Month: June 2023

Republicans are begging migrants not to leave the state:

Florida Republicans on Monday met with migrants to urge them not to leave the state in the wake of a new anti-immigration law that is sparking boycotts of the state.

An NPR analysis determined that the law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) “limits social services for undocumented immigrants, allocates millions more tax dollars to expand DeSantis’ migrant relocation program, invalidates driver’s licenses issued to undocumented people by other states, and requires hospitals that get Medicaid dollars to ask for a patient’s immigration status.”

On Monday, state Reps. Alina Garcia (R) and Rick Roth (R) spoke at an event advising migrants of the impacts of SB1718.

There you have it. The same scumbag politicians who voted for this anti-immigrant crap admit they did so to scare people from coming to Florida while also begging immigrants in a church to talk to their community so they don’t leave and keep working here. It’s all so disgusting.

— Thomas Kennedy (@tomaskenn) June 5, 2023

Joy Reid wrote about what’s happening a couple of weeks ago:

Last week, Desantis signed a vile and inhumane immigration bill imposing penalties and restrictions on undocumented immigrants in Florida that, among other things, bans local governments from issuing identification cards for people who can’t prove citizenship.

It criminalizes not just migrants — but any Florida resident who associates with them. This includes providing undocumented immigrants with work or transportation, which is why Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski said it would criminalize “empathy.”

The penalties — which haven’t even taken effect yet — will certainly have deadly consequences. This is what an undocumented immigrant told Telemundo’s Lourdes Hurtado, translated into English:

“They say they are going to check the hospitals. If you don’t have papers then it is scary to take care of yourself, and I am very sick right now and I need surgery … My children tell me to go back to Mexico … Because they are afraid.” 

The cruelty — isn’t that the point?

But that’s not all. The immigration legislation is also a dumb economic move, leaving a void in the labor this country runs on. 

A similar bill more than a decade ago didn’t go so well in Alabama, where a crackdown on immigration led to produce rotting in the fields. Because picking blueberries, tomatoes and squash largely requires hand labor — by the migrants these Republicans loathe. 

Republicans don’t care about these people and their lives. What they do care about is money.

So it should surprise no one that this issue has taken over social media. We’re seeing work sites apparently abandoned. And Latino truck drivers calling for a boycott, refusing to take shipments into Florida in response to the new law. 

Luís Melean, a construction worker in Florida, showed Telemundo the huge void left by construction workers who left when they heard the bill was approved. Some even left their tools behind as they abandoned the Sunshine State.

This is what Luís said about why the workers fled, translated into English: “They are saying, ‘To be detained out there and then my children are left alone, I’d rather leave before the first of July.’ It’s next month when it is going to get really tough because there won’t be qualified workers.”

But we get it: Republicans don’t care about these people and their lives. What they do care about is money.

Without migrants, the state will lose millions in federal, state and local taxes — because yes, many undocumented migrants pay taxes (though they may not reap the benefits). It will cause staffing crises for agriculture — one of the state’s most vital industries, leaving a gap in the tough, back-breaking labor no one else wants to do. 

This should be interesting:

The Florida Policy Institute, a nonprofit policy research group, estimates that without undocumented workers, the state’s most labor-intensive industries would “lose 10 percent of their workforce and the wages they contribute along with them.” That could lead to a drop of $12.6 billion in Florida’s GDP in a single year — about 1.1% — which would, in turn, cut workers’ spending power and reduce state and local tax revenue.

Oh, and I hope Floridians like the higher prices in the grocery store and restaurants. If you like salad, it’s going to be an expensive trip.

An example from last night’s Nikki Haley town hall on CNN:

TAPPER: So it’s — I mean, do you have an opinion, though?

I mean, would a — if a six-week ban theoretically came to your desk, would you sign it?

HALEY: But why — why — I will answer that when you answer — when you ask Kamala and Biden if they would agree to 37 weeks, 38 weeks, 39 weeks. Then I’ll answer your question.

(APPLAUSE)

No one asked them that. No one asked them how late they’re willing to go. What I’m saying is why go and put the American people through that? Why do that? Why not talk about what’s the truth?

