It’s a running joke that someday someone in the 305 will accuse a politician of child abuse. But stop laughing. Because it happened.

It’s gotten real ugly in the race for Florida House seat 118, where candidate Robert Asencio, a recently retired lieutenant with the Miami-Dade Schools Department, has been painted as a no less than an actual child abuser on an anonymous website.

Of course Asencio says these are false attacks and that they are standard for his opponent — former Congressman David Rivera. Rivera says he has nothing to do with the website, but he is the one who brought it up during a short debate Sunday on Al Punto Florida on Univision 23.

Read related story: David Rivera is baaaack — to his roots in state House race

“If you go to www.asenciocriminal.com you can see all the things my challenger has done,” Rivera said. “These are facts.”

Except the anonymos website called The Asencio Files — which claims to expose his “criminal history of child abuse, federal crimes, false police reports and taxpayer abuse” — takes those facts out of context. It centers on an internal affairs complaint against Asencio. It says that he grabbed a student and pulled him “out of his seat by the neck and shirt” on a school bus because the boy was “disrespecting him.”

It also publishes Asencio’s campaign phone number and urges people to call him and “tell him child abusers don’t belong in the Florida House of Representatives.”

The website claims to be “paid for, compiled and constructed by former police co-workers of Robert Asencio,” and promises more to come. “This is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Miami City Commissioner Ken Russell was not able to get even a second on his motion to fire City Attorney Victoria Mendez Thursday.

Russell had made the move to terminate Mendez because he said she intentionally withheld emails that he had asked her for. He said the 26 emails not provided to him painted a different picture than the ones he got when he made the same request of IT — which was that Mendez was helping a developer get approval for a lot split in Coconut Grove to build five houses on one property. He said he lost trust in the city attorney.

But as if that wasn’t enough, he also mentioned another instance in which Mendez made him uncomfortable — when she advised him to get a cell phone services that would help him avoid having to make his text messages public.

“My very first week in office, in my very first meeting with Ms. Mendez, her first advice to me was which phone company I should use because it erases your text messages sooner,” Russell said at the meeting.

“It’s Sprint by the way.

“And my heart sank because this is not what I wanted to hear from the city attorney,” said Russell, who added that he stuck with AT&T.

Which made Ladra wonder who uses Sprint. So I asked. And the answer is nobody. Unless Commissioner Frank Carollo uses the service provider, because he was the only one that couldn’t be reached over the weekend.

Commissioners Willy Gort, Keon Hardemon and Francis Suarez each said they, too, use AT&T.

Certainly not what Ladra expected.

It seems odd that everybody would ignore the city attorney’s advice, but Suarez — who has been critical of Mendez on other professional issues — also said that the city attorney had never advised him to use a particular cell phone company.

“She’s never said anything remotely similar to me like that,” he said.

He wouldn’t go as far as calling Russell a liar.

“I don’t think he’s a dishonest person. I also don’t think she’s a dishonest person. We get told a lot of things,” Suarez said.

And since he uses AT&T, whatever he gets told in text, stays put for longer.

Miami City Commissioner Ken Russell lost his first political battle Thursday when he failed to get any support whatsoever on his move to terminate City Attorney Victoria Mendez after she failed to provide all the emails he asked her for about a certain Coconut Grove lot split and development.

He didn’t even get a second to his motion.

Russell has said that Mendez, who makes $215,000 a year, intentionally withheld some of the emails he requested on the development application for a lot split on Battersea Road. She gave him 13 emails dating back to November 2015. When he requested the same email search from IT, he got 39, and the conversation started in October. The attorneys even provided the city attorney with draft language for the resolution.

“The whole 39 told a different story,” Russell said.

A drawing composite of one of the five homes to be built on Battersea

The freshman commissioner says the emails show that Mendez went above and beyond to help the developer get a positive ruling on the application to divide the property into five lots so he could build five homes. The original ruling from planning and zoning was that the application needed a document called a warrant. The emails suggest Mendez shopped it out to different attorneys on her staff until she got the decision she was looking for.

