Ding Dong, Ding Dong


Except it’s not. Gov. Ron DeSantis gave his State of the State address yesterday to open the Florida Legislature’s 2024 60-day session. It was a tissue of lies, exaggerations, misrepresentations and coverups of the reality on the ground in the Sunshine State. Lil’ D did not bother to paint a vision for the state’s future because his focus is on his losing bid for presidency.
“It was a speech written for Iowa and New Hampshire voters, House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell, D-Tampa, said afterward,” reported the Tampa Bay Times. “I was surprised that there was no real vision for Florida,” Driskell said. “I came away feeling, OK, so where do you want to take us next?”
DeSantis’s “small government” is more intrusive in citizens’ lives, his robust state budget relies on federal handouts and his anti-woke agenda is based on curtailing individual constitutional freedoms of assembly, speech and privacy.
So much for the “free state of Florida.”

Recognizing that their party is dying and that the only way to win elections is to cheat, Florida Gov. (and erstwhile presidential contender) Ron DeSantis and his henchmen in the Florida Legislature last year turned to trimming the voter rolls of pesky Democrats and Independents.
According to the Florida Bulldog, the Republican wrecking crew was responsible for culling nearly 900,000 potential non-Republican voters from the rolls:
Statistics compiled by the Florida Division of Elections show the total number of registered active voters in the state fell from 14,536,811 to 13,540,135 as of Dec. 1. That’s a reduction of 996,676, to about the same number of active registered voters as in 2019 – even as the U.S. Census Bureau reported earlier this year that Florida is once again the fastest-growing state in the nation. Florida’s estimated population was 22.2 million as of July 1, 2022.
… Voter records from South Florida’s three most populous counties reveal similar declines. In Miami-Dade 85,640 voters were moved from active to inactive status, with 90.75 percent being Democrats and NPAs; in Broward, 190,876 were moved to inactive status, with 84.24 percent being Democrats and NPAs; in Palm Beach, the active voter rolls were sliced by 156,148 voters, 82.75 percent of whom were registered Democrats or NPAs.
All this was done in the service of “election integrity” — an even greater oxymoron that “military intelligence” when used by the Republican Party.

Keith Olbermann on “Countdown”: For all those wringing their hands about disqualifying Trump from the ballot via the 14th Amendment without a conviction: What would Donald Trump have done with Joe Biden if January 6th had somehow worked?
Or TO him?
It’s January 20, 2021 and the 46th President-Elect of the United States is prevented by whatever means from assuming office as demanded by the Constitution and Trump remains in power extra-legally, extra-judicially, extra-constitutionally.
And we are supposed to believe that Biden would have been left free to speak in public, on television, on social media, to the press, in the courts, to the Speaker Pelosi or Majority Leader Schumer, to the Democratic governors with their authority over the National Guard?
Trump would have found a pretext to detain him. Or he HAD a pretext to detain him; a plan we just haven’t found out about. Having once crossed the ultimate threshold – ENDING 237 years of American democracy – having retained power as a dictator by some other name, what would Trump have then NOT been willing to do? And most importantly, what Trump would have done with a man he would’ve wanted the world to believe was an extra, illegitimate American president who had somehow plotted against Trump?
He would have had Joe Biden killed.
Listen to Countdown on YouTube or here or anywhere you get your podcasts

Florida is the only state in the nation that refused its share of $6.4 billion in free money for transportation-related projects to curb tailpipe emissions across the state. The Tampa Bay Times editorial board called it a “boneheaded” decision that “is jarring for its ignorance, hypocrisy and nakedly political motivations.”
Other factoids from the column:
Gov. Ron “Bonehead” DeSantis has said that climate change is “politicization of the weather.” Florida DOT Secretary Jared “Bonehead” Perdue complained the program was an example of government overreach that was “the continued politicization of our roadways.”
This is another example of DeSantis selling out Florida’s citizens and future for the sake of his presidential ambitions. Just think of the wonderful things L’il Puddin’ Fingers could do as president ….

Mark Frauenfelder posted an expose on Boing Boing that found that none of the merchandise for sale at the Trump Store in Trump Tower in New York was made in the United States of America (surprise!). But Frauenfelder explains it this way:
My guess is the merchandise was made in MAGA Land, but the tags were made in China. That’s probably because Crooked Joe Biden made a deal with China. Once Trump is running things, he will make sure everything is made in MAGA Land!
Follow the link to see the video.

The Hill: “Young voters overwhelmingly say they would support President Biden over former President Trump in a hypothetical head-to-head match-up if the 2024 presidential election were held today, according to a poll released Wednesday.
“In the Economist/YouGov poll — conducted via web-based interviews Dec. 16-18 — more than half (53 percent) of registered voters under 30 said they would support Biden, and less than a quarter (24 percent) said they would support Trump.
“Another 10 percent said they would support another candidate, 4 percent said they were not sure, and 9 percent said they wouldn’t vote.”

Axios.com:”Former President Trump, if elected, would build a Cabinet and White House staff based mainly on two imperatives: pre-vetted loyalty to him and a commitment to stretch legal and governance boundaries, sources who talk often with the leading GOP presidential candidate tell Axios.”
Trump and his prospective top officials don’t mince words about their plans:
- They want to target and jail critics, including government officials and journalists; deport undocumented immigrants or put them in detainment camps, and unleash the military to target drug cartels in Mexico, or possibly crack down on criminals or protesters at home.
- They want to scrap rules that limit their ability to purge government workers deemed disloyal.

New York Times: “When the Pew Research Center studied [whether voters become more conservative as they age] in 2013, for example, it found that the cohort of baby boomers who turned 18 under Richard Nixon was much more Democratic than the later cohort of boomers who turned 18 under Jimmy Carter.
“Overall, according to the General Social Survey, boomers, who came of age during the turmoil and transformation of the 1960s and 1970s, are still more liberal than not. Gen Xers, who came of age during the Reagan revolution, started off more conservative than their older counterparts and have become the most consistently conservative generation in the electorate.
“The case of Millennial voters is where things start to get interesting. As children of 9/11, the War on Terror and the 2008 financial crisis, Millennials — born between 1981 and 1996 — entered the electorate much more Democratic than their immediate predecessors. But while they have gotten a little more conservative in the years since, it has been at a much slower rate than you’d expect.
“What’s more, the gap in the number of Millennials who identify as Democrats rather than Republicans is huge, with more than twice as many self-identified Democrats as Republicans. The next cohort on the roster, Gen Z, is even more liberal and Democratic than Millennials, and shows no indication of becoming substantially more conservative as it ages.”