Miami

Thursday

Sarah Beth Spraggins

Jeanette Rubio, first lady in waiting?

From our US edition

Marco Rubio proposed to his then-girlfriend, Jeanette Dousdebes, in 1997, at the top of the Empire State Building. After she said yes, he asked for the engagement ring right back, concerned that it might slip off her finger and fall on the way down. Only once the couple got to ground level did he return it. Jeanette entrusts her possessions to Marco to this day. “I just love that she makes her husband hold her phone,” one Washingtonian says. Unlike many of the wives and girlfriends of the Trump administration, Jeanette Rubio has not created an exaggerated version of herself online. “Wife of Secretary Marco Rubio,” her Instagram bio reads. It links to marcorubio.com, which contains a picture of Marco and the words “Thank you!

Wednesday

Charles Lipson

Is Trump becoming a lame-duck president?

From our US edition

American presidents face an inescapable dilemma as soon as they are reelected. Because they cannot run again, they find it increasingly difficult to dominate the national agenda. This constitutional limitation makes it increasingly difficult for presidents to “herd the cats” in their own party, filled as it is with prospective successors, and to defeat the opposing party, which sees the golden opportunity of winning the next midterm election. Those upcoming elections almost always go against the party-in-power since it is far easier to mobilize angry, negative voters than satisfied, complacent ones. Donald Trump is fighting tenaciously to postpone the impact of these indelible features of American politics, but he cannot escape them entirely.

Wednesday

Britt McHenry

LeBron’s ‘Second Decision’ wasted everyone’s time

From our US edition

With bated breath, diehard sports fans in America and across the globe waited to see what LeBron James’s “The Second Decision,” meant for the NBA icon’s future. Retirement? A team change? Another son being gifted – ahem – earning an NBA draft pick? “Everyone’s on pins and needles across the country,” the host said in the anticipated video. “You ready to go, LeBron?” Then, a pause for unnecessary dramatic effect. “LeBron, fans want to know where you’re taking your talents this year. What’s your decision?” “In this fall, man this is tough,” James’s bad acting enunciates, “In this fall, I’m going to be taking my talents to Hennessy VSOP.” Hennessy is a cognac brand. He was announcing a new brand deal.

miami
Roger Stone

Roger Stone: why Trump should skip the Miami debate

From our US edition

While I have great confidence in President Trump’s skill as a debater and recognize him as perhaps the greatest counter-puncher in American political history, I strongly urge him not to attend the second Presidential Commission debate scheduled for October 15 in Miami. It is important to note that the so-called 'Presidential Commission on Debates' is not appointed by the President, is not a commission, and its real purpose is to limit debate. The Presidential Commission on debates is a privately run nonprofit. The President and the Democratic candidate for President have no obligation to agree to the Commission’s format, moderators or length.

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

Why Trump’s rally mattered more than the GOP debate in Miami

From our US edition

Do you believe in coincidences? I used to. But like Macbeth I have just “supped full with horror.” That is, I have been flipping back and forth between the glitzy but pointless Republican debate in Miami and Donald Trump’s rally in nearby Hialeah, Florida.  And here’s Exhibit One in my brief against coincidences: my office reading group is just now, as I write, reading Dante’s Inferno. Yes, could there be any more apposite reading?  I am going to take a page here from that priest W. H. Auden talked about who advised the people who came to him for confession to “be brief, be blunt, and be gone.” An admirable imperative which I intend to obey.

debate

Thursday

Cockburn

Francis Suarez’s Messi debate stage ploy

From our US edition

As Miami mayor Francis X. Suarez looks to dribble onto the presidential debate stage in Milwaukee, he’s raffling off front-row tickets to soccer superstar Lionel Messi’s American debut to anyone who Venmo's his campaign a single dollar — but campaign finance experts warn that the gimmick could pave the way for an influx of illegal foreign cash. Suarez is shooting his shot, banking on Messi’s star power more than his own to vault him past the required 40,000 donors the Republican National Committee is requiring in order to debate.  https://twitter.

francis suarez messi venmo

Tuesday

Cockburn

Presidential hopeful Francis Suarez: ‘What’s a Uighur?’