And the truth is where can we get 60 votes? I just gave you the consensus about where I think we can come together.

TAPPER: I think Biden and Harris have been pretty clear that they don’t support any restrictions. I mean, that’s — that’s their…

HALEY: They said abortion up until the time of birth, right?

TAPPER: I don’t think that’s the language they used, but, yes, I mean, they — theoretically, they don’t support restrictions. They say it should be up to a woman, her doctor and her God. That’s — that’s what they say.

HALEY: And I think that’s the conversation we need to have, is that they agree with abortions up until the time of birth, and most Americans do not agree with that.

She is wrong and Tapper is guilty of allowing it. Yes, he uses the word “theoretically” but in fact the vast majority of Democrats were fine with all the restrictions inherent in Roe v Wade’s original decision and accepted the decisions that came after which created many obstacles and restrictions. But they do believe that women should not have to deliver babies with fatal anomalies when we have scientific ability to determine that before birth but later in the pregnancy. And they should not have to die or face long term, serious health consequences because some politicians have decided on an arbitrary date after which they can face both. I think we’ve seen the result of that in states which have enacted bans in the last year.

Tapper made it sound as though Democrats are opposed to any restrictions for any reason and that is just not the case. Nor is it even an issue!

Yes, sometimes a dire circumstance does happen and any decent human being should support allowing doctors to do what’s necessary to save women’s lives and protect their health. The rest of this is grotesque scare mongering. As we have seen from so many stories since the ban, women are being put through hell from this ignorant propaganda and it would be nice if the mainstream media didn’t help them do it.

I wonder why?

While all the other candidates were in Iowa running around in motorcycle gear and ppressing the flesh, Trump was at his gold club doing … this.

Complaining workers are lazy has a history

“As always, those insulated by wealth and comfort are willfully blind to the hardships they demand others cheerfully endure in service of their luxury,” writes Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing:

People who don’t have to work have complained for centuries that other people don’t like doing poorly paid, dangerous, dull work, the kind that makes the lives of the affluent comfortable and convenient. This collection of quotes, dating back to 1894, all say the same thing — “Nobody wants to work anymore” — as if there was a time when people relished shoveling shit for the upper class.

Members of the affluent class, who don’t have to work in the traditional sense, have unlimited choices about their activities and careers. Their wealth allows them to pursue interests, hobbies, and jobs that are personally fulfilling, enjoyable, and safe. When they criticize those who avoid bad jobs, they ignore their privilege and the role it plays in their own choices and opportunities.

Snopes verifies the authenticity of the clippings from a search of newspaper archives. The meme described as “a brief history of capitalists complaining that nobody wants to work for starvation wages” has been floating around since at least last July. Snopes traces its origin to a July 19, 2022 tweet thread from Paul Fairie, a professor in the Political Science department at University of Calgary.

But they’re cagey about saying so

A friend who knows I’m into this sort of esoterica sent along this tale of GOP insincerity in its fight to restore confidence in an electoral system Republicans have worked for decades to undermine. Their particular election bogeyman shifts with the season. It’s dead people voting this time, double voters the next, voter impersonation, rigged machines, stuffed ballots, etc., and Black people. Always Black people.

“Election integrity” means Republicans always win, dontcha know. Each GOP loss spikes complaints, demands, and election law tweaks meant to boost integrity by tilting the playing field more in their favor.

An organization created to identify double voting, bad addresses, dead voters. etc., and to make election officials’ jobs easier is the once-obscure, nonprofit voter list maintenance consortium named the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). Or it was obscure until a three-part “expose” in January 2022 by Gateway Pundit that I wrote about in March. The post went viral on Gettr, Gab, Parler, Telegram and Trump’s Truth Social. Gateway Pundit alleged that ERIC is a George Soros-funded “left-wing plot to add more racial minorities to the voter rolls,” the Washington Post Editorial Board wrote. “If Republicans are serious about protecting election integrity and the rule of law, they’d celebrate ERIC.”

Um, no. Since then, eight states have exited ERIC under pressure from the usual assortment of conspiracy theorists and election deniers who vote in primaries. Republican candidates who want to shine-up their MAGA bona fides see ERIC as a target of opportunity, NPR reports.

“It’s this crazy zeal to get out of ERIC,” said J. Christian Adams, a conservative elections attorney, “that is going to cause voter fraud to flourish.”

The Gateway Pundit posts drew on Adams’ criticisms of ERIC (NPR):

In late 2021, Adams appeared on a conservative radio program and called ERIC “diabolical.”

His voting advocacy law firm has sued a number of states for records related to ERIC. And he even wrote what’s believed to be the first article ever alleging a connection between Soros and ERIC, back in 2016. (The Soros-funded Open Society Foundations has given money previously to The Pew Charitable Trusts, which helped start ERIC, but Soros has never had any involvement in the organization.)

In an interview with NPR this year, Adams said he never intended his criticisms to lead to states actually leaving the organization.

“My view is that it’s better to be in ERIC than not in ERIC,” Adams said, because without it, “it’s absolutely impossible to do cross-state checking to see who’s voting twice in federal elections.”

But that assumes that the GOP’s election integrity crusade was sincere.

NPR’s report offers a useful history of how the organization originated that’s worth your review.

At its height, the partnership had 32 members, almost evenly split between the two major parties. The program helped officials clean up voter rolls and remove dead voters, which attracted Republican states like South Carolina, Utah and Texas.

“The ERIC program for us has been godsend,” said Iowa Republican Secretary of State Paul Pate, in an interview with NPR earlier this year.

It also required states to reach out to eligible voters who weren’t registered yet, with a postcard explaining how to register. That helped attract Democratic states, like Connecticut, Oregon and, most recently, New Jersey.

“I had various conversations with my fellow secretaries, who gave positive and I want to say bipartisan feedback at the time,” said New Jersey Secretary of State Tahesha Way, speaking about how she learned of the program.

But MAGA attorney Cleta Mitchell heard about the program, too. Mitchell was deeply involved in the Trump’s failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Heather Honey, a Pennsylvania-based “open-source investigator” worked on the discredited election audits in Maricopa County, Arizona. At a secret ERIC summit Mitchell held last June, Honey presented a 29-page report calling ERIC a “threat to election integrity.”

The real threat conservatives see (and my interest) lies in those postcards ERIC members send to potentially eligible but unregistered citizens. For conservatives, removing dead voters, etc., was the carrot for states to join ERIC. For liberals it was the voter registration outreach. Now that they are aware of it, conservatives want out. ERIC is “bloating the rolls.”

“The impact of ERIC is that instead of cleaning up our voter rolls … they add more people to it,” Honey said. “People who aren’t even interested or disengaged don’t really want to register. But they just, you know, you ask them enough times, they’re going to say yes.”

Can’t have that. Insert “people of color and young people” whenever a GOP operatrive complains about registering people “who aren’t even interested or disengaged [and] don’t really want to register.”

Once again:

“I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, a father of movement conservatism and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, told a religious right group in Dallas during the 1980 campaign. Plenty more where he came from still hold that belief and work every election to limit access to the ballot to the right people.

Iowa and Florida: Where woke goes to die…

….thanks to the leadership of @KimReynoldsIA and @RonDeSantis. pic.twitter.com/G1F4Y4NZrJ

— Casey DeSantis (@CaseyDeSantis) June 4, 2023

She is something else. Her speeches are as inauthentic as his are — her motor-mouthed delivery of anecdotes about their little kids using permanent markers on the walls of the Governor’s mansion ring hollow especially since she delivers them in a Kari Lake-esque voice as if she’s reading from a newscast teleprompter. (She used to be a broadcaster and it isn’t helping her.) She’s pushing DeSantis’ “heroic” fighter image and it just isn’t sticking. And she keeps wearing costumes which are as inauthentic as her speeches.

The Trump Campaign’s secret weapon would like a word … pic.twitter.com/W7semJGP40

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 2, 2023

This piece in the Daily Beast by Katie Baker is just brutal. But I think she’s right:

The First Lady of Florida showed up on the campaign trail in Iowa this weekend wearing a ghastly black leather jacket—American flag on front, an alligator and the silhouette of her state on the back, with the sneering words, “Where Woke Goes to Die”—that brought to mind nothing so much as the racks of a Red State big-bin store where it would be retailing for $24.99.

To be fair, Casey DeSantis wore the bomber to a charity biker rally and I’m sure the campaign intended it to be a viral moment, like Melania Trump’s infamous “I Really Don’t Care” coat that the former First Lady donned to check out the border crisis.

The message on Melania’s coat, like the one-time model herself, was sphinxlike. Was it a sign to the outside that Melania dreamed of escaping her boorish husband, the stuff of a thousand Resistance Twitter fever memes? Was it the physical manifestation of the Trumps’ casual cruelty? After all, Melania was flying down to where the administration locked up little kids in cages and tore them from the arms of their desperate parents. Did it mean nothing at all, like her spox insisted—maybe like Melania herself, a cipher whose eyes seem to betray an inner emptiness, like the infinite refraction of mirrored light off of all those gold-plated Trump Tower bathroom fixtures?

By contrast, Casey DeSantis’ coat is just like her husband Ron DeSantis’ campaign: Crude. Grasping. Saying the ugly part out loud. Whereas Trump would wink-wink at the fascists—who can forget his dog whistle to the “very fine people on both sides” at Charlottesville—DeSantis wants to peel off Trump’s base by being even more explicit about who he intends to target. You can see it right there on his wife’s jacket: DeSantis’ Florida is where the woke go to die—and a lot of other people die as well.

It’s hard to say one is reading too much into a coat that’s so explicit—and anyways, as The New York Times noted in a fawning profile, Casey DeSantis is definitely trying to make a political statement with what she wears, with her aspirations of “Camelot-meets-Mar-a-Lago.” But while Casey may be trying to position herself after Jackie Kennedy (good luck) and even Melania, if this weekend is any indication, she’s falling far short. It doesn’t matter how many times she wears that ice-blue Badgley Mischka cape-dress. The DeSantis’ will never be Camelot. Jackie and JFK symbolized the opposite of vulgar pettiness—they embodied youth, energy, a commitment to moral progress in the struggle for Civil Rights, a country fresh with idealism. Not an America that was obsessed with banning books about male seahorses and rainbows, or nuking the latest Disney movie.

Ron and Casey will also never be the Trumps. For one thing, the Trumps have all that wealth to retreat into, not bothering themselves with the lives they wrecked along the way. Like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, just over in West Egg, not East Egg. For another, Trump manages to command attention naturally, whereas the governor’s attempts to make headlines always feel forced. Whereas Donald Trump is terrifyingly, inexorably himself, the DeSantis’ are more like poseurs. Fake Birkins. Mar-a-Lago imitators. They rail against the elites but Ron went to Harvard. They wear black leather jackets to a biker rally—regular folks!—but they really prefer to be mingling with Elon’s tech bros and wearing those designer duds. They want it way too much and it shows. Why else would Ron whine so bitterly about his wife being jilted by Vogue?

Still, as they appear on the campaign trail, we are seeing clues to who the DeSantis’ are at heart. We’ve got a Sunshine State Lady Macbeth, in her green cape and white gloves, with her middling husband and her thirst for the crown—and we’ve got a guy who wants to be sitting in a corner, mumbling about the Federalist Papers and gobbling pudding off his fingers.

Trump would never eat pudding with anything other than a gold spoon—while pressing the button for his 20th Diet Coke of the day and trying to bomb Iran on a whim. Put another way, Trump is the danger of raw, chaotic id. DeSantis, meanwhile, is the little jerk who’s going to make all of us pay for how he had no friends in third grade, or whatever his particular villain origin story is.

Whether the GOP’s base will respond to DeSantis and his wife trying to imitate Donald and Melania—whether they’ll be happy buying the knock-offs—is an open question. I’m sure many MAGA-types love a jacket that so blatantly sticks it to the libs. Still, we’re told that the average GOP voter doesn’t like feeling that elites are talking down to them (like someone nerding out about the Federalist Papers?), even though one suspects that they actually want to be the rich guy eating off the golden spoon. Will Red State primary voters see more of themselves in strivers like Ron and Casey—or in their old, brash, filthy-rich ‘God Emperor’ and his supermodel spouse?

There’s more if you’d like to partake.

