy after a slain opposition leader. Take that, Vlad!

Last week, the Miami Herald outed Daniel Perez, a Miami Republican running for an open House seat, for taking his engagement photos in Cuba — a move that could seriously hurt his chances with older Cuban Republicans who might see celebratory wedding photos as a tacit endorsement of Barack Obama’s detente with the Castro regime…

Miami-Dade County State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle is reportedly considering a run for a statewide seat — perhaps even governor. That’s an interesting development in light of the fact that a sizable portion of Rundle’s own local Democratic Party believes her office worked to cover up the death of Darren Rainey…

After four years and an absurd hopscotch around Dade County in search of a stadium site, David Beckham and his partners are closer than ever to finally bringing a Major League Soccer team to Miami. Commissioners voted 9-4 this afternoon to sell a county-owned parcel of land in Overtown to Beckham’s group for $9 million — the final piece of land needed to begin work on a stadium next to the Miami River.

For 17 years, Purdy Lounge has been the low-key antidote to South Beach’s overhyped, overpriced, and overcrowded club scene. The Sunset Harbour mainstay has never charged a cover to enter its dimly lit interior, where separate rooms pump out old-school hip-hop and current dance hits, all with reasonably priced cocktails flowing.

How malicious and dumb is Donald Trump? He not only pulled out of the historic Paris Agreement to fight climate change this week, but he also announced he’ll hold a “Pittsburgh, Not Paris” rally to stress that he somehow is fighting for Americans instead of global climate scientists.

When State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle’s office decided this past March not to charge four prison guards who oversaw the death of Darren Rainey — a black, schizophrenic prisoner scalded to death inside a locked shower — she announced the move in a late-Friday news dump without a press conference. But the decision caused national outrage, with critics noting that in her 24 years in office, Rundle has never charged a guard or cop for an on-duty death.

Roger Stone has been at the heart of three of the objectively worst things to happen in the Sunshine State in the 21st Century: When a group of angry white folks protested in 2000 to stop the Bush v. Gore recount, Stone later admitted he staged the whole thing to get Bush elected. When Scott Rothstein’s record-setting Ponzi scheme fell to pieces, it turned out Stone had an office at Rothstein’s law firm.

Three days ago, Fox News retracted an explosive story: The FBI was probing whether murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich had sent thousands of emails to WikiLeaks before his mysterious death. Everyone, from the U.S. intelligence community to cybersecurity pros, says the claim is nonsense: The nearly universal consensus…

Barnaby Min, Miami’s deputy city attorney, was widely ridiculed last week for comparing legalizing weed to pedophilia at a meeting at city hall. But it turns out he’s an even worse messenger for that offensive claim than most anyone knew.

There is truly no defeat the Florida Democratic Party will avoid snatching from the hands of victory. Donald Trump has turned the Republican Party radioactive. His polling numbers are plummeting right alongside the GOP as a whole. And the nation is seeing a groundswell of progressive activism at levels not witnessed since the 1960s.