Art Levine voted her Jackass of the year in 2004.writing in City Link. He states "This should have been the year that allowed Oliphant to survive until the 2004 election, but she once again unleashed the real Miriam and soon self-destructed.
Until this fall, she ducked all the major political bullets aimed at her, with no investigation finding criminal or ethical misconduct. The March municipal elections went smoothly, thanks to massive help from the cities. She even got an additional bailout of $921,000 over her original budget from the County Commission.
But all that wasn’t enough for her. Feeling both politically invulnerable and under assault by the commission, she launched a lengthy budget war with the county, storming out of a meeting when the commission didn’t give her another $290,000 for legal and cell phone bills.
All the while, she kept insisting on a politically absurd $14.7 million budget for fiscal year 2004 during tense discussions with county officials.
“She felt it was political suicide to accept anything less than the $14.7 million,” observes Wallsmith, who favored compromise. Oliphant’s belief was that if she accepted the roughly $9 million and election manpower the county was offering, she would be ruined if she later needed additional funds to cover costs for the March presidential primary.
Unfortunately, her credibility was destroyed during the budget dispute when it became even clearer that she was a policy airhead. Parrish and former aides note that Oliphant couldn’t answer even the most rudimentary questions about her own budget proposals and just started reading from the beginning of her prepared statements over again.
And at one point, when Parrish asked her about how many outstanding absentee ballots she expected for an upcoming election, she told them the office sent out 14,000 and 6,000 were returned, so she expected 20,000, repeatedly failing to grasp the elementary school concept that subtracting the 6,000 got you 8,000. “It was so frustrating dealing with her that we gave up,” Parrish said.
Even supporters at the time, such as Keith Clayborne, were embarrassed by her shaky grasp of issues — and literacy — during commission hearings. “She made herself look stupid,” he says. “We tried to help her, but she couldn’t answer questions coherently.”
During one prep session before a meeting, he was shocked by a report that she and her staff were planning to submit. “It was absolutely atrocious, with misspellings and verbiage you couldn’t understand,” he recalls. Oliphant reassured him that it was just a draft, so when she presented the same report to the commission, “I almost had a heart attack,” he says.
Yet it wasn’t such incompetence that finally did her in but her foolhardy desire for revenge. When she read the critical but honest depositions of some of her most talented employees and then fired them in October, she unleashed a whirlwind of two state investigations that found an office still in chaos and utterly unprepared for the upcoming March primary.
The firing of the admired African-American employee Mary Hall also cost Oliphant dearly in support of black politicians and The Broward Times, helping pave the way for the governor’s suspension order Nov. 20. Now, she faces a trial in the state Senate.
“She thought, ‘I’m untouchable,’ ” one former aide says now. “But guess what, Miriam? You’re not.”
City Link commissioned an illustration to accompany the story." 
I will leave it up to the observer to judge if she is related to Thomas Oliphant.