I think the lady Macbeth thing is a big overdrawn because really, Ron himself is more than just a clod. He’s a truly evil clown. But there is no doubt that Casey is right in there with him pushing this creepy, ultra-divisive agenda. She is literally wearing the message.

Ugh:

Elon Musk endures a lot. Just ask him.

In recent weeks, he has again expounded upon his long workdays and his infrequent vacations, all while mocking workers who prefer working from home as living in “la-la land.”

Since his first startup almost 30 years ago, the billionaire entrepreneur has epitomized the hustle culture of Silicon Valley that is all about grinding out late nights at the office. His public discussion of pain and sacrifice has helped him create a demanding culture at the companies he runs, including the car company Tesla TSLA 3.11%increase; green up pointing triangle and the rocket maker SpaceX. 

Now, with the social-media platform Twitter, which he gained control of late last year, that approach is being tested anew as he races to remake the company and its remaining workforce, an effort that he has described as “quite painful.”  

His live-at-work ethos, through which his own suffering is put on display to motivate others, runs counter to the work-from-home ideal embraced by a new era of employees openly questioning one’s commitment to a job. Their “quiet quitting” while working has helped fuel a broader debate about how much one should give over to the daily grind.

From Musk’s view, a lot. His approach raises questions about how best to motivate workers and get results. Is it giving them flexibility and focusing on work-life balance? Or is it trying to fire them up by working insanely hard and making clear they are expected to do the same?

Musk, 51 years old, recently called working from home “morally wrong,” igniting blowback on social media from those unhappy with being pressured to return to their offices in the midst of child-care costs, commuting hassles and desires to keep flexible schedules. 

Facebook parent Meta Platforms this past week was the latest Silicon Valley giant to declare that more in-office time was needed as companies in general worry about the teamwork and productivity of their employees working from home. 

Asked at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit in May about managing his workload, Musk said he tries to divide his time predominantly between one company each day, such as Tesla on Tuesday, though he might end his day working on Twitter. Musk has said that with the acquisition of Twitter his work has exploded to more than 120 hours a week.

“My days are very long and complicated, as you might imagine,” Musk said last month. 

A week earlier, Musk suggested to CNBC in an interview that he takes off two or three days each year. “I work seven days a week, but I’m not expecting others to do that,” he said. 

Still, Musk sends a message, sometimes not so subtly, that he expects something close to that. 

In the early days of his Twitter ownership, Musk asked his new employees to commit to long hours and “extremely hardcore” work to reinvent the social-media company to his liking, a theme he has used at Tesla when looking to motivate the troops. 

A recent lawsuit filed by former Twitter employees claims Musk ordered that conference rooms at the company’s San Francisco base be converted to “sleeping rooms” to give exhausted workers a place to nap. Musk also wanted a bathroom installed next to his office, according to the complaint, so he “didn’t have to wake his security team and cross half the floor to use the bathroom in the middle of the night.”

Twitter hasn’t responded to the lawsuit, filed in a Delaware federal court. 

In a recent BBC interview, Musk described the “painful” work of taking over Twitter, similar to how he has long talked about struggling for years at Tesla before it became consistently profitable. In 2021, he described his experience at the automaker as amounting to two-thirds of all his life’s “personal and professional pain combined.” 

Going back to his first startup, Zip2, which worked to help newspapers go digital in the late 1990s, Musk showed signs of reveling in stories of triumph over hardships. 

Jim Ambras, who was Zip2’s vice president of product development, remembered the 20-something Musk expressing admiration for Sumner Redstone and how the now-deceased tycoon had overcome personal adversity to become a media mogul. 

In 1979, at age 55, Redstone was badly burned in a hotel fire that left him with a gnarled hand, but that didn’t stop him from going on to build a business empire that included CBS and Paramount Pictures. 

“He liked people who did really hard things even at the cost of personal suffering,” Ambras said. 

Musk has been known to praise those willing to give their all. He expressed admiration for Chinese workers last year during an interview at a Financial Times conference. 

“They won’t just be burning the midnight oil. They will be burning the 3 a.m. oil. They won’t even leave the factory type of thing, whereas in America people are trying to avoid going to work at all,” Musk said.

