Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

He’s right there in front of us. Don’t look away:

A confession: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is living in my head.

For nearly three years now, I’ve been fascinated by the performance art of this blustering pettifogger. My first column, published in June 2020, covered DeSantis’ truculent defense of his management of the COVID-19 pandemic in his state.

At the time, he complained that criticism of his record on COVID was nothing but a “partisan narrative.” Within days, Florida would see a record surge in cases. To this day, DeSantis has continued to claim success against the virus, never mind that his state has notched one of the worst COVID death rates in the country.

Following DeSantis and his hijinks has been what could be described as one of my guilty pleasures. Nothing that happened in Florida had real relevance to our lives here in California; appalling as his policies were, we could afford to watch from a safe distance as DeSantis waged war on LGBTQ+ residents, teachers, universities, anti-discrimination laws, gun safety and so many other the institutions and principles that a sane, inclusive society holds dear.

But things have changed. DeSantis is on the verge of announcing his candidacy for the GOP nomination for president, which will require us to weigh him in the balance as a national political figure. That will be a test for society in general.

It also will be a test for our political press, which so far has treated DeSantis indulgently, as a horse in the presidential race and a possible alternative to Donald Trump, without expending much time or effort examining the impact his policy initiatives have had on the residents of Florida.

Press interest has perked up lately, with DeSantis’ policy initiatives becoming more febrile as his announcement draws nigh.

But the press hasn’t begun to devote sufficient attention to the curious experiment DeSantis has launched, based on the hypothesis that it’s possible to win a presidential nomination, not to mention a presidential election, by appealing exclusively to a bloc of racists, antisemites, gun nuts and other nightcrawlers of the far right. An America led by DeSantis as he has portrayed himself thus far would be a dystopian hellhole.

Let the examination begin.

It would be proper to start with scrutiny of DeSantis’ positions on the most important geopolitical issues of our time, if they could be detected.

DeSantis’ efforts to plant his flag on issues such as the Russian war on Ukraine and America’s proper role in that conflict collapsed into incoherence. That led to the first glimmers among conservatives that perhaps he is not ready for prime time, notwithstanding the fruitless efforts of his sycophants to depict his confusion as the product of deep thinking.

Immigration? Certainly an issue worthy of painstaking thoughtfulness by an aspirant to national political office. DeSantis’ approach has been to gauge the performative cruelty and pointlessness of the approach of his fellow Republican governor Greg Abbott of Texas and say, “Hold my beer.”

Abbott has been shipping migrants released from federal custody from Texas to New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Those are places with infrastructures of aid for immigrants (though Abbott sent busloads to be dropped off in front of Vice President Kamala Harris’ D.C. residence in freezing temperatures on Christmas Eve).

DeSantis couldn’t find enough victims to be rounded up in his state, so he sent his agents to Texas to collect them. His Florida-funded transports dropped them off without warning on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., which didn’t have any assistance infrastructure. DeSantis’ agents lied to the passengers about where they were going and what they would find at their destination.

As it turned out, the people of Martha’s Vineyard, apparently selected for their supposed hypocrisy on immigration, responded to the stunt humanely by arranging assistance, presumably to DeSantis’ surprise.

By the way, most if not all the passengers of these transports are in the U.S. legally.

They’re asylum-seekers who have completed the initial step in their processing by government authorities by getting a hearing scheduled, being fingerprinted and subjecting to background checks. Then they’re released to await further processing; if anything, the GOP transports interfered with this entirely legal process, to the asylum-seekers’ disadvantage.

When critics questioned the expenditure of Florida tax revenue in Texas, DeSantis simply had his indulgent state legislators rewrite the law and appropriate $12 million more to transport migrants from outside Florida to Democratic locations.

If one believes that the prime imperative of state governors is to keep their residents safe, DeSantis must be judged an abject failure.

The most important test for contemporary governors has been the pandemic. Nearly from the outset, DeSantis accepted the unfounded claims by a cadre of unqualified theorists that the proper approach was to focus protection on the most vulnerable population — the elderly — and allow the virus to roam free among everyone else in a quest for “herd immunity.”

It didn’t work.

