Daily Archives: July 15, 2023

DeSantis Is Breaking Florida

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One, I wish the Kennedy family would do something about Robert Junior.

Calling him “nuttier than a peanut farm” doesn’t begin to cover it. In the video he’s saying that Covid 19 was “ethnically targeted” to especially attack White and Black people, while Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese were “most immune.” He’s now denying these comments were anti-Semitic. He’s also said that Trump is the best debator since Lincoln. Seriously, if this guy didn’t have old family connections and money behind him he’d be wandering about in a bathrobe arguing with mailboxes.

But what I really want to talk about is Florida. There’s an amazing article by Fred Grimm in the South Florida Sun Sentinel headlined MAGA propaganda collides with Florida reality. It’s a bit tricky to read if you aren’t a subscriber (and I’m not), but if the pop ups are too persistent in one browser, try another. I managed to copy and paste the thing into Word so I could read it.

Imagine the cognitive dissonance in mocking climate change as so much liberal hype even as the heat index in South Florida exceeds 100 degrees for the 33rd straight day. And counting.

Imagine hewing to the official state pretense that Florida’s property insurance crisis isn’t a crisis in the same week that Farmers Insurance Group notified the state that it was skedaddling. [Note: AAA has since announced it’s leaving Florida too.]

Imagine acting as if the spate of racist, homophobic, sexist laws spat out by the Florida Legislature embodies sound policy rather than the cynical contrivances of the governor’s presidential campaign. Never mind that Florida cities are losing convention business due to the state’s “unfriendly political environment.”

Imaging trying to convince farmers and builders that Florida’s draconian anti-immigrant legislation hasn’t chased away much needed workers, even as farmers and builders insist otherwise.

Imagine ignoring the damage caused by agricultural runoff, leaky septic tanks and other pollutants in a week when 440-square miles of toxic green algae was smothering Lake Okeechobee.

DeSantis’s response to climate change is to pretend it isn’t happening.

Last month, Gov. Ron DeSantis demonstrated his contempt for climate change mitigation by vetoing a budget item that would have qualified Florida for a $346 million federal grant to improve energy efficiency. DeSantis told Fox News that he “rejects the politicization of the weather.”

And the insurance crisis? The guy who oversees insurance regulation in Florida is named Jimmy Patronis.

“The more we learn about Farmers Insurance the more it’s clear its leadership doesn’t know what they’re doing. While they’re bad at helping people, they’re good at virtue signaling,” Patronis claimed Tuesday.

Patronis didn’t say whether three other major insurers who’ve abandoned Florida, or the 15 companies that have stopped writing new policies, or the seven firms that have gone bankrupt covering disaster losses were similarly undone by liberal wokeness. He accused Farmers of “playing politics” and said the company was “well on its way to becoming the Bud Light of insurance,” referencing the MAGA hate frenzy ignited last month by the appearance of a transgender woman in a Bud Light ad.

Florida property owners are in big trouble, and this guy does stand up comedy. The insurance crisis isn’t going to go away. The hurricanes are not going to go away.

Grimm discusses the canceled conventions along with the canceled indurance policies. The looming worker shortages. The increasing rate of gun deaths. These are problems being caused by Florida government policies. Do they actually ever solve a problem?

The political press is writing that DeSantis is losing the nomination campaign because he has no personality. How about because he can’t govern his way out of a wet paper bag?

“Florida hasn’t reached that crucial breakpoint where truth matters more than ideology,” Grimm writes. I wonder if there is such a place.