From our US edition

Miami mayor Francis X. Suarez should pick Gary “Aleppo” Johnson for his 2024 running mate. After a revealing interview on The Hugh Hewitt Show Tuesday morning, it seems the two are both woefully unaware of foreign policy.  Suarez was taking a hardline against China when Hewitt asked him if he would make the Uighurs a part of his campaign. “What — the what, what's a Uighur?” Suarez responded, parroting Johnson’s famous “What is Aleppo?” gaffe during the 2016 election. https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1673687808282697728 After Hewitt scolded the presidential hopeful for his ignorance, Suarez promised, “I’ll look at — what’d you call it, a 'Weeble?’” Cockburn can’t help but think Suarez’s blunder is a bit worse than Johnson.

francis suarez uighur

Sunday

Nicholas Clairmont

Where to drink in Miami

From our US edition

Ask anybody who’s really been in a band what being a musician is like, and they won’t tell you about the moments that make it into the Hollywood biopics. To them, the experience is not the hero-shot onstage, or the girls they picked up after a killer set, or anything you saw in Ray or Bohemian Rhapsody. The reality of being in a band is of driving from place to place. Think of Bob Seger’s baleful “Turn the Page” with its opening lyric setting the place: “On a long and lonesome highway, east of Omaha,” where he’s “ridin’ sixteen hours and there’s nothin’ there to do.” This raises an issue of where to drink in Miami.

Miami

Thursday

Cockburn

Is Mayor Francis Suarez too ‘woke’ for the GOP?

From our US edition

Miami mayor Francis Suarez is running for president, and his opponents already have plenty of attack ad images. The Cuban-American Republican with leading man style might have checked the boxes for an early 2010s GOP. Now it’s 2023 — and it seems no one told Suave Suarez that posing with a Pride flag-emblazoned mayoral sash is way out of style. Suarez’s Twitter feed is littered with rainbow flag paraphernalia. In June 2021, Suarez posted a video pledging Miami’s support of Pride Month. https://twitter.com/FrancisSuarez/status/1403449097453985798 The year prior, Suarez signed an “LGBTQ ordinance” to recognize “the decades of contributions by the LGBTQ Miami residents to the economy and diversity of the city!

francis suarez pride

Friday

Ben Domenech

The Trump indictment will be destabilizing, no matter what

From our US edition

As a general matter, people who are indicted and punished for absconding with classified material tend to have done one of two things. First, they either spread that classified material by leaking to foreign governments, to the press or using it to write their memoirs. Or second, even if they don't engage in such behavior, they are a person who has a lot of enemies in the enforcement bodies in question. If you hand your enemies a baseball bat, you shouldn't be surprised when they smash you with it. The Donald Trump documents scenario looks very much like the second category, but it might also be the first.

donald trump indictment

Wednesday

Cockburn

Poet laureate can’t define a ‘ban’

From our US edition

Amanda Gorman, the young female poet who read at Joe Biden's inauguration lamented on Tuesday night that her poem had been banned by a Florida school library. “Just found out my inaugural poem 'The Hill We Climb' has been banned from an elementary school in Miami-Dade County because it causes "confusion and indoctrination,” America's first National Youth Poet Laureate tweeted.  The poem, however, was never banned. Instead, according to the Miami-Dade school district, “The Hill We Climb” was moved from the elementary section of the library to the middle-school section.  “It was determined at the school that ‘The Hill We Climb’ is better suited for middle-school students and, it was shelved in the middle-school section of the media center.

amanda gorman

Tuesday

Mike Tunison

The Final Four that wasn’t supposed to happen

From our US edition

March Madness markets itself on the chaos, the unpredictability, and the Cinderella stories that make the NCAA basketball tournament one of the most beloved sporting events in America. Most years, the really shocking upsets are usually out of the way by the end of the first weekend. By the time the tournament reaches its most critical rounds, fans are fortunate if there is a single Cinderella still dancing. Over the last thirty tournaments — I would say years but the 2020 tourney was canceled due to Covid — only two national champions have started the tournament as lower than a three seed. In that same span, only two Final Fours did not feature a one seed, while thirteen Final Fours over the past three decades have contained multiple one seeded teams.

Final Four

Thursday

Spectator Editorial

As goes Florida…

From our US edition

Do you remember Rebekah Jones? Don’t worry, we’d forgotten about her too. At the height of the pandemic, she resigned as a low-level functionary in Florida’s public health bureaucracy and accused her state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, of cooking the books on Covid. There was never much evidence to back up Jones’s claims of data manipulation, but that didn’t stop her becoming a pandemic-era media darling. She was given seemingly endless airtime on cable news while newspaper profiles heralded her as a brave whistleblower. Boosted by this favorable coverage, the kooky data scientist even announced a congressional run. But it is now as clear as could be that Jones was wrong.

florida
Miami
Alex Perez

Is Miami really on the rise?