She also assured Javier Vazquez, an attorney/lobbyist for the developer with whom she is rather friendly, that she was doing all she could to resolve the issue. And one email indicates it might not have been an easy sell.

Read related story: Miami commissioner wants attorney fired for missing emails

“Javier, we’re having a hard time on this. Let’s talk next week,” she wrote on Oct. 30 last year. This was after she had told an assistant city attorney to talk to him and “see how we can figure out.”

That email was among the ones that were withheld from Russell. So was the one that had been sent by Assistant City Attorney Amanda Quirke the day before, on Oct. 29. “I spoke to Javier today. I reviewed this issue at length with planning and zoning to see if we could get to the same interpretation, but we could not,” Quirke wrote. “This is an unplatted lot that has had a house on it for more than 50 years. It is a building site, and no building site shall be diminished in the NCD without a warrant.”

Quirke was no longer needed for meetings after that, as Vazquez indicated in an email Oct. 30 to Mendez’s assistant Marta Gomez about a meeting she was trying to reschedule for when Quirke would be back.

“My client cannot afford to keep waiting. Respectfully, we know Amanda’s opinion on the matter. We are simply wanting face to face time with Vicky to give her our interpretation,” he wrote.

Mendez chimed in: “Have Goldberg come up to speed with alternatives and we can still meet without Amanda.”

There’s more. Please press this “continue reading” button to “turn the page.”

A group of Democrat electeds and wannabe electeds got together Friday to denounce gun violence and call for gun reform at what amounted to basically a campaign stop.

Standing side by side to deliver their message of support for common sense firearm restrictions, were former Congressman Joe Garcia, who is running to get his seat back in Florida’s 26th congressional district, State Senator Dwight Bullard, who is in a heated race to keep his seat and Democratic Party candidates Debbie Mucarsel-Powel (state Senate against Anitere Flores) and Dan Horton (state House against Holly Roschein). 

Miami-Dade Commissioner Daniella Levine Cava was the only politician at the event who isn’t in a race this November. 

“We have more than 3 billion guns in this country. That’s more than we have people,” Levine Cava said, adding that gun violence is the number one cause of death for young black men between the ages of 18 and 25. 

See a video of the press conference here

“This is a national crisis, a national disaster. And it is hitting us right here are home,” she said, adding that it claimed the lives of too many innocents. The press conference was at Goulds Park in Southwest Dade, near a home where six teenagers at a party were shot in a drive-by recently.

Garcia said that among those innocent victims were 45 children shot in 2016 and 70 in 2015. “This isn’t some faraway war. This is happening right here in our community,” he said. “It’s unacceptable.”  

Among the group of politicos also stood Regina Talabert, mother of one of the 2016 gun violence victims, 17-year-old Noricia Talabert. The South Dade High School senior had just picked up two friends at a local corner Florida City grocery store when a man opened fire on her car with an AK47 rifle about two months ago. Her mom held a large color photo of her daughter’s graduation class picture Friday.

They were also joined by Greater Goulds Optimist Club President J.L. Demps Jr. and Dr. Willy Wright of the Goulds Coalition of Ministers and Lay People who rolled out a pledge in support of common-sense gun reform and called on the attendees to advocate for an end to gun violence in our communities. They signed a Coalition pledge:

• Support a comprehensive ban on assault weapons
• Support background checks on all gun sales and transfers — including elimination of the gun show loophole
• Support legislation to keep guns out of the hands of suspected terrorists
• Support a ban on high capacity ammunition magazines
• Oppose legislation that allows concealed weapons on schools and other sensitive areas

“The legislation we are fighting for will make a difference and save lives,” said Garcia, who has challenged U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo, who beat him in 2014 amid headlines about absentee ballot fraud in Garcia’s campaign.

Read related story: Joe Garcia releases first web ad in congressional contest

“I’m asking Republicans to have some courage and take a stand for once,” Garcia said. “If Carlos Curbelo would rather pocket contributions from the NRA than save lives, then I challenge him to tell these families that cash for his reelection matters more than their safety.”

Garcia said that 90% of Americans want gun control reform and seemed especially troubled by the gun show loophole.

