Nate Monroe
@NateMonroeTU
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Executive editor @TheJaxTrib. Ex-Florida columnist, @USAToday Network. @jaxdotcom alum. Son of a Cajun. LSU.
Joined November 2014
is this the part where the velociraptor comes out and eats him.
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why yes, 60,000 deaths later we emerged unscathed.
Florida has lowest COVID-19 case rate in the country. They did it without vaccine mandates, without mask mandates in school & with no restrictions on businesses. Life simply went on. @GovRonDeSantis was right again. My latest in Friday's @nypost
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Important context to keep in mind that Jacksonville has been terrorized by Nazi creeps since at least last year, hanging banners across the interstate and projecting hateful light displays on buildings. We have a deep problem here.
“This is a dark day in Jacksonville’s history. There is no place for hate in this community.” Sheriff TK Waters, @MayorDeegan and other officials announce details of a mass shooting near the EWU campus. The shooter left a hate-filled manifesto, police say. @JSOPIO @CityofJax
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Some larger context: DeSantis pressured the legislature to pass a congressional map that, for the first time in decades, wiped out a Jacksonville district that allowed Black voters to elect the candidate of their choice. He was staring at those constituents directly in the face.
Gov. Ron DeSantis just now got a very tepid reception at the vigil for the victims of yesterday's shooting. He was also getting jeered some, prompting City Council member Ju'Coby Pittman to chide the crowd.
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Florida is undoubtedly redder than it used to be, but all across the state voters rejected election deniers, right-wing education nuts, and desantis-backed candidates. Yes, some maniacs won, but tonight was hardly a mass endorsement for desantis’ brand in his own backyard.
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Jax doing its thing and defying desantis’ “free state” ban on pride lights on local bridges.
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Column | Gov. Ron DeSantis, flanked by a posse of white law-enforcement officials in Polk County, signed the so-called "anti-mob" bill into law Monday. It's what “cancel culture” actually looks like, in its terrifying, official form.
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Well, no columns from me for a few weeks. Some great things happened this weekend, and long story short I’m on baby leave. Try not to burn the place down eh?
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a "fake" holiday as opposed to all the holidays you can find out in nature?.
“Indigenous Peoples’ Day” is a fake holiday created to sow division. Of course Joe Biden is the first president to pay it any attention.
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It is difficult to emphasize what a total upset of the established order this mayoral race is.
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so in desantis’ Florida, state agencies can sponsor explicitly political advertising — aimed at influencing the outcome of a vote — but private citizens get threatened with prosecution if they do the same in support of an issue desantis opposes.
The DeSantis administration is now trying to intimidate television stations into taking down ads supporting Amendment 4 – the constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would overturn the near-total abortion ban that Ron DeSantis signed into law last year.
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Jax being Jax and giving the governor a nice middle finger in the eye.
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it was very rude of the president to declare that collective bargaining works right before a collectively bargained deal was struck that rendered desantis’ little bit of meaningless grandstanding immediately outdated.
With 16 deepwater ports, Florida is a hub for worldwide trade and an essential link in our nation’s supply chain. Four of these ports—Port Everglades, PortMiami, Port Tampa Bay, and JAXPORT—are impacted by the International Longshoreman’s Association strike and the inaction of
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Column | The banners hung over interstates, the hateful images broadcast in light displays on our high-rises, the symbols we refuse to let go, the rhetoric, ever devolving — it was all there, right in front of our noses, that terrible tapestry we made.
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Column | Forget Ben Sasse. If there's going to be a disgraced university president in the news, by god it's going to be Richard Michael Corcoran of New College of Florida, the once-respected liberal arts school turned raggedy right-wing academy.
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there definitely needs to be fewer national stories about whether desantis is likable and more about the actual story of the moment in Florida: the destruction of public education, from kindergarten through college, touching every district, every college, each classroom.
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The secretive and sloppy way this was put together highlights another myth-breaking reality about desantis: He's not just bad at politics, he's bad at governing, too. The insurance market collapsed, condo life is ruinous, laws locked up in the courts, cost of living exploding.
Plan to put golf courses, pickleball courts at state parks already meeting resistance from top Florida Republicans; @JimmyPatronis warns it’s a “slippery slope”; @WiltonSimpson says he has “serious concerns.”. Follow up to important @MaxChesnes reporting here.
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***the state of Florida once did this at 4:45 am***.
