Continued unethical behavior, corruption and incompetency in Hallandale Beach and South Florida, and the South Florida news media's willful ignoring of it, plus the 2012 election, propelled Hallandale Beach Blog to set a new record for eyeballs the second month in a row. A daily average of 1396.6 page views a day!

Above, as previously seen on the blog, the campaign yard signs for Bill Julian, Anthony A. Sanders and Joy Cooper that for months stood illegally on church/non-profit property on N.W. First Avenue & N.W. 3rd Street, in Hallandale Beach, FL. This despite the fact that in the United States, federal law is that partisan campaign signs are NOT to be placed on religious property, since the IRS can and does remove the non-profit status of proven violators, like the Church of Christ of Hallandale Beach above. But who cares about rules, laws and penalties when there's an election to be won? Certainly not these three. October 9, 2012 photo by South Beach Hoosier. © 2012 Hallandale Beach Blog, All Rights Reserved.

Continued unethical behavior, corruption and incompetency in Hallandale Beach and South Florida, and the South Florida news media's willful ignoring of it, plus the 2012 election, propelled Hallandale Beach Blog to set a new record for eyeballs the second month in a row

Thanks to readers from South Florida and around the world, November 2012 was THE busiest month EVER in the five years of Hallandale Beach Blog, with a total of 41,898 individual page views -an increase over the previous record in October 2012 by 6,552- for an average of 1,396.6 page views a day. 
Thanks!

Bad journalism is STILL happening in plain sight in South Florida: Why are Herald and Sun-Sentinel beat reporters ignoring campaign finance disclosure violations story re Broward County PBA in Hollywood? Violations that appear quite deliberate. On this, as with so many other dozens of stories that the public wants to know MORE about, these reporters and their editors are sleepwalking

Bad journalism is STILL happening in plain sight in South Florida: Why are the Herald and Sun-Sentinel beat reporters ignoring campaign finance disclosure violations story re Broward County PBA in Hollywood? Violations that appear quite deliberate. On this, as with so many other dozens of stories that the public wants to know MORE about, these reporters and their editors are sleepwalking

Once again, for about the millionth time since they've had the Hollywood and Hallandale Beach reporting beats for their newspapers, the Miami Herald's Carli Teproff and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel's Tonya Alanez are NOT reporting news they know about.

Why in the world is there a time-delay in reporting news to readers that happened WEEKS ago?

In most large cities not located in Florida, especially Northeastern and Midwestern cities that still have pretensions to being 'newspaper towns,' the information would've been in the newspaper the very next day, and the local TV stations, as per usual, would've suddenly gotten interested in the story, too, and gone to work that day in either ferreting out some real answers, or at least making their viewers know what the basic facts were and who the parties involved were. 
But here, it's weeks later and there's still nothing about it.

What are they, reporters, publicists or spin doctors?

It's a very familiar refrain to news-hungry residents of this part of Broward County.

My fact-filled blog post on this matter is coming this week, and I'll very likely take aim at some of the most egregious apologists for both the union and the reporters.
And I'll have some of the questions that we should've already seen posed weeks ago to the people involved at the PBA.

What privacy laws? Wash. Post's devastating story on abuse of confidential govt. information by D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray's 2010 GOTV campaign, targeting public housing residents using private govt. info. HUD says use of official lists of residents would “constitute a substantial invasion of privacy”; @mikedebonis, @kitastew

For weeks now, Washington Post reporters Nikita Stewart and Mike DeBonis have consistently impressed on the ethical scandal and criminal probe involving Mayor Vincent C. Gray, while showing how talented and clever reporters who don't take anything for granted, can write informative and illuminating stories about what happens when political dynamite explodes in the hands of D.C.'s most powerful local politician, in a way that that shocks you from hundreds of miles away, even after you lived in the area for 15 years and, frankly, didn't think you could be shocked by anything going on in D.C. govt.

Their latest story concerns the use of confidential personal information in a government database and possible privacy law violations. 

