Tag: DeSantis is a bad governor
Florida Is Mad Scientist DeSantis’ Project 2025 Laboratory
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 Opens Banned-Book Store in Land of Banned Books
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.
Tyrant of Tallahassee Returns
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.
DeSantistan: ‘A Refuge of Freedom and Sanity’
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.”
DeSantis & Crew Kick 900K Dems and NPAs Off Fla’s Voter Rolls
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.
DeSantis Replaces State Attorney with Federalist Society Judge
To diffuse claims of racism for groundlessly removing Monique Worrell, a Black state attorney who was elected by a two-to-one margin, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis replaced her with a Black judge who is a member of the Federalist Society. But, according to the Orlando Sentinel, Andrew Bain is also not a very good judge:
In his time overseeing criminal cases in county court, Bain received low marks in a judicial qualifications poll by the Central Florida Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys, ranking last among Orange County criminal judges, with respondents describing him as “state-leaning” or prosecution-biased.
At a press conference announcing his appointment, Bain offered a word-salad nonexplanation of why he’s a member of the Federalist Society, a powerful group that is uncannily influential in getting presidents and governors to name conservatives to top judicial posts, including the Supreme Court:
“I am a member simply for this reason: My grandmother was a sharecropper, so when she came time to harvest her harvest in her family and the landowner shorted her, she had no legal recourse because the judges made the laws,” he said. “And that’s purely unfair. And that stuff’s been going on forever.”
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