Friday, March 31, 2023

"Welcome to the presidential suite." (New Yorker Cartoon)

Good one!  


A jailer opens a cell door for Donald Trump who is dressed in a prison jumpsuit.
“Welcome to the Presidential suite!”
Cartoon by Brooke Bourgeois

Daily Cartoon: Friday, March 31st

LAMP meetings will be in public, commencing in June.

Thanks to County Commissioners and Administration for heeding my call to move Land Acquisition Program (LAMP) meetings to County Auditorium commencing in June, where they can be televised live and archived on GTV.  Saw County ad in Today's St. Augustine Record.

It takes a village to stop the pillaging, e.g, by large corporate organizations that St. Johns County Commissioner Emeritus Ben Rich, Sr. called "worse than any carpetbagger."

LAMP meetings will no longer be in the so-called "Growth Management Building," where Division Director MICHAEL ROBERSON creates a hostile working environment for citizens and employees alike. Nasty man, unqualified, voted in by complacent controlled County Commissioners as Director without adequate notice, vetting or background investigation in January 2022. 

Another day, another victory, 

Donald Trump trashes Ron DeSantis’ ‘sellout’ to insurance industry (Florida Politics)

Like a stopped clock, DONALD JOHN TRUMP is right twice a day. He is right on this occasion. From Florida Politics: 


Donald Trump trashes Ron DeSantis’ ‘sellout’ to insurance industry  


by A.G. Gancarski
March 30, 2023
'The worst insurance scam in the entire country with the highest rates in the entire country.'

Donald Trump is doubling down on his attacks of Ron DeSantis‘ “bailout” of insurance companies.

In a new video, the former President again contended the Florida Governor favors privileged “globalist” insurance companies over the people of the Sunshine State.

“DeSanctimonious is delivering the biggest insurance company bailout in global history. This is a gift to insurance companies and a disaster for the people of Florida,” Trump said.

“He’s also crushed Florida homeowners whose houses were destroyed in the hurricane. They have been absolutely decimated. They’re getting pennies on the dollar.”

Trump then offered a denunciation of Florida’s Insurance Commissioner for doing “absolutely nothing.”


“While Florida’s lives are ruined, the hurricane was a disaster. The hurricane was actually handled very poorly and the insurance companies are being made whole. The people of Florida aren’t,” Trump said, decrying the “total sellout to the insurance companies.”

“The worst insurance scam in the entire country with the highest rates in the entire country. That’s Florida.”

This argument may feel familiar. Two weeks ago on Truth Social, the former President flogged the Florida Governor.

“He’s also crushed Florida homeowners whose houses were destroyed in the Hurricane — They’re getting pennies on the dollar. His Insurance Commissioner does NOTHING, while Florida’s lives are ruined. This is the worst Insurance Scam in the entire Country,” Trump contended.

Insurance Commissioner Michael Yaworsky was selected as a permanent replacement this month. DeSantis and members of the Cabinet — acting as the Financial Services Commission — unanimously elected Yaworsky to head the Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR). He had previously served in an interim role.


The insurance “BAILOUT” bashed by Trump refers presumably to two recent Special Session bills. SB 2A, passed in December, provided $1 billion from the state’s general revenue fund to bolster the reinsurance market, in an attempt to stop last year’s attrition of available providers. This followed up on a $2 billion allocation from a different Special Session in May for essentially the same purpose.

___

Gray Rohrer and Christine Jordan Sexton of Florida Politics contributed to this report.


A.G. Gancarski

A.G. Gancarski has written for FloridaPolitics.com since 2014. He is based in Northeast Florida. He can be reached at AG@FloridaPolitics.com or on Twitter: @AGGancarski



DeSantis, possible Trump rival, says he won’t assist in extradition. (WaPo)

Our Constitution gives Governor DeSANTIS no power to interfere with extradition.  Pompous popinjay has a Harvard Law degree but knows no more law than a hog.   The "controlling legal authority," to use Al Gore's phrase, is our Constitution, a document with which DeSANTIS shows abysmal knowledge, based upon his short and undistinguished career in D.C. and Tallahassee.

DeSANTIS's latest ukase makes him sound dangerously close to those insurrectionist rioters who attacked our Capitol on January 6, 2021. 

What do you reckon?


