Politics & Government

Another year in Florida means another wave of clearly unconstitutional attempts to crack down on brown people. State legislators this month began filing their first bills of the 2018 session, and North Florida state Sen. Greg Steube, a man who simply cannot stop himself from filing insane laws designed to hurt people, has already begun flinging anti-immigrant crackdowns at the wall to see what sticks.

Earlier this year, Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran was one of only two state-level politicians who attended the infamous Koch brothers-hosted summit in Colorado. Corcoran promptly flew home and announced a plan to kill Florida’s public-election-financing laws, which help elect candidates who don’t want donations from the corporations, utility companies, real-estate magnates, and billionaires who effectively control state politics.

Poor, poor Philip Levine. The Miami Beach mayor has long been suspected of running a massive social-media-blocking campaign — over the past few years, he’s cut off critics, local activists, and even the main Miami New Times twitter account from reading his tweets. Multiple courts have ruled that politicians are not allowed to block people from viewing their social media accounts because those pages disseminate vital public information.

As Donald Trump has repeatedly praised neo-Nazi and KKK rallies as being full of “fine people” and minimized the deadly domestic terror attack on peaceful counterprotesters in Charlottesville, everyone from Sen. John McCain to Trump’s own economic advisor, Gary Cohn, have spoken out against the president. One voice that has been notably silent, however, is Trump’s labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, who until recently was dean of Florida International University’s law school.

One of the final questions left unanswered from the 2016 presidential election was resolved today. Thanks to an email hack, Democratic National Committee chair and South Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was outed as favoring Hillary Clinton over rival Bernie Sanders during the primary.

Florida marijuana advocate, campaign-donation rainmaker, and possible Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Morgan refuses to drop longtime political shyster Roger Stone from his national marijuana-advocacy team. Morgan has been warned repeatedly that Stone’s presence will end up tanking the entire project (not to mention Morgan political reputation)…

For nearly three years, county officials and police in Miami-Dade failed to respond as a tent city of sex offenders grew along train tracks near Hialeah. The squalid camp is just the latest consequence of a 2005 county law that banned sex offenders from living within 2,500 feet of any school, daycare center, or park, effectively banishing them into homelessness.

Tune in to a Donald Trump rally and there’s a decent chance you’ll see Maurice Symonette — better known as Michael the Black Man — standing front and center behind the president while waving his hand-drawn “Blacks for Trump” sign. He was there through much of the presidential campaign and then again last night in Phoenix, wildly cheering during CNN’s live feed as Trump trashed the press and defended his pro-neo-Nazi remarks after Charlottesville.

The 2016 GOP presidential primary proved Sen. Marco Rubio isn’t particularly great at thinking on his feet. He was infamously nicknamed “Robot Rubio” after getting caught repeating the same, scripted anti-Obama talking point four different times during the debates last year. Robot Rubio was then immortalized on The Simpsons, in what we hope will be the only video clip of Lil’ Marco that survives the coming nuclear winter.

On September 7, Frank Meeink, a former skinhead leader and neo-Nazi recruiter, will “speak out against hate” at Eckerd College, sponsored by the Florida Holocaust Museum. After serving time in prison, where he befriended fellow inmates of other races, he became an activist, denouncing white supremacy and right-wing extremism. Weeks after the August 12 terror attack in Charlottesville, the reformed skinhead will comment on the escalating violence in America.

Planning on getting a marriage license, paying a traffic ticket in person, or filing a motion for the eviction of your tenants? That’s about to become much more difficult in Miami-Dade County.

When Broward County state Rep. Shevrin Jones protested in Hollywood, Florida, to demand the city rename streets honoring former Confederate generals and a Ku Klux Klan leader, a group of counterprotesters shouted racial slurs at him, calling him a “nigger” and a “monkey” and telling him to “go back where [he] came from.”

On September 7, the Miami-Dade Commission will convene to review the mayor’s proposed budget, which includes cuts to transit funding. Protesting the cuts are members of the Transit Alliance, who believe the new budget will cripple Miami’s public transit system.

Yesterday, in the wake of the Charlottesville violence, Tallahassee mayor and gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum begged Gov. Rick Scott to take down a Confederate memorial in Tallahassee’s Old Capitol. Scott’s spokesperson sheepishly told reporters the governor had “received” Gillum’s statement. Nothing else.

Confederate monuments are falling across the United States, torn down by angry mobs in North Carolina and removed in the dead of night by Baltimore officials. The movement is a long-overdue reckoning with racist symbols that were often installed decades after the Civil War simply to intimidate black people.

When a South Florida Uber driver shot and killed an armed attacker late last year, Jose Mejia thought the company should have congratulated the guy. Mejia, who’s also a local driver, couldn’t believe it when the man’s job was called into question instead, thanks to an Uber policy barring firearms.

Save Southern Heritage is a national network committed to keeping monuments to the pro-slavery South alive and gleaming across the nation. At least one member of the group from Virginia attended last weekend’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where mobs of white nationalists beat people with sticks and drove a car into dozens of peaceful counterprotesters.

Julio Calderon, a undocumented immigrant from Honduras, clutches a megaphone in the sweltering August sun and wipes tears from his eyes. He has a message for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is speaking to a crowd of Miami-Dade police and political leaders just down the street. “I don’t think I should be criminalized and deported because I want to stay here,” Calderon says.

Yesterday the pro-Confederate group Save Southern Heritage Florida issued a news release blaming leftists, members of the movement Antifa, and Black Lives Matter for the terror attack by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia.