The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

 

The good:

• Biden leads Trump 49-45. He leads women (55-38), 18-34 year olds (65-30), Latinos (66-26), Indies (47-33). These are good, healthy numbers.

• Dems lead in Congressional Generic 48-46, up from 46-47 in January. Congressional generic asks “which party are you supporting next year for Congress?” These are good, healthy numbers.

• Trump’s lead over DeSantis doubles from 46-31 (+15) to 51-22 (+29). A big yikes for the Florida governor.

• Like other polls DeSantis is already remarkably unpopular with the overall electorate. He is -16 here, -19/20 in Civiqs and Biden is only -9 in this one. While voters do not have a lot of information about DeSantis what they do have so far is really bad for him. It suggests, like Trump, he may have a low general election ceiling. I remain really surprised by how intense his negatives are this early - it has to be the most worrisome data out there right now for the Republicans for it suggests their problems go far beyond Trump. [snip]
  

  As we saw in 2022 the Biden approval rating is once again not a good gauge for understanding the election this cycle. While he may not be popular, he is more popular than his opponents. The constant focus on his low approval rating led a lot of commentators astray in 2022, and it is doing so again this year. The most powerful force in American politics over the last 3 election cycles has been fear and opposition to MAGA, and if you aren’t talking about that you are leaving out the most important part of the story...

All the usual caveats apply to polling this far in advance of primaries, conventions and the election. But it's better to be in the Democratic Party's shoes right now than to be in the Christofascist Republican Party's.

The bad: 

... In interviews with Florida politicians, activists and members of the business community — many of whom won’t whisper a word against him on the record — they describe how DeSantis has catered to special interests as ferociously as he has fought the culture wars. DeSantis wields near-dictatorial sway over his state, which he has used to grant special interests a breathtaking list of favors. He has helped them evade accountability, steamrolled regulations, funded their pet projects, and foisted bailouts and tax breaks onto ordinary taxpayers. Often he does so quite openly. One day after launching his 2024 presidential campaign in a live event on Twitter with its owner, Elon Musk, he signed a law relieving private space companies like SpaceX, another Musk company, from liability for accidentally killing its employees. 

In exchange for how he has run the state, DeSantis raised more money for his 2022 reelection than any governor in U.S. history. The funds now power his nascent presidential campaign: Just a few weeks ago, he transferred $82.5 million from his gubernatorial campaign into his presidential super PAC. As a declared presidential contender, he continues to be a fundraising juggernaut, despite donors complaining he has all the personality of wet cardboard.

This doesn’t mean businesses are getting everything they want — it means they’re getting everything DeSantis wants them to have. Despite building his campaign around falsehoods about LGBTQ+ people and fearmongering of woke boogeymen, DeSantis has identified one true thing, which is how few countervailing forces there are against corporations and their political whims. Even in states where Republicans have gerrymandered popular opinion into irrelevance, big consumer-facing companies remain invested in public sentiment. North Carolina’s anti-trans bathroom bill cost the state the NBA All-Star Game. Racist voting restrictions in Georgia did the same for the MLB All-Star Game and draft. DeSantis understands the threat this poses to his ascendance but remains reliant on corporate financial support, which is why his most meaningful attacks on corporate power have all involved reducing it relative to his own.

The word is out. “If you want to get in good with this governor and his team, you have to pay up,” said a Republican consultant in Florida who requested anonymity. The consultant added, “You need to be very careful getting crosswise with the governor.” He will not hesitate to remind you who really runs the state...

Bootsie's corrupt "pay to play" schemes follow the classic authoritarian/ banana republic model. His grubby, bullying form of politics and governance makes us recall the old Dashiell Hammett line from the Maltese Falcon:  "The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter." But if the polling above holds, he won't be able to bring his "Florida Freedom" to the rest of us.

The ugly: 

...A weakened Putin could face challenges from the Russian elite, or inspire leaders in Russian regions such as Chechnya and Tatarstan, many of which have long-standing grievances with the central government, to push for additional autonomy or separation from Russia. In that kind of situation, “we’re very much talking about the dismantling of the Russian state as it currently exists,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, who served as deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia from 2015 to 2018.

Putin may be less stable than he appeared, said Angela Stent, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. “It’s not a good look for Putin that this man [Prigozhin], this leader, was able to challenge the authority of the ministry of defense, to take over a city, and to march down the road to Moscow,” she said. “And obviously Putin had to bargain with him.”

“This has been such a credible signal of the extent of discontent and dissatisfaction with the war in Ukraine and with the Putin regime in particular,” said Kendall-Taylor, who is now at the Center for a New American Security. “It’s going to be really difficult to overcome that.”