From The Washington Post:


DeSantis, possible Trump rival, says he won’t assist in extradition

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) speaks Thursday in Smyrna, Ga. (Elijah Nouvelage/AFP/Getty Images)
Listen
4 min
Add to your saved stories

Gov. Ron DeSantis, a possible rival to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, said on Twitter that Florida will not work with New York on any extradition requests in case one is necessary for the newly indicted former president.

“Florida will not assist in an extradition request given the questionable circumstances at issue” with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his “political agenda,” DeSantis said.

Legal experts say DeSantis could resist a move to extradite Trump but not stop it — and the Florida governor would not play a role if the former president surrenders.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Bragg said the Manhattan district attorney’s office has contacted Trump’s attorney “to coordinate his surrender to the Manhattan D.A.’s Office for arraignment on a Supreme Court indictment.” It is not clear yet whether Trump will surrender voluntarily.

Trump indicted by N.Y. grand jury, first ex-president charged with crime

In a tweet, DeSantis accused Bragg of weaponizing the legal system “to advance a political agenda” that he said “turns the rule of law on its head.”

“It is un-American,” the governor said.

DeSantis would need to build a solid legal case to decline an extradition request. According to Article IV, Section 2, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution, no state has the right to decline an extradition request from another state.

“A person charged in any state with treason, felony, or other crime, who shall flee from justice, and be found in another state, shall on demand of executive authority of the state from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the state having jurisdiction of the crime,” the Constitution reads.

Federal law also outlines that states are required to comply with other states’ extradition requests. 

Florida statute says that if the governor receives an extradition request from officials in another state and “decides that the demand should be complied with,” they sign an arrest warrant. Michael Bachner, a former prosecutor in Manhattan, said in an interview Thursday that “DeSantis would be very hard pressed legally to refuse” an extradition request for Trump, given that DeSantis is supposed to play only an administrative role.

And Bachner noted that Florida allows law enforcement or other individuals to arrest someone they know is subject to a criminal charge — meaning the governor does not have to be involved.

Bachner, who now works as a criminal defense attorney, was also skeptical that an extradition would be necessary — Trump has not signaled he will resist arrest — and said it is “politically expedient” for DeSantis to say he won’t assist with one.

The Florida governor is expected to announce a bid for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination soon, a decision that would put him in direct competition with Trump. That, however, has not stopped DeSantis from criticizing and attempting to discredit investigations into Trump.

DeSantis said this month that he wouldn’t be “involved” in the case, accusing Bragg of political motivations but also taking an apparent jabat Trump by emphasizing the lurid nature of the accusations against him.

“Look, I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair — I just, I can’t speak to that,” DeSantis said when asked about a possible indictment at a news conference.

That enraged Trump and his allies, who have been attacking DeSantis for months in the expectation that he will challenge Trump for the GOP nomination. DeSantis has largely ignored the swipes, opting to draw subtler contrasts with Trump, so his pointed comments about “hush money to a porn star” stuck out.

The relentless insults and Trump’s growing lead over DeSantis in national 2024 polling have led some close allies of the Florida governor to recalibrate their expectations and prepare for a tougher fight than they once anticipated.

In his tweet Thursday, DeSantis also falsely accused Bragg of “consistently [bending] the law to downgrade felonies and to excuse criminal misconduct” and of being funded by left-wing philanthropist George Soros. Soros is a frequent target of baseless right-wingaccusations rooted in antisemitism.

Bragg, DeSantis claimed, “is stretching the law to target a political opponent.”

DeSantis was speaking at a book tour event in Smyrna, Ga., when reports of Trump’s indictment broke. The governor did not address the news then, according to a person present.

Isaac Arnsdorf contributed to this report.

Mariana Alfaro is a reporter for The Washington Post's breaking political news team. The El Salvador native joined The Post in 2019 as a researcher for the Daily 202, our flagship politics newsletter. Before that, Mariana interned at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Insider, and The Texas Tribune.  Twitter
Hannah Knowles is a national politics reporter covering campaigns at The Washington Post. She previously reported for The Post's general assignment desk. Twitter


I’m a Tampa Bay teacher, not a martyr, in Gov. DeSantis’ culture wars | Column (Chris Fulton, Tampa Bay Times)

 My hat is off to Tarpon Springs schoolteacher Chris Fulton for this column skewering the screeds that serve as the emetic record of the misdeeds of our "local Mussolini," in the words of Presidential historian Michael Beschloss, who uses the term "fascist" to describe Flori-DUH Governor, RONALD DION DeSNTIS)

