Politics & Government

By 3:30 p.m. Sunday, three Miami-Dade County Police wagons were parked outside Departure Gate 9 at Miami International Airport. A battalion of county cops stood elbow-to-elbow in the middle of the street, at least one clad in a K-9 Unit vest. Multiple times, the cops had threatened to arrest members of the more than 300-person crowd that had gathered at MIA to protest President Trump’s Muslim-travel ban.

To initiate a recall vote in Miami-Dade County, one must first send a proposal to the county clerk, who must, according to county law, make sure your legal petition is up to snuff, legally speaking. You’re free to try to recall any elected official in Miami, from the county property appraiser to anyone on the county commission to — oh, just for the sake of argument — the county mayor himself.

County Hall went on lockdown this afternoon as a group gathered outside to protest Mayor Carlos Gimenez’s order to county officials to comply with all of Donald Trump’s strict immigration plans. Guards blocked the doors. The Metromover stop was closed. And then Rep. Keith Ellison crashed the party. The co-chair…

Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s senior counselor and chief strategist, lashed out at reporters this week, claiming “the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut.” The comments came after journalists discovered Bannon was registered to vote in both Florida and New York – an embarrassing revelation…

To put things bluntly, America’s president has spent the past 24 hours attacking brown people. First, Donald Trump announced he’s bullheadedly pushing forward with Building! The! Wall! despite the fact that the fastest-growing group of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. is flying in from Asia. He’s also banning refugees from seven Muslim countries in the name of homeland security despite the fact that nearly every post-9/11 assailant in this country has been a U.S. citizen or permanent resident.

During President Donald Trump’s inauguration events this past Friday, Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi Ken doll, stood on a street corner in Washington, D.C., explaining the significance of the Pepe the Frog meme to a reporter who has apparently never once used the internet. Then the crowds parted as if moved by the archangel Metatron himself, and a masked hero jumped into the crowd — and socked Spencer in the face.

“I marched the first time,” Sandy Oestreich says, speaking by phone from here home near St. Petersburg. Oestreich is 82, and has spent her life demonstrating in the streets for women’s equality. And compared to the big women’s rights protests in the 1970s, the lawmaker, professor, activist, and ardent feminist…

It wasn’t that difficult to attend at least one event related to Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington. Marches were, in fact, planned in every single major American city and tons of smaller satellite cities, including tiny Lubbock, Texas; and Key West, Florida. Miami held its own rally at the Bayfront Park Amphitheatre, which concluded with a protest march through city streets. All you had to do was show up and march.

Remember two weeks ago when your friends were all amazed at Sen. Marco Rubio’s gutsy showing at Rex Tillerson’s confirmation hearing? Rubio roasted Tillerson for refusing to call Vladimir Putin a war criminal over his Syria campaign. Maybe, political columnists suggested, Rubio could be a GOP bulwark against Donald Trump’s neglect for basic human rights.

Donald Trump is officially the president of the United States. Trump promised today to give power in America “back to the people” — people, presumably, like billionaires Besty DeVos, Steve Mnuchin, and Rex Tillerson, who make up his cabinet. If, however, you are interested in protecting your power and rights…

Rubio has thrown deep shade at Chelsea Manning, the transgender former Army private and WikiLeaks leaker whom President Obama pardoned yesterday. See if you can notice what’s off about Rubio’s statement condemning Obama’s move:

Over the past ten years, it’s been difficult to find politicians, be they left-leaning or right-of-center, to defend the U.S. government’s “wet foot, dry foot” Cuban immigration policy. Even during the Bush administration, politicos — such as then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — called the rule an outdated relic of the Cold War. Even Marco Rubio has said it’s time for the law to go.

Barack Obama will be the U.S. president for eight more days. But he’s decided something that will have lasting ramifications for Miami and South Florida: the end of the long-standing and controversial “wet foot, dry foot” Cuban immigration policy, which granted residency to Cuban immigrants who entered the United States without visas, according to the Associated Press.

Before taking the reins as mayor of Miami Beach, Philip Levine made a fortune as a cruise-ship media magnate who spent his spare time hobnobbing with celebrities like Mick Jagger, Annie Liebovitz, and Hillary and Bill Clinton. The minute Levine took office in 2013, he used his experience as a PR king to his advantage, rapidly turning himself into one of the nation’s highest-profile climate-change fighters.

By now you’ve woken up to the Black Mirror-worthy headlines: President-elect Donald Trump has spent all night angrily denying he paid Russian prostitutes to perform an R. Kelly-approved routine at a Moscow hotel while FSB spies secretly filmed blackmail material.

Just so we’re clear, Marco Rubio is, by his own admission, not a scientist. He might actually be a large, brain-eating amoeba infecting the South Florida water supply. But whether he’s a living human senator or single-celled malignant disease, he sure talks like someone who knows next to nothing about the environment. He once blamed Miami’s flooding on “higher sea levels or whatever may be happening” and has said throughout his career that he doesn’t think human-made climate change is real.

In November, 71 percent of Florida voters backed legal medical marijuana. In Miami Beach, the approval rating was nearly 80 percent. So it’s bizarre that the very next day, the city voted to block dispensaries from the island for at least four months. Commissioner Ricky Arriola, who sponsored the move, says he simply wants to hit pause to allow the city more time to decide where distributors can operate.