The Washington Post

Mayor Gray’s 2010 campaign had database of public-housing residents

Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s 2010 campaign kept a database with the identities of nearly 6,000 public housing residents it targeted in get-out-the-vote efforts, which appears to be an unauthorized use of private government information.

By Nikita Stewart and Mike DeBonis

Published: July 22, 2012

The database, part of a cache of documents The Washington Post obtained from former campaign workers, includes residents’ names, addresses and telephone numbers. One of the documents designated “team captains” responsible for reaching out to tenants in specific housing complexes.

It is unclear who assembled the list or how the campaign got it, but two campaign workers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of an ongoing federal investigation, said it was used in the final week before the Democratic primary election to register residents and get voters to the polls.

Read the rest of the post at 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/mayor-grays-2010-campaign-had-database-of-public-housing-residents/2012/07/22/gJQAiumA3W_story.html


Listen to Mike DeBonis discuss this story on WTOP Radio earlier today:
http://wtop.com/774/2955956/Grays-2010-campaign-used-private-public-housing-data-for-targeted-campaigns


Nikita Stewart at Twitter: http://twitter.com/kitastew   
@kitastew


Mike DeBonis at Twitter is http://twitter.com/mikedebonis/
@mikedebonis


His blog at the WaPo is called District of DeBonis: "More than a city. Not quite a state. Enough for a blog" 

Her blog at the WaPo is DC Wire, where her latest post is that 48 percent of African Americans in D.C. think Mayor Gray should step down and that 44 percent think he should stay. 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/dc-wire

In Hallandale Beach: Common sense campaign laws and rules we ALL have to abide by, if, by ALL, you mean 99.99% of us -but NOT the Usual Suspects!

Above, the city complex monument sign on the S.E. 3rd Street (north) entrance to the Hallandale Beach Cultural Center. August 24, 2010 photo by South Beach Hoosier.

Above, campaign signs near the Old Dixie Highway (west) entrance to the Hallandale Beach Cultural Center. August 24, 2010 photo by South Beach Hoosier.

Speaking of common sense rules of society we are ALL supposed to abide by, if by ALL, you mean 99.99% of us -but NOT the Usual Suspects!- did anyone else with a pulse happen to notice the strange goings-on taking place on Tuesday, Election Day afternoon, within spitting distance of Hallandale Beach City Hall?

There, some folks that are well-known to this blogger and many of you faithful readers, were bending the rules about NOT placing physical impediments in the public right-of-way, by clearly confiscating/obstructing part of the public sidewalk between Hallandale Beach City Hall and the Hallandale Beach Cultural Center, where the county's polling booths/tables were located.
The THREE of them, Mayor Joy Cooper and Commissioners William "Bill" Julian and Dotty Ross erected -or, more likely, had erected for them- a LARGE tent over the public sidewalk -on the City Hall side of the road- with numerous chairs beneath it, so they could sit in the shade, catch-up on some light reading and occasionally stop, if not exactly waylay, any prospective voters on their way to casting a ballot.
No standing in the sun with campaign signs for them!
Fortunately, I didn't see any prospective voters in a wheelchair trying to negotiate the public sidewalk coming from HB City Hall and having to attack their redan, but then I didn't hang around for hours after I voted to wait-and-see because I had things to do.

So I voted and watched intently for about 15 minutes and that was long enough to see for myself that they were, indeed, blase about doing whatever they wanted, rules be damned.
The three of them just sat there, practically daring someone to say something to them about their incredible gall and clear lack of good judgement.

Rules?
What rules?
If I didn't know any better, I'd have sworn that they were channeling Brits in India during the Raj, forever complaining about the hot weather and their homesickness, but positively swooning about the quality of the tea!

I'll run the typically dumb-founding HB photos I snapped on my blog Sunday, but in the interim, if you want, you can email me your educated guesses and I'll tell you whether or not you're correct.
And as always, please, no wagering.