If this video — from a FOX affiliate! — doesn’t explain why Florida Democrats and independents are willing to embrace the previous flip-floppin’ governor (Charlie Crist) to get rid of the current one, nothing will.
Warning: Rick Scott’s countenance will haunt your sleep.
The Miami Herald is reporting this story:
Monroe County Circuit Judge Luis Garcia overturned Florida’s 2008 constitutional gay-marriage ban on Thursday, and ordered that two Key West bartenders and other gay couples seeking to wed be allowed to marry.
The judge ordered the Monroe County Clerk’s Office to begin issuing marriage licenses to gay couples Tuesday morning.
“The court is aware that the majority of voters oppose same-sex marriage, but it is our country’s proud history to protect the rights of the individual, the rights of the unpopular and rights of the powerless, even at the cost of offending the majority,” Garcia wrote in his opinion, released about 1 p.m. Thursday.
The judge gave the clerk’s office several days to prepare “in consideration of… anticipated rise in activity.”
It was unclear early Thursday afternoon whether the state will appeal the ruling. The decision applies only to Monroe County, because it was filed in front of a state judge who has jurisdiction only in the county where he sits. A judge in Miami-Dade County has yet to rule in a similar case.
A recent pronouncement that Florida is the scariest of all 50 states leaves us conflicted. I mean, hey, we’re number one at something! But looking closely at the criteria used, you can’t help but find the competition rigged.
Realtors awarded this distinction, based on 15 things that incite fear, and placed Florida first in three categories: hurricanes, tornados, and shark attacks.
Here at the real estate search site Estately we know there are hundreds of worries when choosing where to buy a home, so to help house hunters make a more informed decision we’ve mapped out where Americans’ darkest fears are most readily found.
But do realtors know their natural disasters? If they did, they’d give Missouri the first place ranking for tornados. Joplin, anyone? Instead, Missouri was given first place in meth labs, an enterprise usually associated with Alaska, or since Breaking Bad, New Mexico.
Earthquakes didn’t make the list. If they had, Oklahoma, which thanks to fracking recently surpassed California in temblors, would excel. Mud slides, another California specialty, were also not even counted. The nearest California got to a category header was number two — for spiders. And number six for dentists.
The infographic above shows how House Republicans voted last July on H.R. 2667, a bill to require Pres. Obama to delay implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate.
Now, just one year later, these same House Republicans are suing Pres. Obama in order to lay the groundwork to impeach him on grounds that he delayed individual mandate.
This is, of course, hypocrisy piled on top of hypocrisy. The individual mandate, which forms the basis of the Affordable Care Act — and which Republicans now despise — was a Republican invention. It was developed at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank that has sponsored Rush Limbaugh’s show, and first implemented by the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, in 2006 when he was governor of Massachusetts.
Here is a repost of Romney himself describing how he worked with Heritage to come up with the plan that is the basis for Obamacare:
Pundits say that Trump’s $5,000 midterm bribe was an overreach,
And they agree that if lies were a crime, he’d be impeached.
Despite all the dividend promises he’s made,
The fact is, not one has ever been paid,
So even before the midterms, he already owes us $8,000* each.
*$5000 stimulus checks via “DOGE dividend”; $2000 stimulus checks via a “tariff dividend”; $1000-plus checks via “savings” from expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies
