Tag Archives: Ron DeSantis

And Who Will Be the Biggest Abortion Hustler of Them All?

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The Paralympics in Tokyo have just ended. But here in the States the race among the sociopathic and ethically-challenged has only just begun. The starting gun for this particular level of competition was of course fired in Texas, where gun totin’ and medieval thinkin’ pretty much comes as a right of birth.

To re-cap, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, his approval rating under water by 9% (50-49), facing a possible re-election threat from Beto O’Rourke and desperate to make Texans forget about last winter’s fatal natural gas FUBAR, signed into law the country’s most restrictive anti-abortion law … while promising to, you know, get all the rapists off the streets. (Never mind the nuance about how a rapist has to first rape someone before they can be … oh, never mind.)

Gov. Abbott signs 'heartbeat bill' into law, fight in court expected | KEYE
A Texas cross-section

In (very) short order, ex-beauty queen Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, (a.k.a. The Alabama of the Midwest) , a bona fide Sarah Palin 3.0 in the GOP’s galaxy of presidential contenders, ordered her staff to find some way to outdo Abbott and Texas and make her and her state the most restricting-est in the whole big red country. (She didn’t quite pull off Abbott’s East German Stasi shtick of turning in Uber drivers for a $10,000 bounty. But give her time.)

Cat Scratch Fever: Ted Nugent tests positive for COVID days after flight with Gov. Kristi Noem | KELOLAND.com
Noem with Ted Nugent …

With that bit of theater out of the way, all eyes have turned to Florida’s Ron DeSantis, still over-seeing the worst-ever surge of COVID deaths and still actively crushing his state’s health care system with Alex Jones-like factlessness. Clearly, if he wants a shot at the 2024 nomination, DeSantis not only has to fight off vaccine mandates, masks and basic science, but now is going to have top Abbott and Noem in abortion restriction. (Not a big concern with his geriatric base in The Villages, but tougher with any woman under 50.)

Petition · Recall and remove Florida governor Ron DeSantis. · Change.org
Master … puppet

Up home here in Minnesota we can soon expect any and all of the Republicans running to beat Gov. Tim Walz to do the triple-down on Texas and South Dakota. (Make that quintuple down if sex-trafficker-huggin’ Jennifer Carnahan makes good on her threat to get in the primary.) But who among us doubts former GOP Senate Majority Leader, Paul Gazelka, a guy I swear Margaret Atwood had to have met in person before she wrote “The Handmaid’s Tale”, isn’t right this minute conjuring up some kind of ultra-pious, quasi-religious, Torquemada-style restriction on the freedom of women in his “flock”? You know it’s coming.

Sen. Paul Gazelka on Awakening God's People in the Workplace & More | Truth and Liberty Coalition Livecast

And while we’re at it, do note that over east, in Wisconsin, (a.k.a. The Florida of the Midwest), Scott Walker’s #2, former TV anchor-turned-lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefisch has announced her candidacy, with early indications that she’ll be incumbent Tony Evers’ toughest competition. (Her “platform” includes this: “Vigorously enforce antitrust laws against monopolistic Big Tech,” protect free speech on campuses and in high schools, stop church closures during pandemics, ban most state gun control laws, an anti-abortion “Born-Alive Infant Protection Act” and “Appoint originalist judges in the mold of Justices Thomas and Barrett.”)

So yeah, the race to full Gilead/”The Divine Republic” is on.

The Handmaid's Tale' Turned a DC on the Verge of Shutdown into Gilead | IndieWire

This despite recent polling that shows only 13% want the kind of laws Texas has put in place, (31% of Republicans), and that two-thirds of educated workers are saying they would not live in Texas or any other state with similar laws.

The Biden Justice Department today sued Texas to stop the law Abbott signed in to law. But until it goes back to the Supreme Court and Amy Coney Barrett (or as I think of her, Aunt Lydia), the fight will just be a huge money-maker for Abbott, Noem and every other moralistic conservative poseur ambitious for a cushy Big Gummint job.

Aunt Lydia Quotes - MagicalQuote

What’s left to wonder, post-Texas, really is the “dog catches car” scenario many pundits have observed. Cynics like myself have long regarded the Republican vow to over-turn Roe v. Wade as just another cheesy, transparent hustle of credulous evangelicals. It’s a “fight” Republican con men (and women) never really want to win because as long abortion abolition remains a goal — a moral goal, y’know — its a golden goose. A fat bird consistently crapping out checks from the religiously enfeebled. Deliver the overturning of Roe v. Wade and all that easy chump money dries up.