The real question, said Andrew Weiss, research director on Russia and Eurasia at the Carnegie Endowment, and a former National Security Council and State Department official “is are there significant, powerful people in the shadows who believe that this mess is the final straw, and Putin has screwed up so royally that they need to make him see the error of his ways and push him from power. I have a hard time believing that the scared people around him are likely to move against him.”  [snip]

Russia’s neighbors are bracing for chaos if the situation in Moscow deteriorates, Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics said in an interview. The NATO nations that border Russia are some of the West’s fiercest Putin critics, but they are also the most sensitive to what happens if instability spills across the heavily guarded frontier.

“If there is chaos in Moscow, there’s the same question people were asking back in 1991,” during a coup attempt against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. “Who controls the nuclear football?” said Rinkevics, who will become Latvia’s president next month.

No one is more invested in the genocidal war in Ukraine than war criminal Putin.  Eventually ousting him might put Russia on a path to negotiations before events become even more calamitous.

DeSantis Doubles Down On Threats To AP Programs

 

Florida's would-be strongman Gov. Ron "Bootsie" DeSantis apparently didn't like the College Board's broadside against his attacks on the Board's AP African American Studies framework (they rightly saw DeSantis and his Department of "Education" as making "false and politically motivated" charges designed to further his political agenda).  Well, Bootsie has his shovel, and he's digging a deeper hole:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) warned Tuesday that he may withdraw state support for AP programs, intensifying his ongoing conflict with the College Board, which oversees all AP classes, including an African American studies course the DeSantis administration says leans left and lacks “educational value.” Earlier this month, the College Board said it was revising the course to eliminate lessons on Black Lives Matter and the reparations movement.

After the College Board said Florida’s criticism of its AP African American studies course amounted to “slander,” DeSantis suggested his state might drop AP classes from its schools. Instead, he said, schools could expand alternatives, such as the International Baccalaureate and Cambridge Assessment programs, which, like AP classes, permit students to earn college credit by passing an exam.

It remains unclear what the governor can do to nix AP classes, although he may be able to halt Florida’s practice of paying AP exam fees ($97 per test) for public school students. If DeSantis follows through, hundreds of thousands of students will be affected: Over 199,000 Florida students took AP classes in the 2020-2021 school year, The Washington Post has reported, and roughly 366,000 AP tests were administered statewide at the end of that year.

Parents across Florida are naturally reacting in shock:

“It terrifies me that DeSantis is threatening to eliminate AP classes after seeing how much it benefited my daughter’s education,” [Clearwater resident Colleen] Hamilton said. “It is truly horrifying to be a resident of Florida right now.” Hamilton is “heavily weighing” whether to encourage her 2-year-old granddaughter’s father to move his family out of Florida before the girl reaches school age, she said.

Stephana Ferrell, a 40-year-old mother in Orange County, is having similar thoughts of escape. Ferrell, a former photographer who put her business on pause to help lead Florida Freedom to Read, a nonprofit organization that fights school book challenges and bans in the state, has two children enrolled in public elementary school. Ferrell has long hoped her children would take AP classes.

“My number one concern as a parent right now is that my kids will be cut off from additional information about the world,” she said. “Will they be able to learn beyond what our state is going to allow them to know?” Ferrell said she and her husband are waiting to see how DeSantis fares in the 2024 presidential election before making a final decision on moving from Florida, where their family lives.

This petulant, racist autocrat is foolishly willing to put thousands of Florida students at a disadvantage in applying for college admission to further his own careeer, perhaps figuring that those courses/ tests are mostly taken by the children of pointy- headed elitists, so score one for owning the libs! 

But what's going on here is much more serious and destructive:  in his quest to be the next Trumpist cult leader, Bootsie is pandering to the Republican base by focusing on (racist dog whistle alert) "anti-wokeism," which has been described as "weaponized personal grievances masquerading as a genuine social concern," and which Bootsie got enacted in Florida as the "Stop W.O.K.E. Act."  Specifically in the educational sphere, it represents a wholesale racist whitewashing American history to downplay or eliminate discussions of systemic racism, social justice and contributions of people of color and other marginalized groups to our Nation's tapestry.  Bootsie's targeting of AP African American Studies (and gutting the liberal New College of Florida) are key elements of his war on academic freedom, but are just a part of his broader fascistic culture war that includes attacks on the LGBTQ community ("Don't Say Gay" law and related attack on Disney), the media,  and lifesaving science.

Sadly, Floridians handily re-elected "Meatball Ron" (the Malignant Loser's latest sobriquet for Bootsie), whose ambitious agenda may someday be afflicting your family and their future.  We should all be working fervently to make sure that never happens.

BONUS:  More on what "freedom" means to Bootsie.

(Photo:  our favorite pic of Bootsie)

 

DeSantis' Authoritarian Push Continues

 

Florida's Republican-controlled legislature is taking up two MAGA pleasing priorities of their ambitious, Trumpian Governor Ron "DeSanctimonius" DeSantis: taking over Walt Disney World's self-governing district, and expanding their migrant "relocation" program. They've convened a special session at the behest of DeSantis to elevate his culture war on Disney's pro-LGBTQ+ position, and to please the white supremacist / anti-immigrant base of his support. From the Associated Press report:

"The meeting is the latest development in a high-profile feud between DeSantis and Disney over the company’s criticism of a law dubbed by critics as 'Don’t Say Gay,' which bars instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade and lessons deemed not age appropriate.

The governor, in going after Disney, displayed a willingness to penalize one of the state’s biggest employers and political donors, reinforcing the combative leadership style that has propelled him to national political stardom and appeals to conservative primary voters.

Lawmakers are expected to create a program to transport immigrants who are in the country illegally to another state if they’ve already been processed by the federal government and if the migrants volunteer.

DeSantis had already used part of a $12 million fund, paid for by taxpayers, to fly about 50 South American migrants from Texas to the Massachusetts resort island of Martha’s Vineyard, bringing widespread condemnation." (our emphasis)

When he's not forcing schools to clear their library book shelves for fear of felony charges from his state police or bravely defending gas stoves, he's claiming credit for expanded rural broadband provided by President Biden's infrastructure legislation, something Republicans voted against overwhelmingly. Would you expect anything different from this up-and-coming far right demagogue?

BONUS: He can't leave the drag queens alone either. 

DeSantis' Assault On The First Amendment

Imagine Floriduh's version of Hungary's Viktor Orbán becoming President:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis isn’t exactly hiding what he’s up to.

Earlier this month, the Republican appointed Chris Rufo, the architect of the 2021 moral panic over “critical race theory,” to the board of a public liberal arts school in Florida. As Rufo told New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, his goal — and the goal of several other DeSantis appointees to the New College of Florida’s board — is to transform New College, a liberal bastion in the South, into something more like Hillsdale College, a conservative school in Michigan with close ties to former President Donald Trump.

The one positive thing that can be said about this appointment is that it is, at least, legal — something that cannot be said about many of the governor’s attempts to sic the government on institutions he deems too liberal. DeSantis isn’t just determined to use his public office to suppress dissenting voices and promote his own reactionary views; he’s also quite willing to thumb his nose at the Constitution in order to do so.

Indeed, DeSantis often seems to revel in his contempt for the First Amendment, even fundraising off of it. Shortly before DeSantis signed unconstitutional legislation punishing the Walt Disney Company for criticizing one of his policies, the governor sent a fundraising email to supporters touting the fact that he was doing so. The company, DeSantis said, was being punished after it “tried to attack me to advance their woke agenda.”

DeSantis signed legislation imposing speech codes on university professors, as well as legislation attempting to seize control of content moderation at sites such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. He attacks classroom teachers with vague, unconstitutional laws stigmatizing LGBTQ people. His administration threatens drag performers with criminal charges.

In his victory speech shortly after winning reelection in his increasingly conservative state, DeSantis pledged to “fight the woke in the legislature,” “fight the woke in the schools,” and to “fight the woke in the corporations.” 

One of his lawyers later clarified that the word “woke” means “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”

As a constitutional matter, a governor is allowed to give speeches arguing that the United States is somehow miraculously immune from systemic injustice. He may sign legislation repealing programs intended to cure these injustices. He may appoint officials to public school boards that share his belief that the US is immune to these injustices. And he may even enact policies that help perpetuate these injustices, assuming that those policies violate neither the state nor federal constitution.

But DeSantis goes much further. He wields the government’s sovereign powers to sanction speech he does not like, and to punish institutions that criticize him. DeSantis, in other words, does not seem content to simply enact policies that hew to a right-wing economic or social vision. He wishes to use the sovereign powers of government to shape public discourse itself — punishing some ideas, rewarding others, and conscripting public schools and universities into his culture war...

Milhiser has much more to say about DeSantis'/ DeSanctimonious' un-American authoritarianism, including the prospect of him as President appointing more ultra- right hack judges in the mold of Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, et al to the Federal judiciary -- think Florida's Trumpist judge Aileen Cannon as a template.  The comparisons to dictator Orbán, a darling of Republican "thought" leader Tucker Carlson and CPAC as part of an international authoritarian movement, have been duly noted elsewhere and is worth a read.

DeSantis/DeSanctimonious has the attention of the pundits and Republican pols eager to have Trumpism without Trump.  DeSantis gives them that, mixed in with some Hungarian g(h)oulash.

BONUS:  

 

But our elite national political reporters will continue to describe him as an electable non-Trumpy "culture warrior."

He's a fascist and a liar. https://t.co/naXFAx3nnu https://t.co/LdMB0V22qc

— Dan Froomkin/PressWatchers.org (@froomkin) January 17, 2023

(Photo:  He'll tell you what to think and say! /Paul Hennessy, SOPA Images via AFP)