Category Archives: Miami

Miami Herald, Big coke float a mystery,

A police officer made an unusual discovery in Hollywood Tuesday: a half-million dollars’ worth of cocaine.

The cocaine — about 37 kilos (more than 81 pounds), wrapped tightly in cellophane — had likely been at sea for a month before washing ashore at North Beach Park, 3501 N. Ocean Dr., said Capt. Tony Rode, a Hollywood police spokesman.

The cellophane package was coated with barnacles, he said.

Forget those metal detectors on the beach…

South Florida has been awarded the coveted #1 ranking as the public corruption capital of U.S..

Between 1996 and 2005, a record-setting 576 people were convicted of federal corruption charges in the district that extends from Key West to Sebastian, according to the agency’s most recent annual report.

Actually, the award is a bit of a misnomer — given that it is awarded for the most public officials convicted of corruption, it could easily mean that we’re the leader in dumb and corrupt public officials. Maybe in Chicago or DC they are smarter at covering their tracks. Or maybe we have better prosecutors.

In any case, I would like to go on record as saying that this award is unfair to both of the smart, honest, hard-working public officials in South Florida.

I’m sure that there are at least a couple.

I don’t expect much sympathy for this, but it was so cold out today that I had to wear a sweater. And we’re running the heater in the house this evening. I’m told it could get down to to the low 40s (that’s a few degrees centigrade) tonight.

We do expect a brief annual cold snap, but never this early in the year.

Back on Dec. 17, 2005, I posted an item entitled Kudos to the Miami-Dade Public Library which said,

I have to praise the Miami-Dade Public Library system. Once I escalated my complaints about their new wireless service they have done almost (but not quite) everything I asked for.

They unblocked digicrime.com from the PC network. They are going to put into place procedures which allow on-the-spot blocking overrides for the laptops they lend out in the library (!). They regret that they don’t see a secure means of providing a similar on-the-spot override for users who bring their own laptops, as they think that would ‘compromise security’.

But most importantly, they’ve unblocked port 22 so I can use ssh! And they were very nice about it, too. (Please, nobody mention some of the things you can do with ssh tunnels, ok?)

I’m impressed.

Well, a good chunk of that statement is now inoperative. I am posting this from the Kendall branch, and my attempt to reach digicrime.com just produced this glorious message:

Access to this site is restricted 1

Hacking the site is www.digicrime.com

Not only is this infuriatingly uninformative, but it represents a grave breach of faith with library patrons. How many other whitelisted sites have been surreptitiously re-blocked?

At least ssh is still open…

Captain’s Tavern, a rare foray into restaurant reviewing, is up at Critical Miami thanks to the Miami Cross Blogination project.

And it already has four comments.

We had torrential rain all day yesterday, which undoubtedly depressed turnout in South Florida below the low levels ordinarily expected for unexciting primaries.

The results are interesting but hard to figure. In the process of losing the state, Rod Smith beat Jim Davis in supposedly liberal Miami-Dade — which certainly surprised me. Did Smith mis-allocate his resources? Or did his voters turn out while Davis’s stayed dry?

Katherine Harris won her state senatorial primary, which is just delightful. She was imploding so badly I was starting to worry she might lose to someone without her instinct for political suicide.

Despite a pretty one-sided ballot question, Miami-Dade voters again rejected a proposal to pay their commissioners a decent salary.

State Sen. Alex Villalobos overcame heavy campaigning by Gov. Jeb Bush to beat Frank Bolaños by a slim margin — the issue was Villalobos’s supposed ‘treachery’ in voting his district rather than following Jeb’s orders when Jeb made his final effort to gut Florida’s class-size amendment. Villalobos was the deciding vote and Bush was incandescent with anger. Jeb and his pals reportedly spent $2 million trying to punish Villalobos and it (just barely) didn’t work.

In my local school board race the incumbent beat off a far-right challenge. And nearby, one of the more complacent figures on the school board got forced into a run-off he’ll probably win.

In the judicial races there was a pretty decent result. There’s an odd phenomenon going on in South Florida judicial elections: in the past election or three, certain serving judges with strong records — the kind of people one might hope would cruise to retention unopposed — have been drawing opponents. In what seems to be crude ethnic politics, the judges drawing opponents are usually those with non-Hispanic names, and the challengers are frequently relatively inexperienced lawyers with Hispanic names. The hypothesis, not disproved by yesterday’s results but certainly not strengthened by it either, is that a substantial number of voters just go down the list looking for the Hispanic names. Indeed, a number of non-Hispanic female judges and candidates who happen to be married to Hispanic men have changed their names to hyphenated forms before running.

So how did we do? You can see how I voted. Not everybody I voted for won, but the results were not bad:

County Court Group 1: Patricia Marino-Pedraza;
County Court Group 4: Robin Faber;
County Court Group 9: Victoria Del Pino;
County Court Group 10: Ana Maria Pando;
County Court Group 11: Karen Mills Francis;
County Court Group 12: Steve Leifman;
County Court Group 14: Gloria Gonzalez-Meyer;
County Court Group 27: Shelly Schwartz;
County Court Group 39: Bronwyn Miller:
County Court Group 40: Don Cohn;
County Court Group 43: runoff between Michael Bienstock and Jose Fernandez;
Circuit Court Group 25: Dennis Murphy;
Circuit Court Group 42: Larry Schwartz:
Circuit Court Group 78: runoff between Valerie Manno-Schurr and Jose Sanchez-Gronlier;
Circuit Court Group 79: Tony Marin;
Circuit Court Group 80: runoff between Marisa Tinkler Mendez and Cathy Parks

Ivan Hernandez lost to Robin Faber, which is very good. But Ana Maria Pando crushed Sari Teichman Addicott — I wonder why?

Judges Shirlyon McWhorter, Mike Samuels, and Bonnie Rippingille were also defeated. But each of the new judges are people with solid credentials — and in the case of Don Cohn, super-solid credentials. Hispanic-named challengers with little experience managed to get a lot of votes in some cases (which I find a little worrying), but not enough.

Overall a messy result, but not bad for democracy.