But for now through primary season next year the race for maximum abortion restriction is on. I predict one of these cheap abortion hustlers will be pitching the new and improved “trans vaginal ultra sound” before the year is out.

We’ve Reached That Point. Give the Fools the Culture War They Always Want.

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(Trigger warning for more delicate readers. The following screed may include occasional outbursts of profanity.)

I wish I did, but I don’t own any Berkshire Hathaway stock. And while I tend to take the nostrums and bromides of billionaires with a 50 lb. block of salt, I find I pay more attention when Warren Buffett is quoted. Like recently, when he said, ” … there will be another pandemic. We know that there is a nuclear, chemical, biological and now cyber threat. Each of them has dire possibilities…It doesn’t seem like it’s something that society is fully prepared to deal with”.

His concerns didn’t stop at insufficient financial or technological wherewithall. That exists. What doesn’t exist in sufficient quantity is the matter of getting conservative public officials, “thought leaders” and the general public to take such things as seriously as, well, football play-offs, beach raves and motorcycle rallies.

Buffett, who credits his success as an investor to thousands of hours of reading of a wide spectrum of information, has every reason to be pessimistic about the U.S. and the world coping with a truly ravenous pandemic — a medieval-style disease with faster and more lethal rates of transmission than COVID-19. No one who has done any reading (or something other than Facebook posts) can look at this latest fourth surge of COVID-19 and fail to accept that this all but entirely due to an epidemic of stupidity … in one of the most technologically advanced societies on the planet.

I’m sure Buffett would agree that this literally death-dealing imbecility, doesn’t stop with COVID. The same bone-numbing ignorance applies to two other existential thrwats, namely, climate change and authoritarian violence against democracy.

Here in Minnesota we’re well into our second month of yellow, LA-in-the-Seventies-style, crud-filled skies, with daily records being set for the worst air quality … ever. You’d be just as healthy sucking down a pack of Camel straights as spending a day breathing in the air from wildfires. Fires stemming from drought that is a direct consequence of human-caused climate change. A crisis thoroughly researched and scientifically validated but yet still one that essentially the same 25-40% of Americans prefer to see as “liberal fear-mongering”, if not a plot by Silicon Valley elites and radical socialists to somehow deprive them of their freedoms.

That same percentage — and I’m confident a Venn diagram of the COVID “hesitant”, climate deniers and Trump worshippers would have near perfect overlap — sees no reason to investigate the January 6 Capitol riot, convinced by the echoes of their cult that it was something other than what everyone saw and was recorded for eternity.

So if you’re keeping score at home, that’s (1.) A pandemic that has already killed 640,000 and is revving back up again to re-cripple the economy, (2.) Climate change that is now routinely turning summers into bone-dry, smoky, crop-killing hellscapes, like something out of “Blade Runner: 2049” and (3.) A complete indifference to violent insurrection inspired by failed government leaders.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the connective tissue to all this is reckless, wretched stupidity, inspired and validated by a startling minority of players for their self-interest, be that commercial, ego or both.

COVID is resurging, spawned by the Trump base and the chronically alienated. Climate mayhem will only get worse, thanks to the ignorance and indifference of conservative leaders. (Do NOT read “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells if you want to believe otherwise. Stick with whatever Laura Ingraham is selling this week.) And then there’s violent insurrection, (which would aggravate both of those two). Violence egged on by elected Republican officials will happen again and likely repeat itself in worse ways in the absence of investigation and public punishment.

There isn’t just one grand solution to the “unpreparedness”. But permit me to suggest that we’ve reached a tipping point where coddling, and “reaching out” to those who don’t/won’t understand and pretending that global pandemics, global climate disaster and violent (not to mention racist) attempts to overthrow the American government are no more serious threats to our existence than quarrels over tax policy and school prayer.

What’s to be done? In the COVID context: Mandates. French style.

No vaccine? No walking into a bar. No getting on public transportation. No returning to work. Your kids stay home from school. Let the deniers rage. Let Ron DeSantis and Josh Hawley fund-raise off their voters’ dumb-as-a-stump petulance. Protestors in France made headlines, but 76% of the population agreed with the government’s vaccine mandate. Only fools want to prolong this idiocy.

