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An “Imagine” license plate features John Lennon’s scribbled portrait, so you’d never guess by looking at it that its proceeds go to fund the Florida Association of Food Banks Inc. “Hospice: Every Day Is a Gift” is a morbid reminder of our impending mortality. And every two-bit college in the…

Abortion is illegal in South Dakota, and all I got to show for it was a plastic necklace. “They’re cycle beads,” my friend Shelby from Planned Parenthood said as she pulled the necklace from her purse and handed it to me during “The Ban Stops Here” mixer on a Thursday…

Lucius Gantt is a black columnist and politico whose stock-in-trade has been old-school polemics and an abiding distrust of the white-dominated power structure. For more than 30 years, he’s been writing his often vitriolic and sometimes outrageous opinion, and it has won him praise from fellow journalists, academics, and even…

Today, we have all kinds of Sun-Sentinel Fourth of July fun. In yesterday’s edition, the newspaper had two section front pages with centerpieces using the same headline. Or the same gimmick, I should say. The Metro section’s center package headline: “RED, WHITE & YOU.” And from the Business section’s center…

On this Fourth of July morning, the Palm Beach Post out-jingos the other two midsize metropolitan dailies with a big package (it took up a full two-thirds of the front page) titled The Mounting Cost of Freedom. By William M. Hartnett, it begins this way: “On this 230th anniversary of…

From New York Times home page: “Crack Is Found in Shuttle’s Foam Insulation By WARREN E. LEARY and JOHN SCHWARTZ” Well, you can’t really blame the astronauts for trying. It’s boring as hell up there…

Earl Maucker (looking blurry at right) done good. I don’t say that very often. Sometimes I even criticize him. Some of you might even believe that I don’t think he’s fit to be editor of the Sun-Sentinel. Not so. I think he’s an honorable guy and decent newspaper steward who…

In terms of the Sun-Sentinel’s Help Team, there’s good news and bad news. First the good news: The “Sun-Sentinel Watch” charticle (a mix between an article and chart that is all the rave at newspapers these days) was bumped off the Local front and onto 3B this morning. Apparently the…

Media Matters tells the tale of the fall-out of the Sun-Sentinel correction on the Murtha matter. (Thanks to Flablog for pointing the way). Hell, Fox News was actually accountable. Nice to see. Hate-spewer Neal Boortz (who once went off on me on his sickeningly popular radio show) didn’t retract a…

Broward Times Remember Sylvia Poitier? She’s the one who was voted off the Broward County Commission after creating an untoward relationship (financially) with reviled mega-developer Michael Swerdlow. You might remember that she had her political Lazarus moment by getting elected to the Deerfield Beach city commission. Well, she’s running into…

Mike Berardino has an interesting column in the Sun-Sentinel today about the newfound appreciation of long-time Marlins shortstop Alex Gonzalez. Gonzalez is playing this year in a big baseball town, Boston, and is finding out what it’s like to be a real major leaguer. That kind of comparison extends beyond…

Well, since I’ve come out in favor of shooting cats, I might as well defend Jay Mariotti. Picked this up off of Romenesko about the Chicago Sun-Times sports writer, whom White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen (who was with the Marlins second World Series champion) recently referred to (tenderly, I’m told)…

— As the Miami Herald tells us in its web tease, a fellow shot his own cat’s “head off” and had to go court. Then reporter Amy Sherman tells us all about the case of the murdered cat. First thought: anybody who has [lived with] a cat that is drifting…

By the time Germán Gomez and Javier Dominguez got home from their first day of work in America, on November 3, 2004, the sky was already bleeding dusk. The cousins were weary not just from a long day on a roofing job at a construction site but also from a…

Iraq. On the graves of two soldiers — one British, one American — two rifles are crowned with the dead men’s helmets. In front of concertina wire, silhouetted against a blue sky, stands a soldier weighed down with a heavy pack. She holds her rifle across her body, her head…

Broward County has some tall buildings, lots of yachts with eight-digit price tags, and a billionaire or two, but it doesn’t have celebrities. Oh, there’s that overexposed football player guy who’ll do a television pitch for anything from chicken wings to drain-clearing gadgets if you pay him enough money. But…

Returning from a short trip to the Dominican Republic, Rush Limbaugh was briefly detained at Palm Beach International Airport on Monday when the radio host admitted to a customs agent that the Viagra he was carrying was his, even though it was prescribed to another person. On his radio show…

Supersized McChump If it’s big, they love it: Trevor Aaronson’s June 22 article, “Chump Tower,” is a masterpiece that gets right to the heart of “golden calfism” in South Florida. I should know: I live in Holly-Mara-Wood, where the locals are supposed to shut up about trivial concerns such as…

By all appearances, it was just another random Saturday afternoon story assignment. A 3B job on U.S. Rep. John Murtha’s remarks at a town hall meeting at Florida International University. Get out there, capture the gist of the speech, talk to a few people, get back and file eight inches…

Levine John DeGroot was taking a cigarette break at the North Broward Medical Center this morning and he was mad as hell. “The fucking Sun-Sentinel is so asleep at the switch, it’s just fucking embarrassing,” he told me on a cell phone call. You should know DeGroot. He’s a 21-year…

The Miami Herald website lets us know: “Israelis Keep Pressure on Palestinians.” The Palm Beach Post’s front page informs us: “Bridges Bombed to Cut Off Militants’ Routes.” The Sun-Sentinel: “Israeli Troops Move into Gaza.” NY Times: “Israeli Forces Appear to Increase Pressure in Gaza.” Washington Post: “Israeli Launches Gaza Operation.”…