Steven Shulman is an insurance broker, real estate investor and the founder of a nonprofit charity that saves the lives of pets in distress, Animal Care Now. He grew up in Miami Beach and served two years in prison after being arrested for possession of quaaludes. He received his civil rights back in the 1980s and has become an advocate for convicted felons who have been denied the same privileged he has received. Shulman just released a memoir of his life called, My Uncle Gloria.
I’m a convicted felon.
Back in April 1981, I made a mistake in trusting an acquaintance.
That mistake got me arrested, convicted, and sentenced to five years in state prison for possession of methaqualone.
After completing two years in prison, two years parole, and being released from all government supervision, I applied to Florida’s office of executive clemency to have my civil rights restored.
I was lucky.
The process only took me a few years.
I have done incredibly well with my life because I was afforded a second chance.
In 1988 I had all my civil rights restored, including: the right to vote, travel abroad, perform jury duty, hold public office, and be employed in certain government organizations.
Since then I’ve created a great life for myself.
Steven Shulman during a period where he was using a lot of drugs.
I’m a successful insurance broker, real estate investor, published author and founder of a nonprofit charity that saves the lives of pets in distress.
I hold the proud distinction of being the first convicted felon to be issued a real estate license in Florida, and the first convicted felon in Florida to be issued an insurance license.
I made a mistake when I was young.
I served my time.
And I have done incredibly well with my life because I was afforded a second chance.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to deal with a governor like Rick Scott.
There is of course a massive irony in all of this.
He’s a man with absolute dictatorial power who routinely denies people their right to vote after they’ve paid their debt back to society.
Scott doesn’t care if people turn their lives around.
He wants to keep them as second-class citizens- forever.
Shulman receiving his wife as a visitor while he was in prison.
25% of Florida’s black population is currently unable to vote due to prior felony convictions.
And right now, there’s more than 1.8 million people with felony convictions who have been permanently disenfranchised and cannot vote.
There is of course a massive irony in all of this.
In 1997, Scott’s healthcare company was charged by the federal government with the largest Medicare fraud in history.
Scott resigned as CEO during the investigation, pled the fifth 75 times when questioned by government attorneys, while the company pled guilty to 14 felonies and paid $1.7 billion in fines.
Scott lied his way out of criminal prosecution and a felony conviction.
Shulman showing off his book, “My Aunt Gloria” at Books & Books in Coral Gables.
He could easily have ended up as one of the millions of Floridians who are currently without their full civil rights restored.
But justice looks different for millionaires.
On November 6th, as Florida voters, we have the chance to change that.
We can take this issue out of the hands of politicians and give our fellow citizens their right to vote.
You’ll be amazed with what they do with it, if given the chance to be treated like everybody else.
Take it from my experience.
I was given a second chance and I made it count.
Others deserve the shot I got.
Vote for Amendment 4.
——Here’s Something Completely Different: ——
Meet The Three Frenchmen Who Are Taking Over Miami’s Culinary Scene
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Inside Miami’s Bitcoin Gas Stations
What’s News In This Story?
-The Chevron on 103rd St right next to I-95 in Miami-Dade County might look like just an ordinary gas station. But it hides a secret. Next to the sodas and the junk food you can also buy Bitcoin.
-Owned by hard-nosed entrepreneur Rishi Gosine, the station on 103rd St and his Chevron on 79th St and North Miami Avenue were the first to feature Bitcoin ATM’s in South Florida.
-Now there are dozens of them in the region and over a hundred in the rest of the US.
-Gosine says that the ATM’s are popular with customers- especially young people who lack access to a bank or credit card.
-But the ATM’s have caused concern in other countries. In London, local authorities say that they are used to help drug dealers launder money.
-Miami has become a global cryptocurrency capital in recent years. The city hosted over 5,000 people in January for the North American Bitcoin Conference.
-According to the Miami New Times, Bitcoin entrepreneurs and speculators are drawn to Florida because of lax state oversight of the industry.
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Kim Jong Un Always Travels With A Personal Toilet
North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is not exactly known as a man of the people.
After all, this is the guy who had his own uncle shot because he somehow ran afoul of his nephew’s views. And oh yeah, many people in his country are starving to death and have nearly no rights to speak of.
That’s why the news out this morning that Kim doesn’t use public restrooms when he travels around his country but instead uses portable toilets built into all of his large vehicles is not really that surprising. But it does speak to the level at which Kim is kept inside an ivory tower in the regime.
According to the Daily NK (and republished by the Guardian), Kim is never that far away from a toilet.
“The restrooms are not only in Kim Jong Un’s personal train but whatever small or midsize cars he is traveling with and even in special vehicles that are designed for mountainous terrain or snow,” a source close to the Escort Command who guards the leader told the Daily NK. “There are multiple vehicles within the convoy so that people cannot tell which one he is in, and there is a separate car that acts as his restroom.”
Kim took power after the death of his father in 2011 and is the scion to a cult of personality that has ruled the dictatorial communist nation since 1948. As such, Kim is projected as a god like figure to the North Korean public and a source told the Daily NK that it would be “unfathomable” to imagine the Supreme Leader using a public restroom.