Up-to-date figures place Florida’s COVID death rate of 411 per 100,000 population at 10th worst in the nation; California, with a rate of 259.4, ranks 42nd. If California had Florida’s death rate, its COVID toll would be 161,000, rather than 102,500. Florida has recorded about 88,300 deaths. If it had California’s death rate, about 32,000 Floridians would have been spared.

DeSantis’ defenders point out that Florida has the second-highest percentage of residents 65 and older in the nation. But its death rate is almost twice that of Maine, the state with the oldest demographics, and higher than the nine other states with the highest percentage of residents 65 and older.

The chief distinction between Florida and those other states is DeSantis. He has waged war on anti-pandemic policies. He has demonized Anthony Fauci, who as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was the nation’s most respected epidemiological expert — though a target of the ignorant far right. There was no reason for DeSantis to do this, except to curry partisan favor with the right wing.

DeSantis installed a known COVID “crank,” Joseph Ladapo, as his state’s surgeon general. Together they have mounted an attack on COVID vaccines, which are indisputably safe and effective in reducing illness and death from the virus.

Ladapo has been an advocate of treatments for COVID such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which have been shown to be useless for the purpose. He was recently reported to have personally altered a scientific study to exaggerate the health risks of COVID vaccines for young men; legitimate scientific data show the risk to be negligible, and lower than the risks from contracting the disease.

In March, Ladapo was officially upbraided by the Food and Drug Administration for his campaign of misinformation about the vaccine. Earlier this month, Ladapo was appointed to another term as state surgeon general.

DeSantis’ assaults on schoolteachers, professors and universities have been well documented. His policies and the laws he has signed or advocated aim to eradicate diversity and inclusion programs on campus and restrict free discussion of contentious subjects.

In practice, these strictures elevate a white-oriented historiography to the level of received truth, turning the clock back on decades of pedagogical progress. The laws and regulations are written so vaguely that teachers have no way of knowing when they’ve crossed a line. Their natural inclination is to err on the side of removing books from school libraries and narrowing their curricula.

DeSantis depicts this process as protecting pupils and students from discomfiting discussions. In fact, he’s keeping Floridians from learning the skills of critical thinking and academic inquiry. His view of the university is of a glorified vocational school. In a speech Monday, he sneered, “If you want to do things like gender ideology, go to Berkeley. … We don’t want to be diverted into a lot of these niche subjects that are heavily politicized.” (His obviously hand-picked claque responded with cheers for this vacuous spiel.)

DeSantis has consistently eviscerated LBGTQ+ rights. He has bought into the right-wing hysteria about medical support for transgender youth. Last week, he signed a bill allowing healthcare providers to refuse service to almost anyone due to a “conscience-based objection” — a rule the LGBTQ+ community properly sees as a license to refuse service to them.

Is there no right-wing trope that DeSantis won’t embrace? On Friday, he jumped into the case of Daniel Penny, the white ex-Marine charged with manslaughter for placing Jordan Neely, a Black schizophrenic homeless person, in a chokehold on a New York subway train.

“We must defeat the Soros-Funded DAs, stop the Left’s pro-criminal agenda, and take back the streets for law abiding citizens. We stand with Good Samaritans like Daniel Penny,” he tweeted. Let’s show this Marine… America’s got his back.”

This was a remarkable achievement in Twitterography. It combined three right-wing causes—antisemitism, racism and bloodlust — in a single five-line tweet. Down our way, we call this a hat trick.

The question that will soon confront American voters and the press is whether campaigning of this nature will have legs beyond the hermetic boundaries of Florida. The Republican-controlled legislature in Tallahassee has been content to do DeSantis’ bidding on all these topics, feeding his worst instincts with raw red meat.

Egged on by the conservative peanut gallery, DeSantis has relentlessly pushed himself to the right. Perhaps he has been misled by his obsequious reception in the Florida fever swamps into thinking that the whole country lives up his street.

Possibly DeSantis thinks he has no other chance against Trump except to out-Trump him. He certainly doesn’t have much personal appeal; even his supporters acknowledge that he’s uneasy with the retail politics of kissing babies and making nice to donors. When I wrote recently that DeSantis has all the charisma of a linoleum floor, I received indignant replies from contractors, accusing me of slandering linoleum.

One of the few DeSantis initiatives that has garnered national attention, his stupid fight with the Walt Disney Co. over the latter’s criticism of his “Don’t Say Gay” law, has unnerved even Republican fat cats.

Recent political history suggests that politicians who scurry to the right to appease the GOP’s extremists in primaries find it very difficult to claw their way back to the center to broaden their appeal in general elections on a national level. (Mitt Romney couldn’t do it, for instance.)

It’s too early to know whether DeSantis will be willing or able to moderate his policies and rhetoric for a national audience or to be convincing if he tries. Judging from the record thus far, he’s going to become only more noxious before he’s finally ushered off the national stage.

That’s from Michael Hilzick in the LA Times. I couldn’t agree more.

This man could be president of the United States. And I have come to the conclusion that he is more of a true believer than people realize. I think his “establishment” days were the cynical ones. He’s got the zealot’s gleam in his eye now.

If you’ve been observing politics for a while I’m sure many of you caught House Oversight Chairman James Comer’s not-so-subtle implications that Joe Biden and his “crime family” are killing off his political enemies over the weekend. It’s redolent of the old Clinton Kill List that was an article of faith on the right back in the 1990s.

Tim Miller has the details:

JAMES COMER, THE REPUBLICAN WHO CHAIRS the House Oversight Committee, has been widely mocked for claiming during a Sunday interview with not-yet-fired Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo that the “informant” in his committee’s investigation of the Biden family’s business dealings went “missing,” hampering Republicans’ ability to drop the long-promised “bombshell” evidence.

While this dung-faced performance merited all the mockery it has received, those of us whose sonar is more closely calibrated to the fainter sound waves of the conservative media world caught something more sinister in the congressman’s subtext.

Here’s the transcript, see if you can catch it:

Nine of the ten people that we’ve identified that have very good knowledge with respect to the Bidens, they are one of three things, Maria. They are either currently in court, they’re currently in jail, or they’re currently missing. So, it’s of the utmost importance that the FBI work with us to be able to try to identify what research they’ve done, what investigations they’ve done, because we have people that wanna come forward but honestly, Maria, they fear for their lives.

People mysteriously missing. Others fearing for their lives.

Why exactly? What evidence is there that anyone needs to be worried or that foul play is afoot? It’s not clear.

And yet here we have a GOP committee chairman strongly implying that the Biden family’s intimidation tactics might even go so far as to result in death.

After the Comer interview, Bartiromo asked another guest, the national conservative writer Josh Hammer, to react to these claims, which she described as “chilling.” Hammer says ominously, “Maria, what is actually going on here? You and I both know exactly what is going on here” before laying into a diatribe about how the “Biden Crime Family” and “everyone at the top” of the intelligence community are “pulling out all the stops imaginable” to protect the president. The Washington Examiner followed with a credulous report on Comer accusing the White House of “intimidation.”

For conservative media consumers what Bartiromo et al. are trying to get across is unmistakable. It is part of a long history of vague and not-so-vague accusations that Democratic political elites and the Deep State are willing to go so far as murder in order to silence whistleblowers who might harm the Democratic Party. This tactic was employed most notably against the Clintons with the “Kill List” rumormongering in the 1990s. In the last decade, it was most prominent in the slander surrounding the Seth Rich murder in 2016.

That this was not missed by its intended audience is clear by the response you can see in certain corners of the MAGA internet.

Charlie Kirk, misunderstanding Comer, tweeted about how 9 of the 10 informants are missing, which Kirk also calls “chilling.”

Patriot News Network headlines it “Huge: Biden Family Crime Informant Has Gone Missing!”

On Truth Social the notion that the informant was “Epsteined” and that he or she might be dead was spread by various accounts.

THIS COMES IN THE WAKE of another story last week that you would have seen only in the MAGA media bubble: Tara Reade, who during the 2020 campaign accused Biden of having sexually harassed her years earlier, suggesting that Biden might try to have her killed. “If something happens to me, all roads lead to Joe Biden,” she tweeted. “I am not suicidal.”

“If something happens to me…Biden accuser posts bone-chilling message” was the headline in Conservative Brief, which was shared on Twitter by Chuck Woolery, the conservative crank and former Love Connection host. “Tara Reade fears assassination attempt? All roads lead to Joe Biden” screamed American Action News. Bongino, Rebel News, Breitbart—they all sang from the same hymn book.

Tara Reade always had a strange affection for Vladimir Putin. Lately she’s been pushing the virtues of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. She is one weird person with a knack for getting attention on both the right and left.

All of this just proves that this stuff isn’t a result of Donald Trump’s ignominious reign. They’ve been doing this stuff for decades and the GOP establishment has always been happy to exploit it for their own purposes.

Look at this nonsense:

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley says the results of voting in all 50 states should be announced on Election Night. Haley spoke to a crowd in Ankeny tonight and was asked if she feels elections are fair.

“I don’t mind absentee voting and I don’t mind early voting, but you have to prove you are who you say you are and when those ballots come in, they need to verify signatures and count them as they come in,” Haley said. “There’s no reason any state can’t produce the results on Election Night. There’s no reason whatsoever.”

Haley suggested “a lot of states” are doing things right and she urged the crowd to “keep the faith” about election integrity. “The good thing from COVID is we had a lot of election integrity laws that passed in multiple states,” Haley said. “There are a few states out there that we still have problems with and we’ve got to be careful and they bent the rules and they tried things and we’ve got to make sure that we continue to press those states to do it the right way because integrity in the election process matters.”

She has said in the past that the election was not stolen. Now she’s hedging. Of course. These people are the worst cowards politics has ever produced.

Nobody “bent the rules.” This has all been litigated. There were dozens and dozens of court cases, many of which were heard before right wing judges and none of them found any lack of integrity. We did see a president try to “bend the rules” by strong arming Republican officials into “finding” him the votes he needed to win. We saw him establish a Big Lie that the election was stolen. And we saw him incite an insurrection to stop the peaceful transfer of power. We saw all that. But, no there wasn’t any “bending of the rules” that “we need to keep an eye on” in the states unless she’s talking about Republicans trying to steal more elections.

And adopting the fatuous Trump line that we can always tell the results of the election night is such an enormous pile of nonsense I hardly know what to say. States never “produce results” of an election on election night. It takes weeks to certify elections and she knows that. Media call elections on election night most of the time based on projections — unless they are close. When they are, as ours often are these days, they have to wait for all the votes to be counted — which is not possible between the hours of 8pm and 12 midnight on election night.

This is a Trump line that she’s flogging. He says that no votes should be counted after midnight because Democrats to go out and manufacture votes in the middle of the night to beat him. That’s where this is coming from. And Haley knows it.

These cynical GOP candidates are worse than Trump. They are lending their “moderate” imprimatur to his worst ideas.

Following up on Tom’s post below:

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a horrifying bill Wednesday that will let the state take transgender minors away from their families if they are receiving gender-affirming care.

The new law will allow the state to take custody of a child if they have been “subjected to or [are] threatened with being subjected to” gender-affirming care, which includes puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy. Florida courts could modify custody agreements from a different state if the minor is likely to receive gender-affirming care in that second state. The text refers to gender-affirming care as “sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures” and qualifies this care as a form of “physical harm.”

Medical facilities would have to give the state Department of Health a signed attestation that they neither provide gender-affirming care to any patients under the age of 18 nor refer people to providers that do. Their medical license renewal is contingent upon sending in this attestation.

But the bill also targets trans adults: Only physicians are allowed to offer gender-affirming care (not nurse practitioners). Anyone who violates the law could be charged with a misdemeanor.

Minors who have already begun transitioning will be allowed to continue to do so, but they are no longer allowed to receive care via telehealth, including for prescriptions. Their doctors have to tell them about the “risks” of gender-affirming care, and patients will have to sign an informed consent form, which the ACLU has pointed out often contains misinformation. Doctors who violate any of these new rules could be charged with a felony.

Republicans across the country have introduced bills targeting gender-affirming care, but this is one of the most extreme measures yet. The people who support these bills insist that they are trying to protect children, but forcibly taking a kid from their loving family sounds more likely to traumatize them. What’s more, by passing legislation that describes LGBTQ health care as something that should be penalized, lawmakers are putting people of all ages at risk of real harm.

DeSantis also signed an anti-drag bill the same day, which is expected to end all Pride Parades in the state due to its vague wording. You can read more about that bill here.

This feels more and more like pink triangle time every day.

Of brown shirts and Charles Bronsons

Charlie Sykes writes at The Bulwark, “A few months ago, in a particularly dark mood, I wrote a column suggesting that cruelty was no longer the point in MAGA World…. Trump has already pivoted to brutality, and there is nothing subtle about it.”

“As it turns out, I may have understated the case,” Sykes quips:

Indeed, in April, DeSantis signed legislation to make it easier for juries to recommend the death penalty by eliminating the requirement that jurors have to be unanimous. The right media wing ecosystem exploded with praise. But some wanted to go even further.

Via Media Matters: “Conservative pundits are increasingly open about who they think should be killed.”

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh was among the biggest fans of DeSantis’s death penalty move, but now that his appetite has been whetted, he wants to widen the circle of those who need to be killed.

“If we have this weird rule that we’ve imposed on ourselves that we can only execute one, either murderers or child rapist, like if we had to choose between those two categories of people to execute, then I would say, well, if we don’t do one, then I’d probably murder the — I’d probably execute, rather — execute legally the child rapist,” Walsh said. “But in fact, we don’t have to choose. You know, that’s the wonderful thing.”

“We don’t have to make choices. We can execute all of them,” he continued. “We should be able to, anyway. Execute all the worst people, all of the worst criminals. Just execute them all. And this is the right first step. There’s a lot more that needs to be done. I mean, this is actual criminal justice reform.”

They are not alone, you are not surprised to know.

Stephen Crowder of “Louder with Crowder” weighed in on the killing of homeless Jordan Neely on a New York Subway, declaring, “The second that you are engaging in an activity where someone else is forced to make a decision to save their life or a life of their loved one, completely, by the way, not of their own volition, you’ve put them in that scenario, you forfeit your right to live.”

In essence: When in doubt, take them out.

Trump, Nikki Haley, and Ron DeSantis have all rushed to celebrate Daniel Perry, the man charged with killing Jordan Neely. But DeSantis raised the ante, by calling him a “Good Samaritan,” and raising money for his defense.

Greg Sargent (Washington Post) observed that DeSantis “cast the law enforcement apparatus prosecuting Perry as presumptively illegitimate.” The right is making the case that Penny is a victim of the “deep state,” Sargent observes:

But this is particularly sobering coming from DeSantis; it suggests the two leading contenders for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination — DeSantis and former president Donald Trump — are open celebrators of vigilante “justice.”

[…]

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), for instance, hailed Penny as a “hero” who “stepped in to protect others.” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) suggested that Penny is being persecuted for standing up to “anarcho-tyranny.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page echoed DeSantis, describing Penny as “the Subway Samaritan.” This, of course, is an allusion to the biblical Samaritan who aids a traveler who had been robbed and beaten; the tale doesn’t involve putting the perp in a chokehold until he dies.

Some of these sociopaths are, to be sure, poseurs, the sort of wannabes who get a thrill in their nether regions from dressing in Punisher drag. The problem is, as the neverending bloodbath of mass shootings confirms, some of them will act on their American carnage fantasies. They are egged on not just by podcasters from the lunatic fringe, but assured by leaders the likes of Trump, DeSantis, and the Wall Street Journal that tomorrow belongs to them.

Protesting their innocence later, they will have “ash in their feather dusters.”

Plenty to go around

Former law enforcement officer, Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana (R-of course).

Republican Congressman Clay Higgins assaults citizen who dared ask him a question.

Barely makes the news. Insane. pic.twitter.com/jEG9gyOp5i

— Kaivan Shroff (@KaivanShroff) May 18, 2023

A Republican state representative from North Carolina:

WATCH: North Carolina House Rep. Jeff McNeely caused a stir when he asked Rep. Abe Jones if he would have gotten into Harvard if he wasn't an athlete or minority. pic.twitter.com/TDR8czfuOt

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) May 17, 2023

No wonder they are so desperate to change the subject:

Ron DeSantis attacks LGBTQ community with "slate of hate" laws https://t.co/RDgooId9iB

— Axios (@axios) May 18, 2023

this has got to fucking stop https://t.co/tZHdU7EGn1

— Elizabeth Picciuto (@epicciuto) May 18, 2023

Dave knows his right-wing taxonomy:

I still can’t get over the irony that these fascists call this “parents rights” legislation. https://t.co/3V5yix9yFM

— David Neiwert (@DavidNeiwert) May 18, 2023

It’s not reassuring

A new Pew Poll on Americans’ views of vaccines after the COVID crisis is interesting. If you are following this story, click over to the whole thing. Here’s the upshot:

Americans remain steadfast in their belief in the overall value of childhood vaccines, with no change over the last four years in the large majority who say the benefits of childhood vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) outweigh the risks, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

Still, the survey finds that alongside broad support for childhood vaccines there are signs of some concern – especially among those closest to the decision-making process of vaccinating children. Parents see the risks of MMR vaccines as a bit higher than other Americans, and about half of those with a young child ages 0 to 4 say the statement “I worry that not all of the childhood vaccines are necessary” describes their views at least somewhat well. Concerns tend to be higher among mothers than fathers: Roughly half of mothers with a child under 18 rate the risk of side effects from MMR vaccines as medium or high – 15 percentage points higher than the share of fathers who say this.

The polarized response to the handling of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, including the role of COVID-19 vaccines, has been a source of deep concern for medical and public health communities. It has also raised questions about whether vaccine hesitancy connected with COVID-19 vaccines would spill into Americans’ views of other vaccines. Heightened concerns follow reports of federal data that show another downtick in the share of U.S. kindergartners receiving state-required vaccines in the 2021-2022 school year.

The survey findings highlight the sizable gap between higher public confidence in childhood vaccines and lower ratings of COVID-19 vaccines. Fewer than half of U.S. adults consider the preventative health benefits of coronavirus vaccines to be high and a majority see the risk of side effects from them to be at least medium. COVID-19 vaccines were widely hailed as advances that showcased the power of scientific discovery. Yet a majority of Americans still say the statement “we don’t really know if there are serious health risks from the COVID-19 vaccines” describes their views at least somewhat well.

With the U.S. national emergency in response to the COVID-19 pandemic now at an end, Americans have sorted themselves into three groups based on their vaccination decisions. Roughly a third of U.S. adults (34%) are enthusiastic about the vaccines and up-to-date, being fully vaccinated and having gotten a recent booster shot. A similar share of the public (33%) comprises an ambivalent group that is fully vaccinated, but not recently boosted, with many who have questions about the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. And then there are the 21% of U.S. adults who have said no to the vaccines altogether, a group that harbors deep doubts about the vaccines as well as societal efforts to encourage – or require – them.

These three groups encapsulate the range of Americans’ responses to coronavirus vaccines. They also provide a way to understand views about vaccines generally.

A few findings:

The Mifepristone case was argued before the 5th Circuit today and it went exactly as predicted:

A panel of 5th Circuit Court of Appeals judges — all Republican appointees — unapologetically carried water for the anti-abortion litigants Wednesday during oral arguments in a case where those litigants are trying to get an abortion pill, mifepristone, yanked from the market. 

“When we celebrated Mother’s Day, did we celebrate an illness?” Judge James Ho, a Donald Trump appointee, snarked, regurgitating a false argument by the anti-abortion doctor plaintiffs that the Food and Drug Administration classified pregnancy as an illness to rush mifepristone through the approval process. 

But perhaps the comedic peak of the arguments came when George W. Bush appointee Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod took time out to scold the lawyer for Danco, a manufacturer of mifepristone, for criticizing Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the anti-abortion district court judge that handed down the first ruling in the case. Kacsmaryk’s ruling has been widely panned, including by his fellow judges, as the latest in a series of nakedly partisan decisions. 

“Your filings have been excellent, however I am concerned about some rather unusual remarks in the filings — these are remarks we don’t normally see in briefing from very esteemed counsel that talk about the district court,” Elrod said, affecting a dramatic tone to read phrases including that the district court “defied long-standing precedent” and that the court’s injunction was “an unprecedented judicial assault.”  

“I’m wondering if you would have had more time and not been under a rush and probably exhausted from this whole process, would those have been statements that would have been included in your brief?” she asked. 

When Danco’s lawyer pushed back, saying that the language reflected the unprecedented nature of the case, Elrod took an incredulous tone: “So you think it’s appropriate to attack the district court personally in the case in that way.” Ho soon jumped in to continue the beratement.  