Obviously the Biden administration would benefit from some back-up from private industry, which it is getting in a halting way. But we’d be snuffing out this fourth wave a lot faster if mega-coporations like Delta Airlines for example, denied service to the unvaccinated. (Might cut down on some of their “disruptive customers” problems, too.) Likewise, the Minnesota State Fair. No vaccination? No entrance.

Fair-minded Christian coddling of the stupid, the perpetually reckless (i.e. sociopathic) and the “historically suspicious” has become lethal enabling. So … remove their choice to be stupid and selfish. Give them the goddam culture war they always seem to want.

If that’s the same as saying, “Fuck them and the fucking horses of galloping stupidity they rode in on,” well, there you have it. Nothing else is working.

Wanted: Conservative Intellectuals With Even a Half-Ounce of Conscience

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With a fourth COVID surge well under way, with Ozark/red state hospitals filling to the rafters with the denying and the dying, I recalled a sad little scene from up in Duluth last week.

Within the modern, reality-averse conservative bubble, there’s a long-standing, self-proclaimed “think tank” called The Center of the American Experiment”. Former Star Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten is a prominent member of this cadre of, um, deep thinking patriots. Very much like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s cynical and hapless “America First” tour, the Center was having a hard time finding any venue in Duluth that would host their “Raise Our Standards” carnival. That being a kind of faux intellectual barnstorming exercise designed to alert low information parents to the dangers of … wait for it … “wokeness” and Critical Race Theory.

Four Duluth businesses denied The Center’s request to rent space, before they settled on a tiny community center out on Park Point. Naturally, instead of acknowledging that the businesses had as much interest in associating with them as they would a band of travelling Holocaust deniers, The Center touted itself as the victim … “victim, I say!” … of freedom and liberty-hating left-wingers.

Eventually the group, led by attorney John Hinderaker, best known for his role in the conservative “Powerline” blog, made it’s case in front of barely 30 people, several of whom it turned out were Duluth area lefties curious to see what a quack show looks like up close.

I’ve followed The Center from a distance for years, once wrote a profile of Ms. Kersten and attended a luncheon they put on way … way … back to refute liberal, Chicken Little concerns about climate change. At every step along the way my perspective on The Center is as a crew of oddly embittered, borderline sociopathic contrarians. A clutch of people intelligent enough to form paragraphs, disciplined enough to check their punctuation, but so intellectually dishonest they refuse to concede that their whole game is simply the business of being against whatever peer-reviewed intelligentsia and liberals are for.

The aforementioned climate change bash was naked in its reaction to Al Gore … Al friggin’ Gore! … telling us carbon dioxide was bad for our health. What an alarmist! What a woke nanny stater!

Since then and up to now, The Center and Powerline have kept up a contrarian, reactionary drum beat against … well, let’s see … electric cars, COVID lockdowns, tax advantages for wind and solar power, police reform, anything Joe Biden says, equitable taxation of large businesses and especially “wokeness”, seemingly the greatest liberal sin of all.

In the grand scheme of things The Center of the American Experiment barely registers on the Richter scale of conservative cynicism. I bring it up only to offer an example of the kind of people who come to mind anytime someone asks, “Do these people actually believe this stuff, or is it all just another grift?”

With COVID surging among the unvaccinated, largely due to the self-interested cynicism of similar conservative “intellectuals” — people like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, a handful of bow-tied opinion writers, several hundred talk radio hosts, YouTubers and podcasters — their influence is proving fatal, again. This is not to forget Republican presidential “contenders” like Florida’s Ron DeSantis — lately hawking anti-Fauci t-shirts, as his state leads the fourth wave — and South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, the beauty queen-turned-politician most responsible for, at a time last fall, one of COVID’s worst death-rates-per-capita … in the world.

The Vaccine-Hesitant Coach Who Died as Ron DeSantis Hawked 'Don't Fauci My Florida' Merch

Whether it be DeSantis, FoxNews hosts, Facebook influencers or the poor little Center of the American Experiment, it is impossible to watch this crowd of allegedly educated adults shovel out misinformation to the chronically aggrieved and not see the ratings, revenue, underwriting and political viability motivating them. Put most simply, it’s all about them getting theirs.

Trump Swears He Didn't Ask to Be on Mount Rushmore by Asking to Be on Mount Rushmore | Vanity Fair

You hear people say all the time that what this country needs are two — not just one — reality-embracing, fact-based political parties. And this is true. But watching the explosive sewer-flow of cynicism coming from modern conservatism’s so-called best and brightest I’d add that we also need two — not just one — ideological hierarchy that respects ethics, science and logic.