Back in the early ’90s, shortly after the Fire Ant crash-landed in Palm Beach, we hooked up with some other malcontents and put out an alternative rag called Red Herring. It was an alternative that looked alternative, mainly because it depended on the largesse of a string of eccentric businessmen…
Trying to find out what’s going on in the Town of Jupiter’s quest to purchase land owned by Business Development Board of Palm Beach County CEO Kelly Smallridge’s husband, Mark Smallridge, is like playing Whac-A-Mole: Nail down the answer to one question and another pops up to take its place.See…
It’s easy to look at the bizarre and terrible history of Nazi Germany and focus solely on the millions of victims. Or to make a fetish of the perpetrators and inadvertently honor their crimes. But what I found most compelling in the Compass Center exhibit “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945″…
Pretty goddamned embarrassing when Palm Beach County’s premier performing arts showcase chooses to break the law with impunity rather than do right by its employees. But for 12 years now Palm Beach’s Kravis Center has engaged in an illegal campaign of union busting that’s simmered like a boil on the county’s public…
Friends in the Palm Beach Chapter of the ACLU recently asked us if we had any suggestions whom they might grace with its 2013 Harriette Glasner Freedom Award, “for a Palm Beach County resident whose life and work embodies the values and ideals of the Constitution and the ACLU.” When do we…
It sounds too good to be true, and it makes our utopian heart–what remains of it–sing. City officials in West Palm Beach are trying to foster a cool zone in the aging, historically minority neighborhood of Pleasant City. The embryo of the plan is an artist colony, Lot 23. The idea, officials say,…
It’s a pleasant Saturday afternoon at the Max Planck Florida Institute by the FAU campus in Jupiter. There are food trucks in the parking lot and a jazz band on the stage by the main entrance to the laboratories. Who knew neuroscience could be so hip? Then again, considering the amount…
They may have just won a national presidential election, helping carry Florida for Obama and glorying in the defeat of the despised Allen West, but the Palm Beach Democratic Party executive committee was surprisingly prickly at its reorganizational meeting last night. It’s the family squabbles that are the worst.It was…
Mammon trounced Jesus yesterday in the battle over a wage theft ordinance in Palm Beach County, as county commissioners favored the pleadings of big business over those of a faith-based coalition of activists.Everyone involved made a show of concern for those victimized by unscrupulous employers — who rob Florida workers…
Not content with locking up Palm Beach medical marijuana activist Robert Platshorn for almost 30 years, the federal government has now decided to rob him of his constitutional rights, restricting his ability to travel and enjoy free speech and assembly. They don’t like him advocating drug law reform. See also: Pot Smuggler Schools…
It’s the blahs: postelection, in the limbo between the holidays. The nation’s not in totally awful shape, no rioting in the streets (though some think that would be an improvement). We’re enduring the social equivalent of what Freud described as the goal of psychotherapy: normal unhappiness.Dismal as the tinsel may…
Arrived late to the Black Friday demonstration at the Super WalMart on Federal Highway in Boynton Beach last week, around 11 a.m. Robust turnout, seventy or so protestors chanting and marching in a long oval along the sidewalk by the highway near the store’s parking lot. Most were Walmart employees from…
The turkey you ate yesterday was one of millions whose size is more than twice that of the bird your grandparents ate. Poultry farmers made that happen by careful breeding over the course of decades. The birds got so big they couldn’t screw, and farmers had to resort to artificial…
Just as he did in his defining moment in Iraq, Allen West tried to strong-arm the law in this election and break it to his will. But the law bounced back and bit him in the ass. The disgraced former military officer and confessed, unrepentant torturer will soon — after much cynical, hyper-legalistic…
At 1 p.m today, Allen West fans outside the St.Lucie County courthouse were parading with signs and chanting, “What do we want?” and “When do we want it?” Answer one was “Recount!” Answer two was “Now!”At 3 p.m., Circuit Judge Dan Vaughn told them “No” on both points. But by…
Angel Raymundo’s odyssey began in the style of B. Traven, fleeing the highlands of Guatemala in search of a life beyond subsistence. It ended like something out of Franz Kafka, ground up and cast aside by an impenetrable bureaucracy.It’s a common story here lately, one detainee after another accusing the GEO Group’s…
Veteran’s Day honored confessed torturer Allen West by seeing the courts closed, allowing the disgraced former officer and his attorneys a day off from further embarrassing themselves. The legal maneuvers they’ve employed in lawsuits against local elections officials to stave off defeat in last week’s congressional race are so ludicrous that…
Not being on good terms with the concept of the rule of law, cashiered ex-Colonel (and soon to be ex-U.S. Rep.) Allen West went to court today to ask for judicial action — though it was really extrajudicial action he wanted. That’s a concept the disgraced former officer knows well.West’s…
Since mock execution is not an accepted method of investigating election results in South Florida, confessed torturer and probable one-term congressman Allen West has turned to the next-best thing: a team of high-powered attorneys.See also:-Allen West Won’t Concede, Demands RecountTuesday’s results in West’s contest with young Patrick Murphy for U.S…
By 11 last night at the GOP “victory” party at the Palm Beach Kennel Club, it was all over but the shouting — and there hadn’t even been any shouting. The networks having called the show for Obama, all that remained were a few stragglers packing up bunting and party…
We weren’t really sure about writing about anti-abortion fanatic militant Randall Terry until we came across the photo, below, taken from his debate last December with Vermin Supreme. (Randall’s the one without a boot on his head.) After that, we had no choice. Vermin, you may not know, is running…
It’s over — the election, that is — and we’re already back to business as usual in Palm Beach County: favorable official treatment of questionable businesses, hypocritical maneuvering by powerful lawyers, and rampant dissembling by deep-pocketed merchants of crap.What’s that you say? Election Day is Tuesday? Don’t kid yourself. The…
