So what’s new in DuhSantistan?

Quote from a former client.

Trial attorneys often portray insurance companies as having "deep pockets" and "unlimited" funds. But Florida domestic carriers have been losing billions in surplus annually the last few years. In fact, they're paying $1.18 for every $1 in premium they receive.

Do attorneys not realize that an insurance company is comprised of its customers? That means the "deep pockets" are actually the wallets of Florida homeowners who are paying the price for this egregious lawsuit activity.

Hardworking Floridians are experiencing annual double-digit rate increases that line the pockets of unscrupulous trial attorneys and encourage them to file even more lawsuits, making insurance rates skyrocket even further.

Policyholders and insurance companies are losing. The trial attorneys are winning.

 

Yeah, sorry, but I don't believe a word from insurance companies, particularly when they're seeking to foreclose their customers from being able to recover money they're owed. We heard the same empty rhetoric from those in the medical field. They got their laws, the working man lost protections and rights, and yet the promises they made did not come true. Corporations look out for themselves.

The hardworking Floridians out there filing lawsuits aren't doing it for funsies. They're doing it because insurance companies are too often crooks.

 

In my personal experience with property insurance claims, many of these hardworking Floridians were solicited by attorneys and public adjusters and talked into filing claims while being promised cash settlements from their insurers.
Dont know about the medical side.

 

For-profit attorneys cannot directly solicit clients. Now, is it possible some unethical ones break the rules? Sure. But I have strong doubts that those hardworking Floridians would choose a lawsuit if they were content with how their insurance company treated them.

 

They were talked into filing claims when otherwise they wouldn’t have even filed one. Saw it several hundred times and yes it was generally a few law firms that represented all of them. The public adjusters were the bird dogs for these firms.

 

I haven't followed this and don't really have time to go back and read the posts but I can tell you there are so many people on both sides running scams after these storms. In my years as a building inspector I can't tell you how many roofers I talked to who claimed after a hurricane or hail storm they can get most anybody a new roof. I also had contractors & homeowners both try to get me to deem structures unsafe for human occupancy. Everybody is running a scam, then you have folks like me who have been paying homeowners insurance for 50 years and never filed a claim. I did talk to an adjuster once about a burglary claim but my loss was so small it wasn't worth the bother.

 

Insurance will be the biggest election issue next go round in Florida. The industry is destroyed in Florida on almost every front. Companies are pulling out of the state not only on personal but on commercial lines. Commercial rates are going up 40-100% in some industries. You can barely find anyone thay will cover something like Assault and Battery with liquor liability.

I talk to our broker a lot lately doing renewals and she said brokers are leaving the industry because it's just a miserable existence right now having to deliver devasting rate increases to long time small business customers

 

RD picks up the endorsement of racist anti-Semitic Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. Jumped off the trump train.

 

For anyone who doesn't know who Nick Fuentes is:
Nick Fuentes - Wikipedia

Nicholas Joseph Fuentes (born August 18, 1998) is an American white supremacist[5][6][7] political commentator and live streamer. A former YouTuber, his channel was permanently suspended in February 2020 for violating YouTube's hate speech policy.[8] He holds antisemitic views[9] and denies the Holocaust.[10][11] Fuentes self-identifies as a member of the incel movement.[12]

On October 29, 2019, Fuentes' followers, known as Groypers, began to heckle Turning Point's Culture War Tour, including a speaking event for Donald Trump Jr.[13] In 2020, seeking to rival CPAC, Fuentes began holding the annual America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC).[14][15] Fuentes was an attendee and speaker at events preceding the 2021 United States Capitol attack.[16] He also attended the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.[6]

 

Will DeS refute it or silently glow in it?

 

To take a different turn here in DeSantistan, remember when we were going to get rid of FSAs and replace them with “progress monitoring”?

Guess what, the new tests, FAST , will be taken three times a year and they’re (wait for it) FSAs!

So now we will disrupt the entire school not once but three times. Cambium Assessments will get paid not once, but three times, plus all of the makeups/retests.

 

Need a WOW emoji. When legislators run the state school system.

 

FIFA and Qatar show DeSantis “Christian” values


Summary: Two days after FIFA told Germany and several other European teams that if they chose to wear OneLove armbands supporting LGBTQ+ rights, the teams would be punished with yellow cards during their games. The armbands were meant to highlight Qatar’s criminalization of homosexual conduct.
In response, when the German team lined up for their team photo in Khalifa International Stadium, they covered their mouths to show how FIFA tried—in vain—to silence them.

World Cup Teams Protest, Elon Offers Amnesty, Fox’s New Attitude on Crime, Georgia GOP Wants Fewer Voters, Push for Law Allowing Medical Misinformation, Antisemitism Invades Reality TV, and More!

 

trial begins in the SA suit against the governor. DeSantis humiliated the guy yanking him out of courtroom and then marched out of office by sheriff's patrol

Suspended Tampa state attorney is first to testify in his lawsuit against DeSantis (msn.com)

Upon seeing the email, Warren said, he walked out of a grand jury proceeding he was monitoring and went to his office to confer with his chief of staff, Gary Weisman. A few minutes later, he got a knock on his door.

Keefe was there with two sheriff’s deputies, including a major that Warren knew was in charge of courthouse security. Keefe introduced himself and handed Warren the governor’s suspension order. Warren asked if he could review it first, but Keefe refused, Warren testified.

“He said, ‘You cannot have a chance to review this. You have to leave immediately,’ ” Warren said. The sheriff’s major was apologetic, Warren recalled, referring to Warren by his first name. “I’m sorry, Andrew, you need to go,” Warren recalled him saying.

He saved some files on his computer, grabbed his briefcase and walked out the door without grabbing any of his other belongings, he said.

 

DeSantis’ chief of staff, public safety czar now named in lawsuit over migrant flights (msn.com)

Two members of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration are among new defendants named in a class-action lawsuit filed against the governor over the plan to fly 49 migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard earlier this year.

In an amended complaint filed Tuesday morning, attorneys with the Lawyers for Civil Rights accused DeSantis’ Chief of Staff James Uthmeier and the governor’s “public safety czar” Larry Keefe of working together with others to “deceive” migrants who were flown to Martha’s Vineyard. DeSantis, Florida Transportation Secretary James Perdue and the Florida Department of Transportation are also being sued.

Others now named in the lawsuit include Perla Huerta, who is identified in the lawsuit as the “lead recruiter” of the 49 migrants who were flown to Massachusetts, and James Montgomerie, the president of Vertol Systems Company, the company contracted by Florida to relocate the migrants. Vertol Systems Company is also named as a defendant.

 

Speaking of Vertol Systems.
Flight Company DeSantis Hired For Martha’s Vineyard Stunt May Have Violated Law Banning Political Donations
Ron DeSantis Chartered Planes From GOP-Allied Donor to Fly Migrants to Martha’s Vineyard
It's reasonable to infer that the company received the contract to transport the migrants as a quid pro quo for its political donations.

 

watching this web get untangled should be entertaining. I thought DeS was smarter than this but apparently his hubris exceeds his intelligence. Don't see how this one is going to get buried or paid off

 

I'll park this here because I don't think it deserves a separate thread. Judge Joe Topkins was appointed last year by the Governor to be a County Court judge in Tampa. He graduated Ave Maria law school in 2014. Judge Topkins will be the keynote speaker at a reception following the Hillsborough County Red Mass in January. The Red Mass is a local Mass for judges and lawyers. The tradition goes back 100s of years. The subject of his presentation:

An "Ungracious Silence": The Influence and Impact of Catholic Thought upon the Free Exercise Clause.

It is the same title as his piece published in the Ave Marie Law Review. Ave Maria bears its own explanation, but I will try to keep this brief. Here is an abstract, with a limited summary:


INTRODUCTION

When many people think of the greatness of America and the principles it was built upon, they would undoubtedly identify America and its form of government or Constitution with Protestantism. However, according to the Protestant James Wilson, who is considered to be the "second most influential" person behind the Constitution and was one of the first Supreme Court Justices appointed by President George Washington, (1) there has been an "ungracious silence" to the Catholic influence of religious freedom in this country. (2) This silence unfortunately means that two of the most significant tests to have ever interpreted the First Amendment's "free exercise" of religion clause (3) are flawed. Since both tests failed to account for the Catholic understanding of the relationship between religious freedom and the common good, the Supreme Court has jeopardized a person's right to exercise freely his or her religion in America.

