You good folks spurred me in the post on Becky Blackwood to look into the licensing of Broward County School Board Chief Building Official Ronald Morgan. Or should I say the lack of licensing of Chief Building Official Ronald Morgan. Morgan, who makes in excess of $100,000 a year, is in charge of enforcing code…

I was told this morning that Miami Herald veteran Terry Jackson had died of cancer, and worked a bit on a post about it. What I wrote consisted of paragraphs like this: “Jackson, married to the Herald’s Marjie Lambert, came to Florida from California — where he worked for the Sacramento Bee –…

Becky Blackwood won. And it’s the public who will pay for the Broward County School Board’s stupid and vindictive decision to fire her. It’s been a long road back for Blackwood, a former supervisory building inspector who has contended she was removed from her job in retaliation for her blowing…

Well, former Judge Larry Seidlin solicited gifts from an attorney in his courtroom and chiseled an elderly widow living in his condo building out of nearly half a million dollars — and it looks like he’s going to get away with it. The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, while not exactly exonerating the…

Okay, first watch the video from a pro-Palestinian rally (and pro-Israeli counter-rally) at the federal courthouse on Broward Boulevard in downtown Fort Lauderdale on December 30. It’s going viral as I type this:   Now let’s break this down. First, that rather strange guy introducing the tape, Tom Trento, is…

It’s another year — and another rambling think piece from Tribune Chief Innovation Officer Lee Abrams. And he seems to have reached a turning point. Abrams says truth, integrity, and intelligence … might actually be profitable. “Junk Culture or Junk Food media does sell, but I’m sensing a trend where intellect is commercially viable,” Abrams writes. …

How do you keep fans — and sportswriters — happy in the NFL? Make sure you toss in a few ridiculously bad seasons in the mix of a bunch of mediocre ones. It’s all about expectations, folks. Remember that. Don’t believe it? Let’s look at the Dolphins, a team that during…

I’ve been documenting the downsizing of newspapers here for the past couple of years, so I guess it was bound to happen. My newspaper, which has largely avoided the carnage, has been cutting not just empty positions, but people. And the bloodletting has happened at several other newspapers owned by our parent, Village Voice Media…

The New Year is going to be much like the Old Year on the Pulp — I’ll be faithfully grousing about local newspaper content. My first beef of 2009 is with the lead story in the local section of the Sun-Sentinel today. More specifically it is with the lede of that lead story…

When the City of Deerfield Beach imploded with the arrests of two-fifths of the city’s ruling body — Mayor Al Capellini and Commissioner Steve Gonot — the city’s reigning change agent gloated. “I hereby, now and forever, proclaim the Eleventh of December as Chaz Stevens Day,” Chaz Stevens wrote on…

John de Groot supplies a quote regarding the conflict between Jews and Arabs and challenges Pulp readers to guess who uttered the words. ————————————– The Jews and the Arabs have been doing violence to each other for most of my life. Just as generations of the world’s anguished by-standers have continued to…

Outgoing Sunrise Mayor Steven Feren continues to embarrass himself and his city. On Christmas Eve, he contacted his fellow commissioners, via email from commission secretary Terry Soto, to ask them to hold a special meeting tonight to give him an extra $150 a month for the rest of his life.   To…

The Miami Dolphins beat the Jets Sunday to win the division and make it to the playoffs. It’s a great achievement for a team that went 1-15 last year and a nice gift for the fans. But a miracle? That’s what a headline on the the Sun-Sentinel’s front page called it this morning…

Congrats to the Broward Sheriff’s Office for nailing Gypsy con artist Gina Marie Marks, aka Regina Milbourne, on fraud charges. I knew about this case, which was worked up by Palm Beach private detective Bob Nygaard, for a few weeks and it looks like BSO acted quickly and decisively. You…

… no woman would. Some of you already know what I’m talking about — anybody that saw the front page of the Sun-Sentinel on Sunday. For those of you who didn’t, the entire page was dominated by a photograph of Broward County Commissioner Lois Wexler in her driveway picking up the…

Outgoing Sunrise Mayor Steven Feren, who is leaving office next month to take a judgeship, is proving once and for all that’s he’s unfit for public office.   The mayor’s recent actions have been disgraceful. He is, right now, scrambling to try to get his fellow Sunrise commissioners to vote to ensure him an…

… I’m so desperate that I dream of working for some weird Internet start-up that wants to replace real journalism with blog posts. Yes, and that’s just one possible answer to the question being asked by an outfit called Publish2, the Web start-up in question. And if you are judged to have the best…

Broward County has a history of packing its jails with destitute inmates — so much so that it remains under a 1995 federal order to keep crowding to a minimum. The solution to the problem has been a pretrial release program that releases low-risk, mostly indigent inmates and monitors them,…

Crumbling CastlePolice arrested Deerfield Beach Mayor Al Capellini last Friday and charged him with receiving unlawful compensation. The charge stems from accusations that first surfaced in the 2006 Bob Norman column “Mayor Al Engineers Another Deal.” Capellini’s “stunning” arrest, as the Sun-Sentinel deemed it, stems from a land deal in…

Michael Bienes doesn’t make a lot of news and hasn’t been involved much in local politics, but if you look around you’ll see the tall and seemingly kindly Fort Lauderdale multi-millionaire’s name all over the place. At Holy Cross Hospital, there’s the Michael and Dianne Bienes Comprehensive Cancer Center. At the Broward County Library in downtown…

— So the parimutuels are getting together to try to get some parity with the Seminole Hard Rock. In short, they want to be able to offer table games like blackjack — or have those games taken from the Seminoles. Mardi Gras Gaming’s Dan Adkins tells the Sun-Sentinel’s Josh Hafenbrack…

When trouble brewed, former Broward County Sheriff Ken Jenne was quick to spend our tax  dollars on lawyers to try to help him get out of trouble. Most infamously, he engineered the payment of $1.2 million to his good friend and political supporter Tom Panza to “investigate” the Powertrac scandal, wherein BSO falsely…