About the columnist

Fred Grimm joined the Herald in 1976. Since 1991 he has written a column about crime, politics and life in Broward.

E-mail Fred at fgrimm@herald.com

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THE GRIMM TRUTH

Disparate thoughts and random opinions of longtime Miami Herald columnist Fred Grimm

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In My Opinion

College loans are next debt crisis

Marlins Park, financed by bonds that will take four decades and $2.4 billion to pay off, makes a perfect setting for commencement exercises. Vice President Joe Biden, when he addresses a happy throng of graduates from Cypress Bay High School in that fancy new baseball stadium on June 4, will be looking out at the unwitting perpetrators of the next great debt crisis. 1338145702

In My Opinion

Where some see an ugly house, Miami-Dade commissioner sees a plot

“This is serious business,” the commissioner said. “You know what I’m talking about. Two and two is four.”
In My Opinion

The method behind the madness of governments hiring lobbyists

Along the halls of local government, I’m sure elected leaders have a good explanation for why a public entity must spend great gobs of public money hiring private lobbyists to lobby a public entity. It’s just that their logic is too oblique for a chump like me.
In My Opinion

State left untouched real source of voter fraud

Miami knows plenty about corrupting elections. We did a fine job of it in 1997. Maybe those leading the state’s bungled crusade to “protect the integrity of Florida elections” should have asked the experts.
In My Opinion

Florida, not kids, flunked FCAT testing

Proficiency under pressure — that’s what we test for. Right? That’s what public education is all about in the new Florida. Standardized tests decide whether students graduate, how much teachers earn, what performance grades schools get, how much bonus money to give to schools that excel.
In My Opinion

Shut up and quit texting

Looking back, it was such a quaint little crusade, a futile gesture against the indomitable lure of technology that never got much beyond a bumper sticker slogan: “Shut up and drive.”
In My Opinion

Sermons against gay marriage have familiar ring

The marquee outside a church in Wilmington, N.C., last week made it clear how godly folk were expected to vote on a proposed constitutional ban against same-sex marriage and civil unions: “A true marriage is male and female and God.”
In My Opinion

Dollars and sense of capital punishment

Enlightenment’s a bit much to ask. Florida is not Connecticut.
In My Opinion

Social media, jury duty a bad mix

Seven weeks into a complicated criminal trial in a Fort Lauderdale courtroom, the proceedings came to a sudden and disconcerting stop.
In My Opinion

Knives are banned at Tampa’s GOP convention, but guns are OK

Mindful of the “potentially contentious environment” that comes with so many overwrought protesters converging on a national political convention, the city of Tampa has banned a number of items the last four days of August.
In My Opinion

Fighting evolution one monkey law at a time

Evolution has been voted down in the Tennessee legislature. School kids there need not be bothered by confusing allusions to homo erectus, homo ergaster, homo antecessor, homo heidelbergensis, homo neanderthalensis and other ancestral contradictions to that Old Time Religion.
In My Opinion

Even Wall Street agrees Florida shortchanges higher ed

The Bond Buyer is normally not a publication that grabs my interest. But there’s something particularly disturbing about seeing the risk facing Florida’s universities assessed in the dry and dispassionate language of the financial markets.
In My Opinion

In Florida, gambling is gambling, except when it’s not

When I drifted into Mississippi in 1965, an illusionary state law insisted liquor sales were flat out illegal. Which, I discovered, didn’t mean you couldn’t buy it. That was left up to the individual county sheriffs, who were elected according to how local voters felt about their wet-versus-dry platform.
In My Opinion

What is the University of Florida thinking?

Ever wonder how we’re perceived, out there in the techie universe?
In My Opinion

Not that Rep. David Rivera did anything wrong

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
In My Opinion

Miami Beach sinking in a vast swamp of dishonesty

In places other than Miami Beach City Hall, human resource officers are not encouraged by certain notations in employee personnel files.
In My Opinion

Scott keeps biggest turkey in state budget

Gov. Rick Scott loves to zap the so-called “turkeys” he sees lurking in the state budget. Last year, with considerable flourish, he exercised his line-item veto on a long list of what he characterized as “short-sighted, frivolous, wasteful spending.”
In My Opinion

Speeding cop got sweet, undeserved deal

Of course Fausto Lopez flouted the law. He is the law.
In My Opinion

Gun culture, gang wars are deadly mix

An old friend of mine grew up in the Philadelphia housing projects in the 1950s, a tough, poor, angry Irish kid and self-described gangbanger, with the same mindless fealty to thug life that afflicts poor neighborhoods in contemporary Miami.
In My Opinion

Dyeing chicks, bunnies could become legal once more

We are at war here in Florida against the kind of job-killing do-gooder regulations that deny our toddlers the blessed opportunity of squishing their very own neon pink baby chicks.