The Latest on changes to the White House communications staff (all times local): 2:45 p.m. New York financier Anthony Scaramucci has been formally named White House communications director and Sarah Huckabee Sanders has been promoted to press secretary in the Trump White House’s latest shakeup.
Sometimes political change comes slowly, one drop at a time. That was the 2016 Florida congressional election where Democrats gained a single seat, although the opportunities were everywhere. Sometimes elections result in a political tsunami, where the political landscape is fundamentally altered, and one party replaces the other party as the dominant political force. The 2010 and 2014 midterm elections created a tsunami where Republicans wiped out a substantial Democratic majority and won political control of the House. What will…
When Gov. Rick Scott and Attorney General Pam Bondi finally got around to talking about Florida’s opioid crisis, the hot air was suffocating. In parts of Florida, opioids have overtaken homicides and DUIs as a cause of very premature and utterly unnecessary death. That is not breaking news to anyone who has been paying even a little attention. In a time when reporters are in short supply, almost every newspaper in Florida has made a noble, front-page attempt to assess…
Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone says a car he was riding in this week in Florida was struck by a hit-and-run driver. In a statement to The Associated Press, Stone described the incident as “suspicious,” coming as he is under scrutiny for his communication with the Russian-linked hacker Guccifer 2.0. Stone tweeted that he was uninjured in the crash except for blurry vision in his right eye. Stone says the car he was riding in was “T-boned” by a large,…
It was not long after the first telephone conversation in 1876 — Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant, “Mr. Watson. Come here. I want to see you” — that the White House opened a public comment line. OK, I exaggerate. Elasticity with the truth seems to be in fashion. But seriously, the comment line has been a sounding board for the public for quite some time. No longer. It has been shut down — whether at the inauguration or earlier…
The Rio Olympics, the American presidential election and Pokemon Go were the top global trends on Twitter in 2016. The social media site says Rio2016 was the most tweeted-about topic around the world, followed by Election2016 and PokemonGo. Euro2016, Oscars, Brexit, Trump and BlackLivesMatter also made the top 10. A Spanish gamer known as elrubius originated the year’s most popular tweet: It reads “Limonada” (lemonade) and was retweeted more than 1.3 million times. One Direction’s Harry Styles had the second…
According to front page stories everywhere, America is bracing for a tense holiday weekend. Our biggest seasonal challenge used to be arranging the place cards to keep Drunk Uncle’s hands away from Junior’s girlfriend. After years of practice, most families have survival strategies for annual airings of grievances over who Mom loves best. But is there enough Xanax in Grandma’s medicine cabinet to take the edge off the First Thanksgiving After Trump? Probably not, so here are some Hatfield &…