The three-judge panel, rounded out by Trump appointee Judge Cory Wilson, left little mystery as to how it will ultimately rule. The judges asked questions premised on the myth that mifepristone is sending floods of women to the emergency room, prompting the Department of Justice lawyer to frequently remind the judges that the drug is incredibly safe. Ho railed against the FDA, listing a series of supposed errors it made unrelated to the abortion case, seemingly to make the case that judges should overturn its experts’ decisions. 

Elrod grilled the lawyer for Danco, pushing for her to provide justification for how the company would suffer any injury if the court restricts its primary product — after she and her colleagues fought tooth and nail to show that the anti-abortion doctors, who have struggled to show any direct injury from the mifepristone regime, have standing to bring the case in the first place. 

Elrod also, while asking how information about adverse reactions to mifepristone are collected, asked how it’s gathered from emergency rooms — “or, God forbid, the morgue.”

Ho also brought up Justice Samuel Alito’s furious dissent, when he asked whether the government would even heed court decisions in this case. Some Democrats have called on the Biden administration to leave mifepristone on the market no matter what happens, citing the right-wing judge shopping in the case. The White House has told TPM that it will not “ignore” the court decisions, but didn’t clarify how the FDA would act, should it lose at the Supreme Court. 

The Fifth Circuit’s attitude was predictable to the anti-abortion litigants too. It’s why they placed this case with Kacsmaryk in Texas, knowing that there’s a very good chance that they’d get a right-wing panel when the case got appealed to the Fifth Circuit. 

Fergawdsakes…

Who could have predicted?

What a lovely couple:

Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) has filed to divorce her husband of two decades, according to court records obtained Tuesday by The Daily Beast.

The April 25 filing seeks to dissolve her marriage to Jayson Boebert, with whom she shares four sons. An affidavit of service, also obtained by The Daily Beast, indicate that Jayson Boebert appeared to be caught off guard by the court proceedings. He chased away a process server with an expletive-laden tirade and let his dogs loose when he was served with the divorce papers, the affidavit said.

“Once he learned that he was being served with Dissolution of Marriage papers he was extremely angry,” the process server wrote. “I tried to hand him the documents but [he] did not take them. He started yelling and using profanities, and told me that I was trespassing, and that he was calling the Sheriff’s Office. I told him I was leaving the documents on the chair outside of the door, he closed the door then let the dogs out.”

The document noted that Jayson was cleaning a gun and drinking a “tall glass of beer” when he was served.

Boebert, who has repeatedly spoken of the importance of “family values” in her short political career, told The Daily Beast in a statement Tuesday that the divorce was due to “irreconcilable differences.”

“It is with a heavy weight on my heart that I have filed for divorce from my husband,” the statement said. “I am grateful for our years of marriage together and for our beautiful children, all of whom deserve privacy and love as we work through this process. I’ve always been faithful in my marriage, and I believe strongly in marriage, which makes this announcement that much more difficult. This is truly about irreconcilable differences.”

Boebert previously said she met Jayson when she was 16 and working at Burger King. The couple had their first kid, Tyler, when she was 18, and they recently shared that they’re about to become grandparents.

Speaking to The Daily Beast via text, Jayson said he was “upset,” but denied saying “anything bad” to the process server and that his dogs were “no threat.”

“I did not know what I was being served for or if it was some crazy left wing person coming to my house again,” Jayson continued.

“I was not drinking and I was not cleaning any gun. The divorce is sad, I did not expect this, I love her with every bit of my heart, she has been my soul mate and she is the mother of my Children.

“We have been through a lot together and I just want her to be happy,” Jayson said, ending with: “So it’s what ever she wants.”

Boebert’s office did not answer when asked if she intends to keep her married surname.

“I do not intend to discuss this matter any further in public out of respect for our children and will continue to work hard to represent the people of Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District,” her statement said.

Jayson and Boebert had their fair share of brushes with law enforcement during their time together. Jayson was arrested in 2004 for exposing his penis to two women at a bowling alley—a crime he pleaded guilty to. Boebert, who was then 17-year-old Lauren Opal Roberts, was at the bowling alley, too, but she reportedly stayed with Jason.

That same year, Jayson and Boebert were arrested for separate incidents in which they reportedly abused each other. Jayson was arrested on a domestic violence charge that February, while Boebert was slapped with charges of third-degree assault, criminal mischief and underage drinking in May.

