Pembroke Pines City Manager Charlie Dodge, whose private company earns $755,000 a year from the city, has offered to take a 2.6 percent pay cut next year, in deference to the Broward suburb’s dire financial straits.That’s the word from Pines Mayor Frank Ortis and Vice Mayor Angelo Castillo, both of…
Let me explain. Surveys show that Charlie Crist is one of the nation’s most popular governors. Polls show that he has a huge, possibly insurmountable lead in the race for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate. Yet straw polls show that Republican activists prefer underdog Marco Rubio. And some of…
UPDATE / CORRECTION The post below was based in part on conversations with the Fort Lauderdale City Clerk’s office, which now says that members of the advisory board were obligated to file financial disclosure forms because that board did not have financial responsibilities. As such, LeMieux was not required to…
A writer at American Chronicle, Virgil Hervey, offers a personal story about the health-care status quo that Glenn Beck’s disciples are working arduously to protect. It begins with Hervey’s receiving a call about his parents, who lived in Hollywood and were in a car accident in Italy. Hervey’s father died…
Maybe his wife’s just pissed because Charlie Crist did not appoint her to the U.S. Senate, like he did his good buddy George LeMieux. Whatever the case, it’s becoming clear that the honeymoon period is over for Florida’s First Couple, who appear to be drifting apart as they approach their…
Oh good Christ. Now Delray Beach Republican House Rep. Adam Hasner is crowing about a Florida investigation of ACORN, as if that organization weren’t already a corpse riddled with right-wing arrows. Hasner appears to be terrified that the dead will rise and, once risen, perhaps even stalk around collecting fake…
If the recent ACORN video stings hadn’t convinced you that the right wing is a whole bunch savvier and sneakier than the left, then a comparison of the net worth of our Florida House reps ought to definitively settle the contest. Florida Trend’s look at our politicians’ net worth, published…
Last week the National Council of La Raza, the Hispanic civil rights organization, announced a stunning trend in immigration: In just one year, applications for U.S. citizenship dropped 62 percent.That figure may be a tad misleading — there were a surge of applications in 2007 to beat increases in application…
Stories in the New York Post and today’s Palm Beach Post confirm that the tan, leggy hooker in the ACORN hoax videos is in fact an FIU student. Hannah Giles, one of two college kids who traveled around the country on a $1,300 budget shooting videos of ACORN workers making…
The president of Calvin, Giordano & Associates, a private firm that provides building inspection, engineering, code enforcement, and other services to local cities, says his company pioneered local government outsourcing, and performs its work ethically.”We’re very careful not to have a conflict,” Dennis Giordano says. “We never do any work…
This summer, the Juice brought you the troubling tale of the City of Pembroke Pines’ decision to outsource its building department to a private consulting firm, Calvin, Giordano & Associates. At the time, this was worrisome because the Fort Lauderdale-based firm already does engineering work for Pembroke Pines. It was…
If anyone can convince the squares who read Fortune magazine about the medicinal qualities of marijuana, it’s Irv Rosenfeld. After all, his dozen-joint-per-day habit hasn’t kept him from being a successful Fort Lauderdale stock broker.The massive article begins with Rosenfeld picking up the Fortune reporter in a cannabis-clouded SUV, then…
[jump] From this, we have the Tea Party protests (where the other half of the country finally learned that government is bad, especially if it’s run by people with whom you disagree) and the under-reported upon 9-12 Project. Beck lists nine “principles” (they involve liking America and God and family and…
OK, so it’s not nearly as goofy as the WPLG video I mentioned in the Morning Juice, but this one has a better backstory. Cynthia Muir, a spokeswoman for the Public Services Commission, is already in hot water over sharing BlackBerry PINs with an FPL lobbyist — one of the…
This past weekend, the major newspapers in the Tribune company chain, including the Sun-Sentinel, ran this article, originally from the Los Angeles Times, about how Obama is “fast losing white voters’ support.”And judging by the mostly white tea party types who’ve been heckling Democrats at health care town halls and…
Pack City Hall with more than 150 angry citizens and any governing body would get a bit anxious. But at Wednesday night’s budget hearing, the Pembroke Pines city commissioners appeared to be auditioning for Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? And it wasn’t going well.First, they faced the small…
Congressman Kendrick Meek just posted the above video from CBS 4’s Tuesday newscast to his campaign’s YouTube account, and you can see why. It shows Charlie Crist playing dumb about the role that George LeMieux’s law firm, Gunster Yoakley, played in getting visas for the immigrant workers who were hired…
Many people who packed the Pembroke Pines City Commission chambers for a budget hearing last night were angry at political leaders they believed had failed them. Despite laying off 84 employees and outsourcing major city services, the city still faces a $27 million budget shortfall, and commissioners are considering raising…
Yes, you heard right. In the closing moments of that Capital News Service video, the reporter says that Broward County trailblazer George LeMieux “is leaving open the possibility that he’ll run for U.S. Senate in 2012,” when that darned Democrat Bill Nelson is up for reelection. Which means if his…
Seriously, that classic SNL sketch above is only slightly more absurd than the kind that is being circulated by Boca Raton’s state legislator and House leader, Adam Hasner. In tonight’s speech, Obama took on the “death panel” myth and the socialism myth and remembered to shave the Hitler mustache that…
As the Pembroke Pines City Commission prepares to vote tonight on more budget cuts for the cash-strapped suburb, city employees have reached a boiling point. “Our people have suffered enough,” says Jim Silvernale, spokesman for the local Federation of Public Employees.Already, at least 84 Pines workers have been laid off…
Citing a Marco Rubio campaign ad, St. Petersburg Times politics blog Buzz earlier today asked whether Charlie Crist had “pulled a McCain” — committing a tactical blunder that gives his opponent evidence that he’s out of touch and unfit to lead.Purely from the headline, Juice assumed that the paper was…