In China, that mind-set has received pushback. And Musk’s approach can make him look uncaring. 

Earlier this year at Twitter, for example, during one of the company’s purge of workers as it looked to slash costs, Haraldur Thorleifsson, an employee, tweeted to Musk that access to his work computer was cut off. “However your head of HR is not able to confirm if I am an employee or not,” he wrote. “Maybe if enough people retweet you’ll answer me here?”

Musk responded in a string of biting tweets. “The reality is that this guy (who is independently wealthy) did no actual work, claimed as his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, yet was simultaneously tweeting up a storm,” Musk wrote. “Can’t say I have a lot of respect for that.” 

Thorleifsson has a form of muscular dystrophy and is known in Iceland for his work on disability issues. He joined Twitter after his company was acquired by the platform before Musk’s takeover. Once Musk realized the full story, he apologized. 

“Uncaring” you say? He’s a slave driver. He is also seriously screwed up. Any society in which a freak like this is influential is a very sick society.

It’s not a grassroots triumph

More hype from Florida Franco:

The DeSantis campaign said it had around 40,000 donors in May as “we raised over” $8.2 million, according to text messages and emails to supporters asking for more donations. That works out to an average of more than $200 per donor — a figure far higher than is typical for a campaign heavily funded by grass-roots support. By comparison, Senator Bernie Sanders, who was a Democratic online fund-raising powerhouse, raised $5.9 million in his first 24 hours in 2019 — but from 223,000 donors, for an average donation of around $26.

How a campaign raises money matters. Because of strict campaign contribution limits of $3,300 per person for the primary, campaigns that raise money chiefly from bigger contributors cannot return to those same donors again and again for support.

Small contributors are particularly valuable because they can give $30 more than 100 times before bumping up against contribution caps.

Tim Tagaris, a Democratic digital strategist who oversaw the Sanders fund-raising operation in 2020, called the number of DeSantis donors surprisingly small.

Mr. Tagaris said that 40,000 “donations in a week for a leading presidential campaign is either a sign that they didn’t prepare well enough heading into the launch or there isn’t the kind of grass-roots support from regular people they had probably hoped for.” He added, “That’s a donor number you expect from top-tier Senate campaigns, not a leading presidential.”

His campaign sounds like it has a culture of losing.

I guess we shouldn’t be shocked. Aside from climate change denialism, the war on science includes killing abortion doctors, declaring war on public health officers,threatening medical scientists with jail. I suppose it makes sense they would want to jail doctors providing gender affirming medical care.

And now they are adding therapists to the mix apparently under the assumption that if you even acknowledge gender dysphoria and attempt to help minors deal with it, you are some kind of deviant?

We are now perilously close to thought crime territory now. Therapists work with the mind, they don’t perform surgery or (unless they are medical doctors) prescribe hormones. So I guess if your kid experiences gender dysphoria, your only path to help him or her through it is through one of those violent conversion camps or what … exorcism? These people believe they can force this whole idea out of society and they are willing to use the power of the state to do it.

That’s what is referred to as “freedom” in the American right wing.

DeSantis is pushing new frontiers in abusing the term "woke." Here's a video rundown: pic.twitter.com/NtHPVYx2Pr

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 4, 2023

Seriously, comparing the fight against Target selling tuck swimsuits and Churchill’s fight against the Nazis is beyond cringe. It’s grotesquely stupid.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told reporters on Saturday that “woke is an existential threat to our society.”

DeSantis, greeting Republican activists at a major GOP 2024 presidential cattle call in Iowa, the state whose caucuses lead off the Republican White House nominating calendar, was asked about comments former President Donald Trump made two days earlier.

“I don’t like the term ‘woke’ because I hear ‘woke, woke, woke.’ It’s just a term they use, half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is,” the former president said on Thursday during remarks at the Westside Conservative Club in Urbandale, Iowa.

Asked about Trump’s comments, the Florida governor said Saturday that “to say it’s not a big deal, that just shows you don’t understand what a lot of these issues are right now.”

I dunno. Right wingers are consumed with pedophile conspiracy theories and gay panic but DeSantis may be making the Giuliani error: