Tag: Miami

The Miami Herald Endorses Hillary Clinton

Buck Banks

Mr. Trump’s demerits are well-documented — in print, on video, on the debate stage. And they are legion, so the CliffsNotes version will do: The billionaire Republican candidate is a boastful, self-centered egomaniac who lacks a record of public service or familiarity with the issues. Indeed, he clearly seems to lack any political convictions whatsoever, except those of convenience. He’s the star of this political reality show of his own making, a sick parody of a real political contest. He’s the ringmaster of a circus that attempts to conceal his lack of gravity by relying on the entertainment value of insults, exaggerations, lies and promises completely devoid of credibility and substance, characterized by his pie-in-the-sky vow to “make America great again.”

— From the Miami Herald’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton

¡Yay, Miami es Numero-Uno!

Buck Banks

Copyright: Image by StockUnlimited
Copyright: Image by StockUnlimited
Having just dodged the first major hurricane to hit Florida in more than a decade, Miami, it would appear, has something else to celebrate. Or not.

According to Bloomberg, Miami is now the most unequal city in the United States, having leapfrogged five ranks in just a year to reach the top. Yay! We have greater income disparity than anybody!

Bloomberg ordered large cities – those with populations of at least 250,000 – based on the Gini coefficient. The index measures the distribution of household income using 2015 data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. The ratio ranges from zero, which reflects absolute equality, to one, complete inequality. Miami took the top spot in 2016 with a coefficient of .58, followed by Atlanta and New Orleans.

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What the Castros Wrought, Trump Set Asunder!

Buck Banks

I have lived in Miami since 1992 and for nearly that entire time the Cuban exile community, as it is called down here, has been monolithic in its loyalty to the Republican Party and a force to be reckoned with for anyone wanting to hold elected office. All any Republican politician, whether running for U.S. Senate, Congress, mayor or dogcatcher, had to do was have a last name that ended with a vowel an S or a Z, show up and drop a couple of anti-Castro comments, promise to maintain the embargo until that Communist sumbitch was dead, and collect the solid Cuban vote wrapped up in a corn meal tamale.

I recall clearly a campaign stop then Sen. Barack Obama made in Miami at the ancient and rather small and dingy Miami Auditorium in late 2007. Although Obama was still pretty much a cipher to most Americans, he was considered enough of a threat to merit an official Cuban demonstration across the street from the venue, complete with waving fists, angry chants and grammatically innovative signs. It was almost as if they sensed that Obama was going to open up Cuba, lo, these eight years later, which was at the time anathema to the Miami Cuban bloc.

But with the arrival in Havana yesterday of the first U.S. cruise ship in almost 50 years and with Donald Trump seemingly intent on shredding the GOP, it appears it’s the end of an era, or “error,” as the wags like it. Indeed a Miami Herald article today sports this headline: Will Donald Trump drive Miami Cuban Americans from GOP? New poll says yes.

Local Cuban Americans dislike Trump so much — and are increasingly so accepting of renewed U.S.-Cuba ties pushed by Democratic President Barack Obama — that Trump’s likely presidential nomination might accentuate the voters’ political shift away from the GOP, according to the survey shared with the Miami Herald and conducted by Dario Moreno, a Coral Gables pollster and a Florida International University associate politics professor.

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