Columns

Don't hate the player ... hate the game. Isn't that what Andrew Korge, dispatched primary opponent of Dwight Bullard, said when he compared African Americans and "Bernie Bros" to the Tea Party in one of his infamous Facebook rants? See said rant below.

Visit Florida will emerge from the budget process next year a slimmer creature than it is today, I've resigned myself to that. But I hope it won't mean sacrificing Florida tourism's considerable muscle.

Just what we all need to ring in the Christmas season: Un-merry millionaire Michelle Obama belly-aching about the burdens and sacrifices of public life with billionaire Oprah Winfrey.

The fall of Aleppo just weeks before Barack Obama leaves office is a fitting stamp on his Middle East policy of retreat and withdrawal. The pitiable pictures from the devastated city showed the true cost of Obama's abdication. For which he seems to have few regrets, however. In his end-of-year news conference, Obama defended U.S. inaction with his familiar false choice: it was either stand aside or order a massive Iraq-style ground invasion.

It offends me to see good people lied about and dragged through the mud. 

As everyone knows, the fiasco that took place in Miami-Dade County on Dec. 20 has given us Stephen Bittel as Miami-Dade's committeeman. Not fairly, mind you. Not as the will of the people, mind you.

When the dust settles, the biggest loser in Election 2016 could be the Clinton Foundation.

"To change anything in the Navy is like punching a feather bed. You punch it with your right and you punch it with your left until you are finally exhausted, and then you find the damn bed just as it was before you started punching."

Running for office statewide in Florida is a daunting task.  The state is 361 miles wide and 447 miles long and is in two time zones.  Florida has 67 counties, 282 cities, 119 towns and 19 villages.  In short, Florida is big and campaigning in the entire state is hard work.

Political mildness is scarce nowadays, so it has been pleasantly surprising that post-election denunciations of the Electoral College have been tepid. This, even though the winner of the presidential election lost the popular vote by perhaps 2.8 million votes, more than five times the 537,179 votes by which Al Gore outpolled George W. Bush in 2000.

This column is a vehicle for a number of items in a bits-and-pieces, strictly opinion, sometimes irreverent format. Look for "Just Sayin'" to run once a week in this spot.

There are few Jewish journalists I like and respect as much as Samuel Freedman,‭ ‬a distinguished‭ ‬professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Pulitzer-prize nominee,‭ ‬which is why if he criticizes me I take it seriously.

Let's face it. There is a certain faction of the Jewish community that will never, ever, ever, ever, ever accept Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison as Democratic National Committee Chair, no matter what he does, or how he does it. 

Democrats spent the first two decades of the post-Cold War era rather relaxed about Russian provocations and revanchism. President Obama famously mocked Mitt Romney in 2012 for suggesting that Russia was our   principal geopolitical adversary. Yet today the Dems are in high dudgeon over the closeness of secretary of state nominee, Rex Tillerson, to Vladimir Putin.

Indiana's Thomas R. Marshall, who was America's vice president 100 years ago, voiced -- he plucked it from a Hoosier humorist -- one of the few long-remembered utterances to issue from that office: "What this country needs is a good 5-cent cigar," which would be $1.11 in today's currency. A century later, what the country needs is a $12 twelve-ounce cup of coffee.