So what’s new in DuhSantistan?

The list just goes on and on. He's gone way out of his way to be divisive, far more than any governor Florida's ever had. I think it will backfire on him, but he's clearly only thinking of the 2024 primaries right now and his strategy of governing-by-owning-the-libs is clearly working in that regard.

 

Largest margin since the Civil War. FL is the new anti-California, thanks in no small part to the way Floridians think about DeSantis.

 

A number of posters have certainly gotten more worshipful since 2020, which is mostly because he came around to their views on COVID, not because he was a possible presidential contender. If anyone's views shifted on DeSantis, it was down to their outlook on COVID, very little to do with national ambitions.

 

So you’re saying it was Floridians who led their governor out of hysteria, whereas residents of other states did not ? So it was Florida Man ?

 

Yeah, it does seem like he's just using his office to try to own the libs. Imagine if a liberal governor took the same approach as DeSantis:
- Required state offices to celebrate Limbaugh's death
- Required companies in the state to have diversity training based on CRT
- Required college professors to testify in support of a bill he had proposed.

 

Desantis has clearly courted the national spotlight in the Trump lane. I think there’s good indication that swing voters are moving away from that and will be even farther from it by 2024, giving either Trump or Desantis a tough road in the presidential election

 

Now this anti-science mini-Trump creep wants the Florida Supreme Court to investigate Covid vaccines, plus he is launching a committee to counter the CDC, National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration. I guess any day now he will launch a committee to investigate Democrats eating babies and the present whereabouts of John Kennedy Jr.

DeSantis targets Covid vaccine manufacturers and CDC in latest anti-vaccine moves | CNN Politics

 

Honest question: Can any DeSantis supporters or anti-vaxxers here explain what he might possibly hope to find with this?

 

NYT with an article today, this isn't limited to Florida although we are in worse shape than most states. Seems like a good place to invest that fat budget surplus DeS keeps bragging about.

Personal experience when our kids were going thru high school is that the better teachers were all moving into administration as it paid much more for much less work. We need to cut the number of administrators and administration pay and increase the number of teacher and pay better teachers more. Unions seemed to be a major impediment to both of those ideas.

OT - if you have a subscription to The Athletic, you now get free 6 months of NYT

The number of teaching graduates has went from 176k in 1970 to 85k in 2020.

Opinion | There’s a Reason There Aren’t Enough Teachers in America. Many Reasons, Actually. - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Teachers are not only burnt out and undercompensated, they are also demoralized. They are being asked to do things in the name of teaching that they believe are mis-educational and harmful to students and the profession. What made this work good for them is no longer accessible. That is why we are hearing so many refrains of “I’m not leaving the profession, my profession left me.”
..........................

systematically examined news reports, department of education data, and publicly available information on teacher shortages for every state in the U.S. We find there are at least 36,000 vacant positions along with at least 163,000 positions being held by underqualified teachers, both of which are conservative estimates of the extent of teacher shortages nationally.

In an email, Nguyen argued, “The current problem of teacher shortages (I would further break this down into vacancy and under-qualification) is higher than normal.” The data, Nguyen continued, “indicate that shortages are worsening over time, particularly over the last few years. We do see that southern states (e.g. Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida) have very high vacancies and high vacancy rates.”
.......................................
Wages are essentially unchanged from 2000 to 2020 after adjusting for inflation. Teachers have about the same number of students. But, teacher accountability reforms have increased the demands on their positions. The pandemic was very difficult for teachers. Their self-reported level of stress was about as twice as high during the pandemic compared to other working adults. Teachers had to worry both about their personal safety and deal with teaching/caring for students who are grieving lost family members.

 

Yes I am aware it is happening everywhere due to common conditions, but is worse here - hence "Teacher shortages are extreme even considering other external factors". I would submit that Florida being in relative worse shape is attributable to the attacks on teachers by DeSantis. I don't know any way to disaggregate that data, but the attribution is certainly logical

 

How do you use the Athletic subscription - I am an Athletic subscriber

 

I got an email blast advising that I was eligible and logged into NYT with my same login as Athletic. Maybe targeted, not sure, but thought I would share anyway

 

I tried to use my Athletic login, but they still wanted to to reup. Its the same login as my old NYT subscription, which likely accounted for it

 

I think it is more than just DeS though. I see local school boards being populated by MAGA members but maybe that is just in the MAGA haven I live in (Collier County)

 

and the anti woke crowd cheer his attacks, and the latino crowd cheers his false machismo (throw Fauci, etc)

 

The two are not necessarily distinct. In a lot of counties, maybe all of them where MAGA types ran for the School Board ran, he actually put up and funded those candidates.


Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who won re-election in a landslide Tuesday, threw his political weight behind 30 school board candidates this election cycle.

Nearly all of them won.



Lindsey Curnutte, a press secretary for the DeSantis campaign, said in a statement the governor “led a coalition of parents to establish students-first, parents’ rights school board governance across the state. The DeSantis Education Agenda was on the ballot, and the voters made their voice clear: We want education, not indoctrination.”

Florida's DeSantis-backed school board candidates win as he declares state as 'where woke goes to die'

 

He must stop the woke CDC by creating a Ministry of Vaccine Truth.

 

Attention and limelight?

 

Nothing. It's a play to distance himself from Trump and say how he treated vaccines differently than Trump did. His base is anti vax/question the vax and they will eat it up. My question is if this was such a big deal then why didn't Ashley Moody do something about it a year ago?

 

Colbert is skewering DeSantis tonight. Played a slew of clips of DeS supporting vaccines