“He has to travel around the entire country for field guidance, so there always needs to be a personal restroom exclusively for the Suryeong [Supreme Leader] Kim Jong Un,” the source told Daily NK. “It is unthinkable in a Suryeong-based society for him to have to use a public restroom just because he travels around the country.”
More from the Daily NK story:
“The source went on to explain that preparation for ‘No. 1 events’ that involve the leader is as elaborate as can be, including his use of the restroom. Because the matter requires absolute secrecy, it can also be one of the most challenging and sensitive issues for members of the Escort Command.
Another reason why the leader uses exclusive facilities is for periodic examination of his urine and fecal matter to ensure the leader is free of illness and in overall good health, according to the source.”
In more serious North Korea news, CNN is reporting that another close advisor to Kim may have been purged in recent days, sparking additional questions about the leaders grip on power.
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Cover Photo Credit: thierry ehrmann/ Flickr (CC By 2.0)
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Mainstream Media Didn’t “Let” Trump Win, It Was Just Too Weak To Stop Him
Mainstream American journalism as we know it died in the wee hours of Nov. 9, 2016.
It is survived by click-bait shops and a few Macedonian kids who like to make up fake stories.
The funeral will be held at OH LOOK AT THAT LITTLE IGUANA ESCAPING FROM THOSE SNAKES!
I’ve talked to a bunch of distraught liberal friends since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency.
All are angry by what has happened and many blame “the mainstream media” for the result.
I do too.
Despite what some say, this was in fact a failure of media.
But I don’t blame cable news or print sources for letting Trump get away with it.
He was relentlessly covered during the general election and many typically straight reporters got dangerously close to the line in their reports on him.
Newspapers again showed why they are the most important institutions during a political campaign (outside of the FBI, of course).
David Fahrenthold’s indefatigable reporting on Trump’s lack of private donations and his shady charitable foundation for the Washington Post is deserving of massive praise from all sensible people. He also first reported on Trump’s controversial comments in a now infamous Access Hollywood tape.
The New York Times deserves plaudits for reporting on a leaked copy of Trump’s 1995 tax returns. It showed that Trump had possibly not paid taxes for up to 18 years and that he lost $916 million in a single year.
Many local papers chipped away at Trump’s lies and business failures in a daily beat that was impressive.
57 of the largest papers in America endorsed Clinton. Two endorsed Trump.
But none of it mattered.
People weren’t interested in the truth because they didn’t believe it when they saw it.
They either didn’t have the ability to see it or they did and chose not to anyway.
Many have simply lost faith in mainstream media and the form of journalism that emits from them.
It was a failure of media, not because reporters didn’t do a terrific job, but rather do to the fact that those reporters hold less influence that they did even four years ago.
Our media landscape is more cluttered and confused than at any time since the Tower of Babel hosted an economics reporting conference.
Social media is in part the culprit of this.
Fake news stories frequently run rampant through the ether, inciting anger and hardening views of people and issues that is unmoored to fact.
Proprietary partisan content mills churn out dozens of stories, videos, memes and pictures a day that only seeks to score points for the red or blue teams.
Some of the more irresponsible “Breaking News” twitter feeds keep people who follow them in a perpetual state of terror about the state of the world. Death and chaos is always around the corner and the decay of our culture is a foregone conclusion there.
News aggregators have trained us to only read the headlines and have stunted our ability to read pieces for depth and nuance. This started in broadcast media decades ago (rewrites and readers) and has reached a virulent level on the web.
By the time cable news outlets started doing serious reporting on Trump, it had already allowed him near unlimited amounts of free airtime during the GOP primary.
Sure Trump was horrific, but damn if he isn’t entertaining, the logic of executives seemed to go.
This cognitive dissidence on cable clearly impacted the way he was viewed by many.
But in the end, the biggest element that allowed Trump to outflank the media was the very fact that the media has been democratized and Brexited in its own way.
For example, the Times reports that one particular fake news story of Pope Francis endorsing Trump was shared millions of times.
When the news wasn’t totally fake, it was certainly skewed beyond recognition.
Breitbart has given voice to the Alt-Right, a force that has been circling under the waves of news website comment sections for decades and who forged beachheads on Reddit and 4chan. Breitbart is one of the worst offenders and it is only poised to get more popular as the go to voice box of the impending Trump administration.
Other sites feed into the worst fears and strangest parts of our brains.
Alex Jones and his Infowars outlet, for example claim that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are literal demons who smell of sulfur. Jones has one of the most popular Youtube pages out there as a result of his lunacy.
With all of this noise swirling out there, the delegitimization of mainstream media is somewhat inevitable.
Most people don’t know a journalist in their personal life and aren’t able to discern between truth and junk.
In that environment, mainstream media cannot possibly wield the same level of influence it once did.
Welcome to our post-fact reality.
It is whatever you want it to be.
Cover Photo Credit: Oli Goldsmith/ Flickr (CC By 2.0)
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