DeSantis Is Breaking Florida

Posted on by

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.

13 thoughts on “DeSantis Is Breaking Florida”

  1. Excellent find and a treasure trove of evidence of the inability of the crazy wing of the republican party to govern.  I thought Brownback and Kansas was enough evidence, but no.  When it gets to the point that real estate values and mortgages are on the line, as it was in Kansas, politics change fast.  Extended periods of hot and humid don't help either.  Reality doesn't care if you believe in it or not.  In the long run it has major persuasive powers.  

    6

  3. Truth – economic truth – is where business lives. Rhonda Santis is pursuing an agenda that his MAGA cult loves. The war with "woke." It sells well with his base and they're a united group that loves to see Ron punch down. These voters aren't going to feel the pinch of the stupid policies for a while. They're being gouged by electric companies and insurance companies but the heat is getting turned up gradually. I see nothing turning the base around.

    Tourism and agriculture are taking a hit. The employees in these industries aren't the MAGA crowd, generally. Young people primarily work in hospitality – Disney, hotels, convention centers, etc. Hispanics are the field workers in Florida. Not a lot of votes there for DeSantis to worry about. The corporations that built Disney and all the peripheral tourist-related infrastructure risked billions. They have a lot of clout if they will exert it, DeSantis went to war with Disney to intimidate the rest of the corporations who will take a hit. (The battle was a strategic error – Ron should not have tried to bully someoene who can kick his ass. It may inspire others to resist.)

    What might big business do against Fascist Ron and his minions in the state legislature? One: Put money into ad campaigns that expose the legislative stupidity. Two: Mock Ron without mercy. He's a clown with the message tattooed on his ass. "KICK ME!" (If Disney came up with a cartoon villain who looked and sounded like Ron, it would be iconic.) Three: Invigorate democrats to vote. Build a culture of winning against Ron in the courts and in elections. Democrats in Florida can reach parity but not with watered-down politics. Just campaign against fascism, the main export of Tallahassee. 

    5

  4. I watch CNN & MSNBC every day to keep-up with how Gov. "DUH!-Sadist" is creating a mini-recession for his own state..

    "The DUH-Sadist Campaign" is the best political sitcom in years.  Maybe ever!"

    What do you mean by, "it's real?"

    Like, really-real real?

    Yes, you're right!

    I agree!

    It'd be lot less embarrassing for that party if it was fiction.

    But it's not.

  5. Florida is broken. 16 years of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis administration's have made Florida the state where outlaws, scammers and nutjobs come thinking they have found the Garden of Eden.

    The average person is screwed blue and the corrupt business and government complex continues to find ways to turn the place into a Ferengi hellhole, seeking profit over people,hand in hand, as ruthlessly as possible.

    There seems to be no fixing it, now or in the decades to come, unless some near miraculous change in the culture of politics, and the mindset of the epistemological closure of the "Florida man". Vanishes.

    The only good news is that comedians will have a wealth of material to mock Florida for decades to come.

    P.S. the gubmint I refer to is the state machine. Some local govs are islands of reason and sanity, but are not powerful and united enough to influence the state machine .

    P.P.S. I guess that only means the screwing will be rough and angry.

     

    1

  6. No one to pick produce wipe rears in nursing homes make food clean up

    A state guard private militia

    No home insurance

    Rising water which is reported to be 98 degrees hot

    Circle of incompetents around the fascist head

    On and on

    And people threw money at this guy?

    2

  7. 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.

    Protip: next time you find yourself doing this, try looking at archive.org/web (there's even a handy browser plugin for navigating to an archived link) or archive.is. For example, https://archive.is/d1n0m has that item you linked.

     

    1

  8. With respect to the property insurance situation, there really isn't any answer except "tell the people who insist on having buildings on barrier islands that they're on their own."  Properties on the islands are uninsurable. 

    This isn't an answer anybody wants to hear, so the denial will presumably continue right up to the day a Cat 5 storm packing a 10' storm surge pulls up next to South Beach, comes to a stop about 5 miles offshore, and then starts heading North at about 5 mph for 14 hours or so.

    What will happen then is that the laughably under-resourced socialized-risk insurer-of-last-resort that writes policies on beachfront condos and restaurants will use its authority to levy surcharges on homeowners' policies across the State, to make those owners whole. Probably some of the homeowners will not be able to come up with the dosh. Probably that will be bad for the insurers who wrote those homeowners' policies. Farmers has decided that day is coming soon enough to quit while they're ahead.

    4

  9. Joyce Vance writes some alarming stuff about DeSantis’ “State Guard”

    …the historical parallels are far too obvious and dangerous. Last summer, DeSantis announced that he was reactivating Florida’s “State Guard,” which has been inactive for the last 75 years. He complained that Florida’s National Guard was understaffed and the state needed a force of volunteers to respond to hurricanes and other public emergencies.

    Fair enough. But as it turns out, volunteers who signed up for the State Guard found that the program was something other than the civilian disaster training they had anticipated. Reporting in the New York Times calls the training “heavily militarized.” Participants had to train in “marching drills and military-style training sessions on weapons and hand-to-hand combat.” Many people who complained were removed from the program or quit….

  10. Authoritarians are nearly always hideously bad at practical government and administration. Their primary project is how adept they are at distracting from this fact.

    The authoritarian project is to create a politics where it's safe for the worst mediocre obedient people to thrive and dominate others. You don't do that by correcting course, admitting mistakes, holding yourself or others to a standard of success or merit. Every failure is an opportunity to promulgate another absurd position unhinged from reality, and then watch which of your loyalists repeat and embroider it and gauge how enthusiastically they debase themselves doing so. Facts and evidence are totally useless in defense or support of anything, so it's like driving blind. Wreckage is inevitable.

    1

Comments are closed.