From our US edition

My lunch spot in suburban Miami-Dade County, El Palacio de los Jugos — the Palace of the Juices — is the kind of Cuban joint that specializes in monstrous portions served up by some of the finest mamacitas on the planet. The black beans and rice can be overly greasy and the tropical jugos sickeningly sweet, but one frequents the palace for the only-in-Miami atmosphere; the food is incidental. On any given day there, you’ll run into a construction worker chatting up the gals from the Asian massage parlor next door. Young bros roll up in souped-up Hondas and scarf half a dozen empanadas before rushing off to cook up their next low-level con. The Cuban old-timers sit around, as they’ve done for decades, slamming cafecitos and denouncing los comunistas.

Thursday

Chadwick Moore

The United States of Uber

From our US edition

I’m getting into the backseat of an Uber in Washington, DC with a cup of coffee in one hand and a tattered, floppy cloth mask in the other. I’ll make a half-assed attempt to mask up! indulging the Democrats’ last gasps of Covid political theater, only on airplanes and in Ubers, and that’s just to avoid the hassle of getting banned if you don’t. My mask — I only own one — is about as snug as a Kleenex with too-wet noodles for straps. It covers my contagion holes for only a few moments at a time when the loose cloth rests on the tip of my nose. The struggle to keep it up for the duration of the journey is my own bit of theater. “Do you need to switch that mask out?” a flight attendant once asked me. “Oh, no, I could never do that.

uber

Friday

Alex Perez

The restaurant that set Miami ablaze

From our US edition

You’d think that a restaurant named Café Habana would be a perfect fit in Miami. But when it emerged this week that the New Yorker-owned joint specializing in Cuban/Mexican fusion was “inspired by a storied Mexico City hangout, where legend has it Che Guevara and Fidel Castro plotted the Cuban Revolution,” all hell predictably broke loose. The restaurant, slated to open in downtown Miami in the spring, has since scrubbed the Castro and Che reference from its website. But no amount of damage control will appease commie-hating Miamians, many of whom are surely cooking up protest plans, pots and pans at the ready. The original Café Habana opened in New York in 1997, and like so many other restaurants before it — the famed Carbone, etc.

Thursday

Craig Brown

The disappearing man: who was the real John Stonehouse?

November 1974 was the month to disappear. On the 7th, Lord Lucan went missing, and a fortnight later John Stonehouse MP dis-appeared from a beach in Miami. Lucan was never found, so remains prominent in our national mythology. Nothing endures like a mystery. Stonehouse, on the other hand, was discovered in Melbourne six weeks later, living under an assumed name. His vanishing trick, so carefully rehearsed, had unravelled — partly due to Lucan, as it happened. Having been alerted to a suspicious Briton by a beady bank clerk, the Australian police thought he might be Lucan. Their first act after arresting their suspect was to lift his trouser leg to look for the missing earl’s telltale scar. Stonehouse had long had a tendency to vanish.

Thursday

Ian Birrell

Sacrificing to the false god of gold

Deep in Peru’s Amazon rainforest sits a desolate zone, stretching for miles and pockmarked with chemical-tainted water that glistens orange and blue. This was the centre of the country’s illegal gold-mining operations, where tens of thousands of desperate people dug into the soil in search of a precious mineral that could make the difference between destitution and wealth. For every ounce found in the crime-infested badlands, nine tonnes of toxic waste are thought to be left behind in an environmental catastrophe that will contaminate the region for decades. No wonder Pope Francis, on a visit to the impoverished area, called gold ‘a false god’ when so much wreckage is left behind in its wake.

Thursday

Matt McDonald

COVID-positive president won’t debate online

From our US edition

The droplets had barely settled after Wednesday’s vice presidential debate when next week’s head-to-head between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was thrown into doubt.The Commission on Presidential Debates announced a change in format this morning, switching the October 15 debate to a virtual event ‘in order to protect the health and safety of all involved’. Trump currently has COVID-19 and no one on his campaign will tell us when his last negative test was before his diagnosis. The Commission’s concern is understandable.But not so fast. Reacting to the Commission’s change during an appearance on Fox Business, the President declared he would no longer participate. ‘I’m not gonna waste my time on a personal debate.

debate

Friday

Digby Dent

A tale of three dogs

From our US edition

Florida Hullo, readers. I’m down Florida way for a bit of warm weather. The Bermuda Race Organizing Committee has been commandeered by a coterie of crapulous ingrates, leaving your correspondent on the outs. Nothing a little R&R can’t cure, but I’m sour. I hate trekking up to Newport for nothing. I’m in no mood for correspondence, but an interested reader inquired some days ago how I fell into journalism. I shall endeavor to answer. Stick me on a psychiatrist’s sofa and I’ll happily discuss my lifelong love of loquacity. It maddened Mother, who labeled me an ‘ecstatic’ child. She would be equal parts unsurprised and appalled by this hobby. Fortunately she doesn’t read this magazine.

marriages dog