Perhaps the reason for this silence is due to the fact that since the American Founding and until the late Twentieth Century, there has been a general "fear, distrust, and hostility" toward the Catholic Church. (4) These sentiments partially stemmed from the idea that the Catholic Church and "the American way of life" (Americanism) were fundamentally incompatible. (5) The Church's teaching that "error has no rights" (6) was viewed by Americans as meaning that the Church would only nominally support fundamental American freedoms (e.g., religion, speech, press and association), until it could influence government to use its "coercive power ... to deny legal existence to beliefs which the Church regarded as erroneous." (7) Thus, since it was once believed that Catholicism was incompatible with the First Amendment, it may come as a surprise that Catholic thought helped enrich and shape the First Amendment.

The first part of this Note will proceed through history briefly examining the works of St. Augustine, Pope St. Gelasius, Pope Gregory VII, and Pope Boniface VIII in order to see a strain of Catholic thought that viewed the Church and State as two separate, but mutually beneficial spheres. Moreover, the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Thomas More will continue this vein of Catholic thinking not only regarding the relationship of Church and State, but also regarding how freedom of conscience and religion promotes the common good. This strand of Catholic theology will ultimately provide the basis for the implementation of Catholic values in the New World.

So briefly stated, the Catholic conception of "religious freedom", freedom of conscience and Church-State relations should be given more weight, (ultimate weight?) in US law. First of all, that's absurd. He tries to go back to James Wilson to somehow suggest that the Catholic conception of religious freedom was part of the way the original Constitution was drafted. Not even close. In fact, the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause were not even part of the original Constitution, they were part of the Bill of Rights.

And I'm quite certain that there is no originalist argument for an interpretation of either the Free Exercise Clause or the Establishment Clause along Catholic lines. Let's consider. “Americanism” was labelled a heresy by Pope Leo XIII in 1898 because the state and the Church were separate. From Wiki


Americanism was, in the years around 1900, a political and religious outlook attributed to some American Catholics and denounced as heresies by the Holy See.

In the 1890s, European "continental conservative" clerics detected signs of modernism or classical liberalism, which Pope Pius IX had condemned in the Syllabus of Errors in 1864, among the beliefs and teachings of many members of the American Catholic hierarchy, who denied the charges.[1]

Pope Leo XIII wrote against these ideas in a letter to Cardinal James Gibbons, published as Testem benevolentiae nostrae. The Pope lamented for America where church and state are "dissevered and divorced" and wrote of his preference for a closer relationship between the Catholic Church and the State along European line

In fact, the Catholic Church did not recognize any individual’s right to freedom of conscience, to be free from state coercion on the particulars of religious belief, until….1965. Again, Wiki:

Dignitatis humanae[a] (Of the Dignity of the Human Person) is the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom.[1] In the context of the council's stated intention "to develop the doctrine of recent popes on the inviolable rights of the human person and the constitutional order of society", Dignitatis humanae spells out the church's support for the protection of religious liberty. It set the ground rules by which the church would relate to secular states.

The passage of this measure by a vote of 2,308 to 70 is considered by many to be one of the most significant events of the council.[2] This declaration was promulgated by Pope Paul VI on December 7, 1965.

Dignitatis humanae became one of the key points of dispute between the Vatican and traditionalist Catholic such as Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre who argued that the council document was incompatible with previous authoritatively stated Catholic teaching.

You will note that traditionalist Catholics have never accepted that teaching, and they still do not, as shown by many in high positions in our federal government, and the scheduled Red Mass here in Tampa.

Believe them when they tell you who they are

 

There's actually very little difference between the Islamic theocracies of the Middle East and the conservative Christian theocracy that some so called Evangelicals would like to impose in the United States.