OPINION
|
Guest Column
I’m a Tampa Bay teacher, not a martyr, in Gov. DeSantis’ culture wars | Column
The essential life lesson that racism and bigotry are morally wrong needs to be served up hot with a warm side of historical context. Selective omission is itself a form of indoctrination.
Enlightening students as to both sides of any topic is part and parcel of a teacher’s job description; doing so nurtures empathy and allows learners to make informed decisions on where they stand. And those who argue against academic freedom and teacher autonomy are de facto advocates of authoritarianism.
Enlightening students as to both sides of any topic is part and parcel of a teacher’s job description; doing so nurtures empathy and allows learners to make informed decisions on where they stand. And those who argue against academic freedom and teacher autonomy are de facto advocates of authoritarianism. [ JIM COLLINS | 

I’ve been Mirandized. Anything I say can and will be used against me in a court of law. And I say: Bring it on! Go ahead and make a martyr out of me because my classroom is my turf, and I’ll continue to teach however I damn well please within the blurry parameters of my content area.

Chris Fulton
Chris Fulton [ Provided ]
Gov. Ron DeSantis’ declaration that Florida is the freest state in America leaves out the part about that freedom being a right-turn only, one-way street. As such, things are looking down for foot soldiers doing battle in the state’s educational trenches. Now taboo is any LGBTQ+ discourse, the assumption being that not saying “gay” will make it go away. Then there’s the governor’s union-busting Teacher’s Bill of Rights providing “civil remedies for teachers who are ... punished by their employers for standing up for what is right,” which sounds splendid but raises the basic question: What qualifies as “right”? And who gets to decide? Is it to be DeSantis and his rubber-stamp Legislature?The Virginian-Pilot ]The governor champions “teaching accurate American history without an ideological agenda.” To that end, he’s established a 50-hour Civics Seal of Excellence course for teachers, the underpinnings of which fly in the face of the constitutional separation of church and state. Sharp-eyed educators who have signed on for the $3,000 dangled carrot-upon-completion say the course has a distinctly Christian fundamentalist, conservative bias. No shocker there since the curriculum was developed in coordination with Hillsdale College, a private Christian liberal arts school in Michigan, and the Bill of Rights Institute, founded by conservative billionaire icon Charles Koch. So much for taking ideology out of the mix.

Are parents to be the arbiters of what is right? Should one parent, or a relatively small group of parents, have the power to dictate whether an acclaimed novel is taught? Parents who believe their precious child isn’t being exposed to the uncensored actualities of modern society via the internet and other forms of media are delusional. Cloistering kids is detrimental if our mutual goal is to produce capable critical thinkers.

Enlightening students as to both sides of any topic is part and parcel of a teacher’s job description; doing so nurtures empathy and allows learners to make informed decisions on where they stand. And those who argue against academic freedom and teacher autonomy are de facto advocates of authoritarianism.

Don’t students have the right to draw conclusions about our imperfect world without the disingenuous whitewashing of America’s sometimes dark, inexcusable history? The essential life lesson that racism and bigotry are morally wrong needs to be served up hot with a warm side of historical context. Selective omission is itself a form of indoctrination and excluding shameful facts as a way of sheltering learners from distasteful truths is as harmful to them as it is to society.When I teach “Huck Finn” — Mark Twain’s slyly disguised tirade against racism — I do so with a no-holds-barred approach. The fear-mongering tactic of politicizing critical race theory as causing white kids to feel guilty about both their skin color and the abhorrent mistreatment of African Americans and Native Americans by ancestors generations removed doesn’t factor into my educational equation. The premise is patently stupid.

Just as dumb are efforts to legislate sexuality in all its forms. Because the ignorant endeavors of repressed lawmakers will never supplant the fundamental, unavoidable certainties of human nature.

In Ray Bradbury’s prescient novel “Fahrenheit 451,” books are illegal and burned because the populace has lost interest in reading them in favor of mindless interactive videos and other forms of vacuous entertainment. People willfully swallow alternative facts from their government because they can’t be bothered to work their way to discerning objective realities.

With that in mind, and in view of my imminent arrest by the (lack of intelligent) Thought Police, I’d like to preemptively assert my right to place one phone call:

“Hello? May I please speak with the Founding Fathers?”

Chris Fulton teaches Cambridge Literature/General Paper classes at Tarpon Springs High School. He has been in the classroom for more than 25 years.

U