To reality, Florida’s government is not very tightly tethered.
To save us from cloud seeds and chem trails they have endeavored.
So if you think it’s too hot,
And you want to change it — better not!
In the Free State of Florida it’s now illegal to modify the weather.
From a Tampa Bay Times investigative report:
The $10 million that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration diverted to a state-created charity last year consisted of Medicaid dollars owed to state and federal taxpayers, contrary to what the governor and other officials have publicly asserted.
Three years ago, lawyers working with the state drew up a settlement agreement that said Florida’s largest Medicaid contractor, Centene, overbilled taxpayers $67,048,611 for medications, according to a copy of a draft agreement obtained by the Times/Herald.
That’s the exact amount DeSantis officials settled on with Centene last year. But instead of returning all $67 million to state and federal coffers, they sent $10 million of it to the Hope Florida Foundation, a charity overseen by first lady Casey DeSantis.
The money was then sent to two nonprofit organizations that aren’t required to report how they spend their funds. Those “dark money” groups later gave $8.5 million to a political committee overseen by DeSantis’ chief of staff in a series of transactions that some Republican lawmakers believe were illegal. How Medicaid is allocated, which pays for health care services for the poor, is highly regulated.
The document contradicts statements by DeSantis and state officials that the $10 million was a charitable contribution by Centene separate from what it owed to the state.
“Come to Tally for my extra special session!
“It’s a DeSantis Decree — comply without question!”
But lawmakers told Ron to take a dump,
They’d rather take orders direct from Trump.
Ron’s just a “flailing guy, losing relevance,” with indigestion.
Professional muckraker Dan Christenson of FloridaBulldog.org offers a look at how Ashley Moody — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ pick to replace Marco Rubio as U.S. senator — aggressively participated in the effort to overturn the 2020 election:
When Ashley Moody takes the oath and becomes Florida’s next U.S. Senator Congress will get yet another politician who played a role in whipping up President Donald Trump’s supporters to march on the Capitol “to stop the steal” on Jan. 6, 2021.
Florida Attorney General Moody – picked Thursday by Gov. Ron DeSantis to succeed Marco Rubio, Trump’s choice for Secretary of State – was a director of a conservative dark money group ironically called the Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF). On Jan. 5, the group sent out robocalls to Trump adherents imploring them to “march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal” and “fight to protect the integrity of our elections.”
The next day, after President Trump instructed rallygoers nearby to descend on the Capitol, violent insurrectionists broke into the building as the nation watched on television. Their assault threatened the peaceful transition of power to Joe Biden, caused the nation’s leaders to flee in panic and left four people dead. A Capitol Police officer who had fought with insurgents died the next day.
Earlier, Moody had tried unsuccessfully in court to overturn the 2020 presidential election. In early December, after the courts had rejected numerous challenges to the vote, Moody signed onto a brief filed by the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit asking the justices to delay Senate certification of presidential electors in four battleground states. Paxton’s lawsuit was bounced out of court three days later
Read the rest here.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis just can’t help himself: If there is a way to wield authoritarian power to advance his own political ends, he will do it and Florida law and Floridians be damned.
The Tampa Bay Times has reported on Puddin Fingers’ latest nefarious attempt to undermine Amendment 3, which would legalize recreational marijuana use. Herr Governor used the Florida Department of Transportation to issue a 30-second public service announcement paid with state funds asserting that “DUI crashes increase in states with legalized marijuana, putting everyone at risk.”
Except: The preliminary results of an Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study of injured drivers who visited emergency rooms in California, Colorado and Oregon showed that drivers who used marijuana alone were no more likely to be involved in crashes than drivers who hadn’t used the drug. That is consistent with a 2015 study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that found that a positive test for marijuana was not associated with increased risk of being involved in a police-reported crash.
But that’s not all. Not content to let the citizens of Florida make up their own minds about access to reproductive medical treatment, the failed presidential candidate and go-go boot–wearing governor also sent his private army of goons to the homes of people who had signed a petition to get Amendment 4 on the ballot to ostensibly corroborate that they actually signed the petition, which would overturn Florida’s Draconian six-week abortion law. This, after the deadline to challenge the petition had passed.That was a ham-handed and clearly illegal use of state resources to further MeatBall Ron’s personal agenda.
[…]
Over the past several years, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the stacked GOP Florida Legislature have been conducting an experiment with Floridians as their lab rats. The hypotheses and methodologies are straight out of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook.
The Tallahassee Democrat (an ironic name for a newspaper in the capital of a rapidly reddening state) has a pretty good explanation on the topic here:
Project 2025 proposes a dramatic overhaul of the federal government, replacing thousands of civil employees with political hires, expanding the power of the president, abolishing the Department of Education, enacting a flurry of tax cuts, banning pornography and halting sales of the abortion pill.
For Floridians, the document’s themes and policies may sound familiar. After all, Gov. Ron DeSantis advanced many of the same ideas, pushed along by hard-right think tanks in his first six years as governor.
“You guys in Florida are living in the future,” said Nick Beauchamp, a political scientist at Northeastern University. He has written on Project 2025 and its proposals, powered by Heritage and a host of other conservative, billionaire-funded think tanks.
See also WNMF’s piece, “Florida Is the Laboratory for Project 2025.”
Author Lauren Groff is opening a banned-book store in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband. The Lynx bookstore grand opening is set for April 28.
Groff, who made Time Magazine’s 2024 Time 100 list of the 100 most influential people in the world, is an award-winning author.
The store is liable to have no shortage of inventory, given that Florida leads the nation in book bans. In 2023 there were 33 attempts to ban or restrict books in the Sunshine State, with 2,672 titles removed from public school shelves between 2020 and 2023.
Ron DeSantis is nobody’s favorite political gnome,
And his toxic smile ain’t a symptom — it’s a syndrome.
So we Floridians rightly fear
What he’ll do in the next three years,
Because our bitter loser fascist governor is coming home.