AP couldn’t let Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio hand out juice at a campaign event in Miami without connecting them to cocaine. What? David Fischer’s story was headlined “Host for Romney event is a convicted drug dealer.” It began: “Mitt Romney held a campaign event Monday evening at a Miami juice shop owned by a convicted cocaine trafficker.”

In 1995, cocaine trafficker Jorge Cabrera gained access to Al Gore and Hillary Clinton at separate fundraisers after giving $20,000 to the DNC. When that story broke a year later, CNN tried to describe him as a “commercial fisherman.” AP’s story continued:

This year, as always, Florida is a crucial swing state. Because of that, the liberal media is doing all it can to gin up Democratic base voters, attempting to energize them for the November election by bashing Florida's conservative Republican governor Rick Scott and his attempt to clean up voter rolls of noncitizens, who by definition are not allowed to cast votes. The liberal media, particularly hyper-partisan MSNBC, has also attacked efforts in other states to require voter ID. Florida has had a photo ID law since 2002.

The tragic February shooting death of Trayvon Martin also led the Left to work up attacks on the Sunshine State's Stand Your Ground laws. But new polling shows that the media's attacks are just not working. Sure, Gov. Scott himself is personally unpopular, but the policies he's pursuing are, reports Steve Bousquet of the Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times (emphasis mine):

Natural disasters have a way of bringing out the worst on the Left. Flooding in Florida and wildfires in Colorado “inspired” nutty talk-show host Mike Malloy and the Daily Kos to rant about how conservatives in these states deserve these disasters because they’re anti-government, and too religious to boot.

Malloy teased from his atheist worldview, “Could that be, you know, Jesus or God saying hey, you know, we're sick of you right-wingers. We're sick of you religious nuts. We're gonna -- we're gonna flood you, we're gonna burn you?” Malloy mused maybe God was punishing the Christians at the Air Force Academy:

Of course you probably won't hear an apology or retraction on the network's programming, but PolitiFact.com has determined that MSNBC's Chris Matthews was in error when the Hardball host claimed on his June 4 program that a new Florida law -- which has been on hold by a federal judge -- made it utterly impossible for voter registration drives to sign up new voters over weekends. The law requires voter registration drive volunteers to turn in new voter registration forms within 48 hours after having collected them. "You don’t have to be a lawyer to own a calendar or know what a weekend is. A weekend is 48 hours," Matthews sneered at Florida GOP chairman Lenny Curry, insisting that its impossible to register new voters over a weekend without running afoul of the law

But the Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald-run PolitiFact site did what Hardball producers should have done before Chris took to the air, actually look up and read the text of the legislation. In doing so, PolitiFact found that there's an exception in the law that takes weekends into account:

In today's 16-paragraph page A6 story, "Legal challenges tie up new voting restrictions,"* the Washington Post's Krissah Thompson reported that many "[s]tricter ID laws and other controversial voting restrictions" could be held up in the courts until after November election.

At no point in her story, however, did Thompson note recent polling shows 70 percent of Americans back photo ID for voting. What's more, while Thompson noted Obama/Holder Justice Department staffers are working to thwart "an effort by Florida's Republican secretary of state to remove noncitizens from voter registration lists, saying it is illegal to conduct such a purge this close to an election," she failed to note that in this instance, it may well be the Obama administration that is violating federal law by refusing to assist Florida officials.