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As the Government battles to not disclose WhatsApps to the official pandemic probe, a solicitor for bereaved families hints at the chair's potential resignation

Generalissimo DeSantis opens a new front All the GOP presidential candidates (except for Donald Trump who apparently had some urgent hysterical posting and golfing to do) converged on Iowa last weekend for Sen. Joanie Ernst’s Roast and Ride gathering. They gave speeches in front of haystacks and wandered around in dad jeans pressing the white Republican flesh. Florida first lady Casey DeSantis sported a black leather jacket with the words “Where Woke Goes to Die” emblazoned on the back and Mike Pence donned a leather vest and rode around on a Harley trying desperately to imitate a regular guy. It was a magical time. There were a lot of speeches but one stood out among all the rest: “… we will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of congress, we will never ever surrender to the woke mob! “ As you can see, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is fashioning himself as a wartime leader, aping Winston Churchill’s most famous speech given June 4, 1940 after the miraculous rescue of tens of thousands of British troops at Dunkirk.

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. 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.

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.

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.

Showing ’em how it’s done “American carnage” was an unlikely inauguration theme. It had the merit of being memorable, even if it was “some weird shit.” And in unlikely ways prophetic. Just the sort of thing that appeals to radicalized Independent Charismatics. So what is happening in Minnesota under DFL Gov. Tim Walz is easily lost in the “carnage” fallout, rightward lurch of red-state legislatures, revanchist backlash, and Beltway hostage-taking. E.J. Dionne wants to be sure that doesn’t happen. Is the “avalanche of progressive legislation” passed with a “two-vote Democratic majority in the Minnesota House and one-vote advantage in the state Senate” a “Minnesota Miracle”?

And a mockery of democracy The massacre of pro-democracy supporters in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989 stays with me. I was out of town on business and saw the shocking reports in my hotel room. Maybe I remember because the next day I joined 6,000 Chinese students from across the Midwest in a protest in downtown Chicago. Or maybe we all remember because of “Tank Man.“ Anne Applebaum reminds Twitter that, far from China, Polish voters on the same day chose democracy in “partly-free elections that contributed to the fall of communism” (Associated Press): In the election, Poles voted heavily for Solidarity candidates over communists in a clear sign that they wanted a change of power. That vote accelerated the fall of communism in Poland later in 1989, and fueled the wave of revolutions in eastern Europe over the following year or two. “Poland showed to Europe and to the whole world that you can build a democracy without violence or bloodshed,” European Council leader Donald Tusk said during ceremonies in his hometown of Gdansk. Tusk was a Solidarity activist and served as Poland’s prime minister from 2007-2014. After Jan.

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.

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.

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.