Category Archives: Miami

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.

Well, talk about anticlimaxes.

But, it’s only the beginning of the season:

…TROPICAL WAVES…

AN EASTERN ATLANTIC TROPICAL WAVE IS ALONG 30W/31W S OF 17N MOVING W NEAR 15 KT. LOW-MID LEVEL CLOUD MOTIONS ON NIGHT CHANNEL VIS IMAGES AND THE FIRST FEW VIS IMAGES THIS MORNING SHOW CLEAR CYCLONIC CIRCULATION ABOUT THE WAVE AXIS. CLUSTERS OF SCATTERED MODERATE/ISOLATED STRONG CONVECTION ARE NOTED FROM 6N-14N WITHIN 200NM OF EITHER SIDE OF THE WAVE AXIS…THOUGH SHOWER AND TSTM ACTIVITY REMAINS DISORGANIZED AND ANY FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THIS SYSTEM SHOULD BE SLOW TO OCCUR.

A HIGH AMPLITUDE TROPICAL WAVE IS ALONG 44W S OF 23N MOVING W NEAR 10 KT. A 1012 MB LOW IS ALONG THE WAVE NEAR 16N. SHOWER ACTIVITY WITH THIS SYSTEM IS LIMITED…AND DEVELOPMENT…IF ANY…IS EXPECTED TO BE SLOW TO OCCUR AS THE LOW MOVES WESTWARD. A COUPLE SMALL CLUSTERS OF SCATTERED MODERATE CONVECTION ARE SEEN IN THE VICINITY OF THE SURFACE LOW FROM 15N-19N BETWEEN 42W-46W.

Have I mentioned yet this year that I wish the National Hurricane Center didn’t use ALL CAPS…

Grey, very grey, overcast. Drippy with occasional bouts of rain, but not thing violent–yet. The center hasn’t made landfall yet, and the new track is a little west of us anyway, so I may not see the worst of it, (although some models have landfall only a few miles south of here). In any case, it seems to have decided to top out at tropical storm levels.

As Forecaster Pasch put it,

Discussion: Tropical Storm Ernesto: DURING THE DAY…ERNESTO BECAME SOMEWHAT MORE ORGANIZED-LOOKING ON RADAR AND SATELLITE IMAGES. RECENTLY … HOWEVER … THE PRESENTATION HAS BECOME A BIT RAGGED-LOOKING ON THE IMAGERY. FLIGHT-LEVEL WINDS HAVE NOT INCREASED…AND THE FALL IN CENTRAL PRESSURE THIS AFTERNOON WAS ROUGHLY COMMENSURATE WITH THE TYPICAL SEMI-DIURNAL PRESSURE CHANGE. IN OTHER WORDS … ERNESTO IS NOT STRENGTHENING. IT IS SOMEWHAT PUZZLING WHY THE TROPICAL CYCLONE HAS NOT INTENSIFIED TODAY.

Works for me.

Update (6pm): The rain got here.

Miami will be closed Tuesday and Wednesday.

No, not just the public schools and the university, although we’re closed for two days. Pretty much the whole town.

And the joke is that

• the Ernesto forecast has (for now) been demoted to a tropical storm until it gets to points far north of us and
• the storm has slowed a bit: even on the original track it wasn’t supposed to hit until late Tuesday afternoon.

Now we’re looking at very late Tuesday or even early Wednesday. And possibly an anti-climax at that. When they close the public schools, pretty much everybody falls into line; and planners are undoubtedly still smarting from their failure to close early for one of last year’s hurricanes which meant that a lot of commuters struggled home in dangerous weather. So now we’re very very cautious.

False alarms are nowhere as bad as the real thing, but I find that the irregular procession of even false alarms take their toll — there’s something very … distracting … about the real possibility of slowly oncoming doom, even when it starts seeming somewhat less likely. And those makeup classes are a pain for all concerned.

Yesterday I had a chance to stock up on gasoline for our generator with almost no lines, but didn’t — and the storm track moved over Miami a few hours later. Today I stocked up on gas (the line wasn’t that bad, maybe 10-15 minutes) and within minutes of coming home with the goods learned that Ernesto was being downgraded.

I believe this constitutes the basis for a testable hypothesis.

The latest hurricane track has shifted to put Ernesto right over us. They’re saying category one (modulo uncertainty), which in principle should be not so bad except that the last two times last year it was fairly bad — and my roof still isn’t fixed from last year.

I suppose that after class this afternoon I will have to go and get some gasoline to run my generator if the power goes out; by this time there will undoubtedly be long lines for gas and spot shortages.

I hear that the public schools will be closed tomorrow. The university is currently meeting to decide if we’ll be open tomorrow and should have an announcement out very soon. (It was in fact due 20 minutes ago.) On the current forecast, things might get messy by Tuesday’s evening rush hour, which makes planners very reluctant to order a normal day, but also means that if you close, most of the day it’s for no reason. But with the schools shut, if you open, people have to either stay home or bring their kids. It’s a mess.