DeSantis Losing Friends and Alienating People

Pensito Editors

The Guardian: “By almost every measure, the rightwinger has had another lackluster week on the campaign trail, with ‘clumsy’ missteps in New Hampshire, Texas, California and New York. Now, barely one month after his glitch-ridden launch on Twitter, DeSantis finds himself sinking in the polls, closer to the large field of optimists below him than the twice-indicted, twice-impeached former president who retains a stranglehold over the Republican party.

“‘The more voters learn about him, the less they can stomach the idea of him running the country,’ the online magazine Jezebel concluded.”

These 25 Corporations Donated $13.5 Million to Anti-Gay Politicians Since 2022

Pensito Editors

stryvemarketing.com

While major corporations continue to spend token amounts on marketing to the LGBTQ community, a Popular Information investigation reveals the same companies are spending millions backing anti-LGBTQ politicians. The investigation found that 25 corporations have donated $13.5 million to anti-LGBTQ politicians since January 2022.

Popular Information’s analysis includes:

1. Money donated by corporate PACs to the campaigns of members of Congress who received a zero rating on the latest Congressional scorecard produced by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation’s most prominent LGBTQ rights organization.

2. Money donated by corporate PACs to the leadership PACs of members of Congress who received a zero rating on the latest HRC Congressional scorecard.

3. Money donated by corporations and corporate PACs to state legislators who sponsored anti-LGBTQ legislation in Florida, North Carolina, North Dakota, Tennessee and Texas.

4. Money donated by corporations and corporate PACs to the governors who signed anti-LGBTQ legislation into law in those states.

5. Money donated by corporations to the primary 527 organizations that support anti-LGBTQ state legislators and governors: the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) and the Republican Governors Association (RGA).

Here’s the list:

All 25 corporations included in Popular Information’s analysis were highly rated by Human Rights Campaign’s 2022 Corporate Equality Index (CEI). Twenty of the 25 corporations received perfect scores (100) and none received a score below 85. Along with workplace policies, the Corporate Equality Index purports to measure corporations’ “public commitment to the LGBTQ community.” But HRC’s methodology excludes political donations.

Happy Pride Month!

DeSantis Demonstrates His People Skills in New Hampshire

Pensito Editors

To DeSantis supporters, we would direct the governor’s question to the AP reporter: “Are you blind?”

https://twitter.com/patriottakes/status/1664397623120347136?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1664397623120347136%7Ctwgr%5E54b679526b815f7bb8508487ebcbab72fe8bbdef%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fboingboing.net%2F2023%2F06%2F01%2Fdesantis-loses-temper-snaps-at-man-are-you-blind.html

What’s a Good Citizen, Charlie Brown?

Pensito Editors

In 1970, students in a fifth-grade class at Hawthorne School in Beverly Hills were assigned to write a letter to someone they admired, asking them, “What makes a good citizen?”

Joel Lipton, 10 years old at the time, wrote to Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz. This was Schulz’s reply:

Good grief! Schulz still hits the salient points in a single paragraph here, some 50 years later.

The Atlantic: Twitter Is a Far-Right Social Network

Pensito Editors

The Atlantic: “As a public figure, [Twitter owner Elon Musk] has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to the right’s culture war against progressivism—which he refers to as “the woke mind virus”—and his $44 billion Twitter purchase can easily be seen as an explicitly political act to advance this specific ideology. Now the site itself has unquestionably transformed under his leadership into an alternative social-media platform—one that offers a haven to far-right influencers and advances the interests, prejudices, and conspiracy theories of the right wing of American politics…

“Twitter is essentially following the playbook of platforms like Rumble, which used to be the go-tos for canceled and deplatformed right-wingers seeking a soft landing and the promise of revenue. Like Rumble, which pivoted from a struggling YouTube alternative into a full-fledged far-right platform in the late 2010s, Twitter appears to be dipping into the well of popular right-wing shock jocks as a way to revive the financially adrift website…

“If Musk weren’t too preoccupied lapping up approval from trolls, reactionaries, and Dogecoin enthusiasts—a few of the constituencies left on his site that still seem to adore him—the Parler statement should worry him. Right-wing alt-tech platforms may attract investors and a flood of indignant new users with persecution complexes, but they are, ultimately, bad businesses.”