Boebert landed herself in hot water again in 2010—with a neighbor accusing her two pitbulls of attacking a pup. Boebert pleaded guilty to a “dog at large” charge and paid a $75 fine.

Boebert was arrested again in 2015 for disorderly conduct at a country music festival, and was charged with careless driving a year later after she rolled her truck into a ditch.

More recently, neighbors of the couple called 911 in August and accused Jayson of running over their mailbox and threatening them. In 911 calls obtained by The Denver Post, a neighbor is heard yelling to a dispatcher, “It’s Lauren Boebert’s jackass husband, Jayson. He’s running over my mailbox right now… Stop you jackass. Get the fuck out of here.”

No arrests were made and the local sheriff’s office remained tight-lipped about the incident.

Uh huh…

I can’t help but wonder if Boebert, like her sister in arms, Marge Greene, hasn’t found herself a boyfriend while she’s been away. It gets lonely in Washington in all those late nights spent destroying the country.

Florida’s economy is already paying the price

@gilbertoalvolante

May 16th update. No workers in Florida.

♬ original sound – gilbertoalvolante

In a time of full employment, chasing immigrants out of your state may not be the smartest move:

The videos from Florida aren’t hard to find: Dozens of clips of empty fields, abandoned construction sites, and scores of truck drivers calling for boycotts of the state have racked up hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok and Twitter over the last month. The common thread? Fear and frustration over the state’s newest anti-immigrant law, signed a week ago by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, which mandates that businesses with 25 or more employees verify the citizenship status of workers through the federal online portal E-Verify or face stronger penalties, among other new restrictions.

The new law, which goes into effect on July 1, is the latest move by DeSantis to capitalize on immigration politics as he prepares for a likely but as-yet-unannounced 2024 presidential campaign. The law, one of the most stringent state immigration measures in the US, seems intended to contrast President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration policy as the controversial pandemic-era health rule Title 42 expired last week. But the impact of the bill, critics say, will amount to a wide-ranging and intrusive crackdown on the state’s large immigrant communities, which stand to face the brunt of the new rules.

Florida is home to about 800,000 undocumented immigrants, and many work in the kinds of businesses that would be impacted by the law, known as SB 1718. Many of those affected are also members of mixed-status families — where a son or daughter, for example, might be a US citizen while their parents are not. The bill’s impact extends beyond the workplace to health care and highways: Even family members could be targets of law enforcement under a new provision that punishes anyone who transports an undocumented person “knowingly and willfully” into Florida across state lines.

The law also requires Florida hospitals that accept Medicaid to collect the immigration status of patients and calculate and report the cost of health care for undocumented people to the state; it no longer permits undocumented people to use driver’s licenses issued from other states and prohibits state ID cards to be issued to them.

Combined, these provisions may also deal a devastating blow to Florida businesses that rely on migrant labor, as it may force workers and their families to flee Florida, Samuel Vilchez Santiago, the Florida state director of the American Business Immigration Coalition, told Vox.

“The narrative that immigrants are not welcome here is going to have a huge impact on our business community — in particular industries such as construction, hospitality, health care, and agriculture — because they rely solely or primarily on migrant labor. As fear becomes the norm in immigrant communities, a lot of these migrant workers will start leaving the state and looking somewhere else,” Vilchez Santiago said. “And there is a lot of fear in migrant communities across the state.”

The law was already causing panic across Florida before DeSantis signed it. In South Florida, reporters with a local CBS News affiliate tracked empty construction sites across Miami-Dade County and spoke with construction workers who said that many of their coworkers were not showing up to work because they feared deportation. An NBC affiliate interviewed farmworkers in South Florida considering moves out of the state because of fear of persecution.

DeSantis’s office referred Vox to comments the governor made during a press conference this week. “When we have something like an E-Verify, that’s a tool to make sure that longstanding Florida law is enforced,” DeSantis said. “You can’t build a strong economy based on illegality.”

I’ve joked about DeSantis being so extreme that he’ll be bringing back slavery before too long but if this keeps up I won’t be surprised if he actually does it. At the very least there’s a good chance he’ll jump on the other red state solutions of legalizing child and forced prison labor. He’s going to be short around 800,000 workers and I don’t see how he retreats on this one. Immigrant bashing is central to his presidential campaign.