Once again, Florida’s legislature leads a benighted nation,
By introducing a bill against “weather manipulation.”
Florida Republicans have gone off the rails
Over contrails, cloud seeds and chemtrails,
But this law will end the Democrats’ hurricane modification.
Now that Ron DeSantis is a “rage-hampered homunculus,”
You have to wonder, What’s his political calculus?
Will he wage his “war on woke”
On us poor Florida folk,
And spend the rest of his term just fuckin’ with us?
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.
The Free State of Florida is full of reactionaries
Who are adept at removing books from school libraries.
The worst books, we heard,
Are full of sexy words,
Which is why they’ve now banned dictionaries.
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.”
In May 2021 Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Senate Bill 90, which effectively cleared the voter rolls of Florida citizens who had requested mail-in ballots. Previously, Florida voters could file one request for mail-in ballots and would receive one for any and all elections.
No more.
Although a federal judge removed several of the most egregious provisions of the law, it nonetheless is still suppressing mail-in voting, according to the Florida Reporter:
Studies show that voters who are registered to vote by mail are more likely to cast a vote.The impact on voting by mail from this new law is already coming into sharp focus: last year, Miami-Dade County had 438,000 mail ballot voters, but as of July 1st of this year, a mere 92,000 voters were enrolled in vote by mail. In Hillsborough County, only 70,000 voters are signed up to vote by mail as of July 1st, down from 320,000 before the new law went into effect. In Broward County, it’s even more dramatic: a recent review confirmed just 35,000 vote by mail sign-ups, compared to 428,000 last year. In Orange County, only 23,000 voters have requested mail-in ballots for the upcoming cycle after 140,000 voters used them in 2021.
When Joe Biden tripped, Donald Trump made a big to-do.
When Trump slipped, tripped and gripped, it went viral, too!
But hey, you’re the president,
And it pays to have a sycophant
Like Li’l Marco, who will badly fake a trip to cover for you.
