The First Amendment protects Americans from being punished by the state for the things they say. The “state” part here is key: You are not being censored, for example, if you’re fired from your job as a newspaper columnist because you got caught hanging out with a neo-Nazi biker gang…
In most states, it’s legal for property owners to sell home-generated solar power to other people or to tenants living in their homes. This is usually called a “power-purchase agreement” — your landlord, for example, might put some solar panels on top of your apartment building and charge…
In 2013, Broward Sheriff’s Dep. Peter Peraza shot an unarmed man dead. Jermaine McBean, a 33-year-old information technology worker, was walking home while wearing earbuds and carrying an unloaded air rifle. Someone thought the gun was real and called the cops. Peraza then killed him. Peraza has since claimed he…
A whole host of civil-rights advocates believe that the private, for-profit prison industry should not exist. But former Florida State Senate President Joe Negron appears to, ahem, lean in the opposite direction: Politico Florida first reported yesterday that the outgoing Negron will take a cushy gig as…
Florida currently ranks 45th of the 50 states when it comes to the number of residents living without health insurance. It’s 48th in health performance Now the Trump administration yesterday agreed to cut Medicaid benefits. The weird rationale: to see if that “helps” people sign up for Medicaid. The logic is…
This past Friday, Broward Sheriff’s Office SWAT member Matt Patten wore a QAnon conspiracy-theory patch while greeting Vice President Mike Pence at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. Today Patten was reprimanded and demoted from the SWAT team and BSO’s Office of Homeland Security.
It’s legal to walk up to the U.S. border and apply for asylum. But U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents decided to fire smoke grenades and tear-gas canisters at members of a migrant caravan at the Tijuana border over the weekend. Under international law, tear gas is a chemical weapon…
A series of far-right social media pages and groups have been reported to law enforcement for doxxing Brenda Snipes and Susan Bucher, the supervisors of elections in Broward and Palm Beach Counties, respectively. According to redacted screenshots obtained by New Times, at least one of the posts doxxing Snipes…
Most of what President Donald J. Trump says is drivel. He gets mad online to impress what appears to be an army of online Twitter robots. His tweets and public statements are almost never worth writing about. That is, except for today, because Trump’s latest confused, old-guy meltdown is objectively hilarious.
Claims by Gov. Rick Scott, Sen. Marco Rubio, and President Donald Trump that Democrats are “stealing” the 2018 elections in Broward County have sparked the expected reaction. Despite the fact there appears to be zero evidence backing up the claims, conspiracy theorists, right-wing grifters, and pro-Trump protesters are now descending on the Broward County Supervisor of Elections office.
Rick Scott is one of the worst people in America. It’s fitting, then, that he will follow his eight-year tenure as Florida governor with a new, six-year stint as U.S. senator. Scott, as governor, displayed nothing but bitterness and resentment toward the poor and needy in his state. Low-income people’s…
Bowie, my 85-pound retired racing greyhound, sneaks undetected into our bed every night while my girlfriend and I sleep. He lies directly perpendicular to the two of us, then nestles in, stretching his gangly, two-and-a-half-foot-long legs out in both directions. I usually wake up dangling precariously off the side of the bed or shoved against our bedroom wall.
In April 2017, Lewis Bennett and Isabella Hellman, two dual British and Australian citizens, set sail on a yacht from St. Maarten to South Florida. According to federal prosecutors, they made a pit stop in Cuba weeks later, on May 14, 2017. But by the next morning, U.S. Coast Guard agents found Bennett floating…
There is virtually no reason for a group of large adult male cops to pin a 14-year-old girl to the ground and continully punch her in the ribs and kidneys. Yet after Coral Springs Police officers were filmed doing exactly that to a teen outside the Coral Square Mall yesterday, the police department is now trying to defend itself and callously throwing the teen under the bus for somehow provoking the beating.
A Broward County judge has confirmed the Hollywood Police Department ruined the lives of ten gay men for no reason at all. This past July 26, Hollywood PD raided a gay-cruising hangout and arrested eight men allegedly caught masturbating in a private backroom and two others accused of performing oral sex on each other. The police department then sent the men’s photos and names to the media, and many outlets happily blasted out the men’s identities. One man said he was outed and fired from his job as a result.
Leonard Pozner has lived through unimaginable pain. His son Noah was shot to death during the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, in which six adults and 20 children were murdered in Newtown, Connecticut. Then, after that incomprehensible tragedy, conspiracy theorists and gun-rights advocates have continued to harass him. Pozner is suing InfoWars’ Alex Jones for defamation after Jones repeatedly claimed Pozner was a fake “crisis actor.”
Even compared to other college conservative groups, Turning Point USA is a collection of some of the absolute worst pundits in America. Case in point: The group says it’s bringing American-Habsburg crown prince Donald Trump Jr. to a South Florida high school to speak at 6:30 tonight as part of TPUSA’s Campus Clash series, in which group leaders Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens appear at local schools and colleges to make libs mad or whatever it is they do.
Just three days after 17 students and teachers were massacred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High this past February 14, a gun show was held at a Miami community center. Others followed even closer to the school. Naturally, many parents are outraged. In April, the City of Fort Lauderdale ended its regular gun show at the city’s War Memorial Auditorium…
Just before the November 2016 election, a federal judge forced the Florida Division of Elections to allow rejected absentee-ballot voters to correct mistakes on their mailed-in forms. Yet somehow even more ballots ended up being rejected in that election than in 2012 — and younger voters and voters of color, who overwhelmingly lean to the left, had their ballots invalidated at a far higher rate.
Earlier this year, New Times detailed the horrific case of Maria, a 24-year-old who fled persecution in Guatemala, gave birth to multiple American children, and wound up jailed in an ICE detention facility in South Florida after she was arrested while trying to pay a $150 traffic fine. Speaking from inside the detention center, Maria told New Times in Spanish that she was allowed to see her three young children only an hour or two each week and that her 9-year-old daughter was afraid she’d also be detained if she visited her mom.
After last night’s primary results made it official, Floridians assumed newly minted GOP gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis, a Confederate-flag bumper-sticker come to life, would run a wild, dog-whistling, and entirely Trumpian campaign against Democrat Andrew Gillum. But people perhaps didn’t expect DeSantis to start throwing around racial slurs this early…
The running joke among Florida political journalists is that the state’s inept Democratic Party runs a centrist from Tampa every single year for governor. The past few decades of Democratic gubernatorial candidates have been milquetoast centrists who love palling around with their Republican colleagues in Tallahassee and sharing stories about staggering home from bars during their time at FSU. Florida, it seems, does not create populist firebrands.
