It’s a blessing to live in a county where all elected officials but one are so good and wholesome. Great to breathe the same air as politicians who are as clean as Britney Spears’ teeth and who can root out evildoers in a way our great warrior president can only…
John Edwards has all the gravitas of John Boy and is almost as proven as a national leader. John Kerry has no presidential legs, but he’s got effete. Joe Lieberman combines chronic charisma deficiency with a serious identity problem — is he Democrat, Republican, or Likudnik? And Dick Gephardt… well,…
Broward State Attorney Michael Satz, whose bald head and square jaw could have been chiseled from stone, refuses to admit defeat. Sitting in a conference room near his office on the sixth floor of the Broward County Courthouse, wearing a crisp blue dress shirt and a tightly knotted yellowish tie,…
Newspapers around the country played the New Year’s Eve suicides of Morris and Estelle Spivack as a dramatic spectacle. Almost every headline about the Hollywood couple, for example, contained the word “leap.” The Chicago Tribune printed this atop its brief January 3 story: “Ailing couple leaps 17 floors to death.”…
Wake Up and Smile! That’s the name of the imaginary early-morning news show in one of the funniest Saturday Night Live skits ever. Former cast members Will Ferrell and Nancy Walls play anchors who are full of cheer until, “Good God no!” their teleprompter breaks. After Ferrell repeats the last…
Editor’s note: This is the last of a three-part series. The first column described Plantation’s racist history and showed that blacks are severely underrepresented in the police department and in supervisory positions throughout the city. The second told of City Hall’s unequal treatment of black and white nightclubs. Emelio Davis…
Some people might think Jim Crow died a long time ago. But the City of Plantation enacted laws a couple of years ago that were clearly designed to run black patrons out of town. And it has protected white-owned businesses, even when they break city ordinances. A group of political…
The boys ride to my driveway on mad killer bees. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzz! The sound emanates from small gas-powered motors, which are attached to little steel scooters called Go-Peds. They come for the basketball hoop, and I let them play, though the near-daily thumping of the ball on the blacktop and the…
Roy Baker uses a lot of code names, which can make it hard to unravel the meaning in the sharply analytical political columns he writes for Pompano Beach’s little weekly newspaper, the Sentry. When Baker refers to “Goliath,” for instance, the casual reader likely doesn’t know he’s talking about Tom…
Pompano Beach Mayor Bill Griffin didn’t face an election on November 5, but his political fate was on the line just the same. The ballot in his city included a mayor-at-large referendum designed to force Griffin outside of his cozy district for a citywide reelection bid this coming March. Since…
The New York Times buried its little story on the biggest peace rally in the United States since the Vietnam War on page A8, under the headline “Thousands March in Washington Against Going to War in Iraq.” Not tens of thousands. Not 100,000. Not 200,000. Just “thousands.” In the same…
On Tuesday, when Robert Wexler beats his underfunded Republican challenger, Jack Merkl, the Boca Raton congressman will get two more years of far-flung travel. As I’ve reported recently, he’s been jetting around the Middle East and Central Asia drumming up sup1port for an invasion of Iraq and the nebulous “war…
Robert Wexler loves to talk Turkey. The congressman from Boca Raton gobbles on and on about that troubled country, calling it a role model for all Muslim nations to follow and praising its help in the so-called war on terrorism. “Turkey is secular and democratic, and they are a steadfast…
Our elected Democrats fell to pieces last week, just as surely as if a Scud missile from Baghdad had by some miracle struck the party’s headquarters. En masse, they accused George W. Bush of wagging the dog by pushing a vote on the war during election season. They were right…
It’s official. Broward and Palm Beach counties are 100 percent in support of making war in Iraq. It seems we’re all itching for a bloodbath — or at least for bloody Baaths — in Baghdad. We’re good and snookered by the bait (Osama) and switch (Saddam), and have abandoned any…
With a manner strongly reminiscent of fellow Brooklyn native John McEnroe arguing a line call, Robert Wexler has made himself one of the nation’s loudest critics of President Bush. The liberal congressman from Boca Raton has made more than 100 appearances on cable television shows during the past two years,…
Tracking new Florida child welfare chief Jerry Regier’s past has led to some pretty disturbing things: radical Christian groups, papers on parental discipline that condone bruises and welts, and a drive to give tax dollars to churches. Now, welcome to the prayer closet. Inside a converted 300-room hotel, the prayer…
When Gov. Jeb Bush took office in 1999, he promised to clean up our singularly seedy state with tougher anticorruption laws. The new administration created a special task force that made recommendations in early 2000 to free up the Florida Commission on Ethics to investigate politicians of its own volition…
Religious fanatics are threatening to take away our peace and our freedom. They hate our open society and want to send us back to the Stone Age, where we’d be forced to live strictly by the rules of an outdated religious text. Even as I write this, they are planning…
Frank Lee Smith died in prison two and a half years ago, wrongfully convicted of raping and murdering an eight-year-old girl. He never found justice in courtrooms. But now, in the name of justice, Smith lives on in them. During just the past two weeks, Smith’s name has been invoked…
Never mind that Frank Lee Smith had done the time for his past crimes. Forget that he had lived three quiet, arrest-free years outside of prison before Broward County sheriff’s Det. Richard Scheff swept him up in a faulty investigative dragnet and charged him with the rape and murder of…
When Pompano Beach Mayor Bill Griffin decided last November that he wanted a bigger job, he went to Bill Keith. The mayor couldn’t have picked a better-connected fellow for employment assistance, especially in Griffin’s field of construction. Keith’s engineering firm, after all, is aligned with numerous major developers and builders…
