Donald Trump has been president for only 13 weeks (even if it feels like a brutal half-century in Twitter years), yet he’s already spent seven full weekends at Mar-a-Lago, his beachfront playground for the obscenely wealthy. That’s concerning for all kinds of reasons: the ethics of constantly pumping up a for-profit business run by his family, the security lapses in the sprawling mansion, the costs of protecting the president there.
Jose Felix “Pepi” Diaz (not to be confused with Miami-Dade County Commissioner Jose “Pepe” Diaz) was fired after two episodes on the reality show The Apprentice in 2006. He’d been tasked with coming up with a business proposal for Gillette, which was trying to sell some sort of five-razor-blade monstrosity to insecure men. Diaz ended up sleeping in on the day of his pitch and was fired for lack of leadership.
For all the debate, tears, and fury that President Trump’s short-lived “Muslim ban” caused, the public actually knows surprisingly little about what happened at airports. The exact techniques Customs and Border Protection agents used before courts quashed the ban have remained secret. And since the ban was suspended in February, Muslims across the nation, including Miami’s Muhammad Ali Jr., have been detained illegally anyway.
Donald Trump is so rich. Big-league (bigly?) wealthy. So wonderfully wealthy that he apparently owes a Miami paint store $300,000 for work at his Trump National Doral Miami resort. So wealthy he’s been fighting not to pay that $300,000 since last year. So wealthy that his lawyers officially lost an appeal yesterday and now he’s gotta pay that $300,000 or try to appeal all the way to the Florida Supreme Court.
Nothing can happen in Miami this year that will be funnier than Ben Carson getting stuck inside an elevator today. Nothing. There is no single image more hilarious than the look on Carson’s face as he walked through the elevator’s metal doors at Overtown’s Courtside Family Apartments and then realized they weren’t going to open. Carson and Miami-Dade County Public Housing Director Michael Liu were trapped inside the elevator for a solid 20 minutes this morning while firefighters searched for a way to free the two.
Jack Seiler once served as the mayor of Wilton Manors, a Broward city with the second-highest proportion of same-sex couples in the whole country. Seiler, a Democrat, now serves as the mayor of nearby Fort Lauderdale, which has its own long history of LGBTQ support. In fact, South Florida as a…
If you were to take the words of Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Ted Deutch, and pretty much any other Democratic congressperson in the Sunshine State at face value, Donald Trump is an unstable, proto-fascist warmonger, uncontrollable narcissist, and serial sexual predator who should never have been able to come near any sort of missile-launching device.
Marco Rubio spent most of last year lambasting Donald Trump as a “con artist” with tiny genitals who is totally unfit to lead the nation. But since last night, at least, he’s been the Don’s single best spokesman on cable news and the internet. Rubio has been everywhere to loudly defend the Trump administration’s about-face last night away from keeping war criminal Bashar al-Assad in power to dropping Tomahawk missiles on Syrian airfields.
Carlos Beruff has virtually no political qualifications. He’s rich, openly racist, and good friends with Florida’s governor. The real-estate developer and major political donor ran for U.S. Senate against Marco Rubio last year and lost. In that time, he called Barack Obama an “animal,” called for a ban on all immigration from the Middle East, and reveled in being dubbed the “Cuban-American Donald Trump.” Voters heavily rejected him.
Miami Beach is 53 percent Hispanic, so you’d be forgiven for assuming its 46 boards and committees would reflect those demographics. But a recent survey shows that’s not the case — as of last month, just 17 percent of those appointed by city commissioners were Hispanic. Black residents are also…
Thanks to Donald Trump, the nation is already expected to lose $1.6 billion in tourism from Mexican travelers, who are overwhelmingly skipping the States and flying to Canada. On a local level, economic analysts worry that the so-called Trump effect from his xenophobic rhetoric and attempted Muslim bans is also discouraging Latin American tourists from venturing onto U.S. soil.
In June 2016, the City of Miami Beach voted to eventually raise its minimum wage to $13.31 per hour. The move sounds innocuous enough, but it was a shot across the bow of state legislators: Florida law actually bans local municipalities from setting their own wages higher than the state’s…
Miami-Dade commissioners — particularly Barbara Jordan and Audrey Edmonson — last week let down their constituents. How? They punted for a third straight year on coming up with a system to give $14 million in funding to nonprofit groups.
Miami Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart definitely, totally, absolutely hasn’t been trying to trade his vote for “Trumpcare” for control over the Trump administration’s Cuba policy, the congressman’s spokesperson tells New Times. Just minutes before the scheduled high-stakes vote, such is the surreal world of political intrigue in which Diaz-Balart now finds himself.
Before voting to ban floating billboards in his city, Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine told the company behind the concept that it was an “interesting business.” He must have meant it: A month and a half later, he’s now using their services to advertise.
According to Longwood state Rep. Scott Plakon, Florida’s firefighters, cops, and corrections officers are a “special” type of public servants, the sort that are integral to a functioning democracy. The state’s teachers and nurses? Not so much. Earlier this month, Plakon filed a bill that, if enacted, would strip a union of its collective bargaining power…
When a congressional issue unites the following list of subhuman rat-people, you know it’s going to be something awful. One bill this year has brought together U.S. Sens. Tom Cotton (the dude who hates Iran), Jim Inhofe (the idiot who took a snowball inside the Capitol to disprove global warming), Rand Paul, Orrin Hatch, Mitch McConnell, the Zodiac Killer Ted Cruz, and Miami’s own Marco Rubio.
It’s Sunshine Week, a nationwide initiative to promote transparency in government, so what better time to run through five bills that could chip away most at Florida’s open-records law?
Eleven times in one year, Miami Police received calls for help at a tree-lined, three-bedroom house in Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood. Some came from tenants in distress inside the home. Others were placed by neighbors concerned about loud arguing. All reflect back on White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who rented the house for his most recent ex-wife in 2015 and 2016.
Miami State Sen. Frank Artiles is swimming in some boiling-hot water after accepting nearly $2,000 in gifts from Florida Power & Light before rapidly advancing pro-FPL bills in his committee. But don’t criticize Artiles online — he’ll probably just block you.
Marco Rubio has been as silent as a Trappist monk lately. He’s refused to hold town-hall meetings, declined to criticize Donald Trump’s Muslim ban, and wouldn’t even join the Republicans calling for Jeff Sessions’ recusal from a Russia probe over his lies about meeting Moscow’s ambassador.
Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine is having a weird month. Last week, he got into an emoji-filled Twitter fight with the Airbnb company account after accusing the home-sharing service of ruining the quality of life on his island. Today, in front of a roomful of Cuban-Americans, Levine suggested invading Havana. The mayor insists he was just kidding, though.
