Fri: While Democrats Freak Out Over Manchin 3rd-Party Run ..

Vivek Who?


Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, who’s got the money to advertise, is all over the place in the polls.

Dead, Deader, DeathSentence

Can DeSantis come back? Anything is possible. Maybe Trump will finally collapse under the weight of his own criminality and chaos. But DeSantis seems to have more in common with the highly touted candidates who collapsed early and never returned than the small handful who came back to win.

Is Ron DeSantis's Campaign Already Over?

Six different Republican operatives, campaign officials, and pollsters described or shared with Rolling Stone internal data and surveys they’d conducted or reviewed last and this year. Some of these sources are Trump-aligned, some support DeSantis, and others back different 2024 GOP presidential hopefuls. Across the board in the surveys, Covid-related policy — including vaccines and vaccine mandates — did not rank as an item of high concern for voters. That held true even when voters were specifically given the option of Covid policy when asked about their concerns. Since the middle of last year, Covid-related policy did not show up in conservatives’ top 10, or top 15, issues in any form, leading various campaigns and consultants to declare it, for the most part, unuseful.

This Should Fix Things.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called on the head of his state’s pension fund to review its holdings in Bud Light’s parent company after bigoted right-wing attacks over a partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney led to a reported drop in sales.

In a letter to Florida’s State Board of Administration on Thursday, the 2024 Republican presidential candidate claimed Anheuser-Busch InBev’s board “may have breached legal duties owed to its shareholders.” He said “all options are on the table” to protect the SBA and retirees, including a possible shareholder action.

“We must prudently manage the funds of Florida’s hardworking law enforcement officers, firefighters, and first responders in a manner that focuses on growing returns, not subsidizing an ideological agenda through woke virtue signaling,” DeSantis wrote in the letter to SBA interim director Lamar Taylor.

His Feud With Another Huge Company Isn't Exactly Working Out Well

The ill wind of Disney’s war with Ron DeSantis over LGBTQ+ rights appears to be blowing some magic pixie dust towards California as the theme park giant reins back its investment in Florida and ramps up spending in the Golden state.

Analysts see the company reprioritizing its expansion plans as its conflict with Florida’s rightwing governor and his so-called “don’t say gay” law banning classroom discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation escalates into a legal dispute.

In May, Disney canceled a $1bn project to build an office campus and relocate 2,000 employees to Orlando. It also pulled the plug on a Star Wars hotel that had been open at Disney World for less than two years.

Now, following comments from Disney’s chief executive Bob Iger that DeSantis is “anti-business” and “anti-Florida”, the company is all in on Disneyland Forward, an ambitious rolling program of growth at its two Anaheim theme parks. The company projects the program will generate $253m annually and more than 2,200 new jobs.

It's a Black and White Issue

US House member Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands) made the following statements during a House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing on Thursday.

"You know, Mr. Kennedy's own family decries his stance on vaccines and families disagree on a lot of things," Plaskett said while grilling Kennedy. "I got family members that, you know, we all disagree, so that doesn't mean anything. But the fact that he has famously sent a request to a party guest that they had to be vaccinated to come to his party, and I'd like to introduce into the record a letter from Lewis Silken — a law firm representing Mr. Kennedy — which states, as he has stated repeatedly, he vaccinated all his children. And I'd like that to be introduced into the record."

Meanwhile, Plaskett continued, Kennedy "tells the Black community and myself, a mother of five Black children, that I should really be careful and not necessarily have the same safeguards to protect my family, my children, from a virus that has killed millions of people because I'm Black. There's no secret that this is an amplification of his own platform."

Dumb, Dumber, Flori-Dumbest

AP African American Studies arrived last year at 60 schools across the country, and this fall, it will be tested in roughly 800 high schools – twice what was originally planned – thanks to a surge in demand.

Despite that growth and highly publicized revisions to the course, it remains off limits in Florida.

Though the state this week approved its own African American history standards that officials have lauded as the anti-woke approach to teaching about Black experiences in the United States, advocates say the standards whitewash or gloss over key aspects of that story.

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The upshot: Possibly hundreds, or thousands, of Florida high school students whose hopes of taking a complex, college-level version of African American history have been dashed amid a political tug-of-war.

Flori-Dumberer

The Tampa Bay Times reviewed records showing an upward tick in staff departures at some of Florida’s largest universities. And, as the Board of Governors discovered this spring, doubts about the state’s academic workplace are spreading fast.

Matthew Lata, a music professor at Florida State University, told board members that candidates were turning down positions in his college “because of the perceived anti-higher education atmosphere in the state.”

Talk of the phenomenon is everywhere, he said. “More and more often we are hearing ‘Florida? Not Florida. Not now. Not yet.’”

Some brain drain examples documented by the Times:

-University of Florida: 1,087 employees resigned in 2022 — the only time in the last five years that the number exceeded 1,000. More than 730 employees had already left UF this year as of May 31.
-University of Central Florida: 103 faculty did not return for the 2022-23 academic year, the highest number in the last five years.
-Florida State University: 136 faculty resigned last year, also a five-year high.
-University of South Florida: 146 faculty left in 2022, up from an average of 95 over the previous four years.

The numbers for 2023 are on track to be worse than 2022.

Will Anyone Care Unless They Start Losing Football Recruits?

Texas worker accused of being on drugs was actually dying of heatstroke

The mother of a 24-year-old worker who died from heatstroke while working for a construction firm in San Antonio, Texas, has filed a lawsuit against his employer.

Gabriel Infante was working for B Comm Constructors in San Antonio, Texas, on 23 June 2022, digging in the hot summer sun to move internet fiber optic cable, a job he had recently started with a childhood best friend while they were finishing college.

The lawsuit comes after Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, signed a controversial bill into law on 14 June that prohibits local municipalities from enacting heat protection standards for construction workers. The bill nullifies ordinances previously passed in Austin and Dallas that mandated 10-minute breaks for workers every four hours. A similar ordinance was being considered in San Antonio before the state bill was passed.

According to the lawsuit, Infante began exhibiting heatstroke symptoms including confusion, altered mental state, dizziness and loss of consciousness. His friend and co-worker Joshua Espinoza began pouring cold water over him, trying to cool him down. A foreman insisted Espinoza call the police, claiming Infante’s bizarre behavior was due to drugs, and the foreman pushed for a drug test when emergency medical services arrived.

On the day of the incident, temperatures in San Antonio reached in excess of 100F (37.7C) with humidity levels reaching as high as 75%, noted the lawsuit.

Infante later died in a hospital from severe heatstroke and had a recorded internal temperature of 109.8F (43.2C). The Center for Disease Control states a body temperature of 103F (39.4C) or higher is a main symptom of heatstroke.

From Wiki: "Ramaswamy rose to prominence in conservative circles as an "anti-woke" activist.[1][2] He has centered his candidacy on criticizing what he calls "new secular religions" such as "woke-ism", "climate-ism", "covid-ism", and "gender ideology".[2][3] He is also a critic of the environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) initiatives.[4][5] In April 2023, Forbes estimated his net worth at $630 million; his wealth comes from biotech and financial businesses.[6]"
Sheesh, another car just hooked up to the crazy train.  I wonder how many Sheeple will join his flock?  And it seems to me that both the extreme left and right can be accused on promoting "new secular religions".  Mr Pot, meet Mr. Kettle.