“In this district, here in South Florida, we have one of the largest gun shows in the country, where you can walk in and buy a weapon with absolutely zero background check,” Garcia said. “These weapons end up on these streets, killing our kids. It’s unacceptable. We have to stop it.”

A Garcia campaign spokesman said they had tracked at least $44,000 in contributions to Curbelo directly from the NRA alone. They believe the support is over $50,000. Curbelo has voted against background checks and to relax gun restrictions, has gone on TV to say gun control is not the answer and, with the rest of the GOP, blocked debate in 2015 on legislation to ban the sale of guns to individuals on the no fly list.

Read related story: Joe Garcia and Carlos Curbelo agree on Zika

He must have changed his mind because this past summer, after the mass shooting tragedy at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Curbelo filed bipartisan legislation to ban sales to suspected terrorists. Garcia immediately called it pandering. 

The Brady Campaign, one of the nation’s leading anti-gun violence advocacy groups has rated Curbelo — a lobbyist who put his firm in his wife’s name so he wouldn’t have to reveal who he lobbied for — as a “lap dog” for the NRA. 

Hey, maybe they are one of his secret clients.

Republican Florida House candidate Rosy Palomino, who is running for a Democrat-held vacated seat that the GOP really wants to turn, has two Tallahassee big wigs helping her get there.

Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera and State Rep. Jose Oliva, slated to be Florida Speaker of the House in 2018, top a host committee, still in formation for a Palomino fundraiser in Coral Gables Tuesday.

“No one is more surprised than me,” Palomino said Saturday. “Wow. Maybe they have nothing else to do.”

This type of self-deprecating, down-to-Earth talk is not a schtick. It’s just Rosy being Rosy. When Ladra spoke to the educator and community activist Saturday, she was stressing out about not having any non-perishables at home in case Hurricane Matthew comes this way.

“Not even a can of salchichas. What Cuban doesn’t have a can of salchichas? All I have is water because I’ve been canvassing,” said Palomino, who lost a bid for Miami city commission last year, so she’s actually been canvassing much of the district for years.

A district that Lopez-Cantera represented from 2004 to 2012. “He still lives in the district. He cares about who represents it,” said Palomino campaign manager Hector Roos.

Which may explain his presence. But Oliva? Or State Rep. Carlos Trujillo (Doral), who is also on the host committee? Well, other Republicans might care about what may very well be the only reversable House seat in the state this November. It is also the only one of 35 contested House races without an incumbent. It was vacated relatively late, in March, by Democrat State Rep. Jose Javier Rodriguez, who is running for state Senate.

Read related story: Miguel DLP vs J-Rod make it a hard choice in Senate 37

Tuesday’s event at the Knights of Columbus will be Palomino’s first event since the primary, which she won with 61% over Michael Davey.

The other hosts so far are Coral Gables Mayor Jim Cason and — coming out of self-imposed early retirement — former Gables Commissioner William “Billy” Kerdyk, who was termed out of office in 2015 and opted out of a mayoral run. Is he plotting a comeback in 2017? Who knew he was Republican? Only a tiny sliver of the Gables, east of Le Jeune Road, is in the district, which also encompasses much of Miami and all of Key Biscayne.

Maybe the VIP GOP headliners will be able to inject Palomino’s campaign with some cash. Palomino, who ran unsuccessfully for a Miami city commission seat won last year by Commissioner Ken Russell, has spent all the $15,000 or so she raised as of Sept. 16, according to finance reports at the Florida Division of Elections.

Meanwhile, her opponent, Nicholas Duran — son-in-law of former Miami-Dade Democratic Party Chairman Mike Abrams, a former state rep (North Miami Beach/Aventura) and current lobbyist with Ballard Partners — has about $50,000 left in the $157K he raised. And that doesn’t count the $55,000 of in-kind donations for staff and research from the Florida Democratic Party — in a primary, no less.

The GOP did not get involved in the primary. But maybe Tuesday’s fundraiser is a sign that they will now.

“We’re looking forward to it,” Roos said.