Was this really necessary? The federal government just scared 70%+ of American with this alert. This is way too much Federal Government for me. FM/AM radio and Broadcast TV is plenty to get your alerts out.
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so a random and particularly sketchy organization (incorporated in Delaware with seemingly no real presence in Florida) pitched DEP on a ridiculous idea and DEP just set about making it happen? what kind of bullshit explanation is that?.
BREAKING: @FLDEPNews tells us the group behind the proposal to build a golf course at Jonathan Dickinson State Park is withdrawing its plan . Here is everything we know right know @TB_Times:.
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Column | DeSantis, surrounded by dour right-wing edgelords, some of whom are new Florida transplants with peculiar histories, has shown a penchant for attacking the institutions that have served Florida well for decades. Parks are just the latest.
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Hey Twitter fam, did a thing recently. She was crazy enough to say yes!
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Column | During Sunday's vigil, DeSantis revealed himself to be an utterly spent force — lacking even the vocabulary to speak lucidly about the awful thing took place the day before. Mourning Jacksonville needed a leader. Instead, it got Ron DeSantis.
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New, from a @jaxdotcom, @orlandosentinel, @FloodlightNews reporting partnership: .'Unsettling,' 'un-American': FPL consultant obtained personal information, surveillance photo of Times-Union journalist.(yes it's me; yes it's awkward).
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One does not schedule an appearance on *Sean Hannity* to discuss "preparedness." You do it to score points. Even if you buy this argument about Harris, this man has a historically powerful storm bearing down on his state while debris from the last storm is littered everywhere.
Tonight, I spoke with Sean Hannity about Florida’s preparedness for Hurricane Milton.
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my god these are truly the lamest people in the world.
Imagine a Florida where the air is constantly thick with the smell of marijuana. That's exactly what Amendment 3 will do. With no restrictions on where pot can be smoked—apartments, beaches, parks—public smoking will be the new normal, and clean air will be a thing of the past.
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Like his state parks development plan, like his removal of popularly elected prosecutors, like his opposition to abortion rights, like the wanton removal of health insurance from working class families — it’s utter contempt for his constituents, their needs and their preferences.
DeSantis-style democracy: After Moms for Liberty-backed candidate gets 20% of the vote in Broward School Board race, governor elevates him to state Board of Education
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oh wow: I significantly underreported the salary being collected by a direct report who appears to be Sasse's most expensive hire: Kurt Dudas, a VP in charge of the Jacksonville campus project, was hired on a $687,000 salary, not the $513,000 listed in UF's pay database.
Column | Ben Sasse's biggest bet at UF was ambitious, controversial, enormously expensive - and still moving forward.
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Column | Hi America, now Ron DeSantis is your problem, too .
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While DeSantis flop sweats his way through Iowa — fake-smiling and fake-laughing with enough tension to pop the strings on a harp — his state simmers and suffers. It's difficult to operate an ice cream shop when your only product is formaldehyde in a cup.
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Breaking (significant Jacksonville news): Federal grand jury indicts former JEA executives on conspiracy, wire fraud, accusing them of trying to profit off sale of utility.
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effectively erasing this from history - that desantis not only embraced every conventional lockdown measure, including school closures, and pursued others, like shuttering bars and breweries, with particular zeal - is one of the great PR coups of our time.
I was relieved when Ron DeSantis locked Florida down during COVID-19. He’s busy running for POTUS and seems to have forgotten — so here is that video.
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good thing the “reforms” implemented by the legislature and desantis were exclusively all things this scummy industry wanted; if these clods cared an ounce about their constituents this would prompt a criminal investigation and a special session.
Insurance adjuster Jordan Lee dug further into his work from Hurricane Ian and says he found that the Rapkins weren’t the only family whose claim had been altered.
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i think the last time someone posed 'serious questions' to rick scott he invoked a certain constitutional right not to answer them.
25th Amendment?. @SenRickScott poses 'serious question' of @JoeBiden removal from office after Afghanistan crisis, via @AGGancarski. . #FlaPol
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In desantis' Florida, only he is allowed to run campaign ads - and to do so with taxpayer money, Florida statutes notwithstanding.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis may be preparing to take legal action against television stations airing ads in support of a citizen-led constitutional amendment that would end a near-total ban on abortion in Florida. .
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I do hope people remember desantis was weird long before it was uncool to be weird.
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desantis is not good at this, which is not surprising to anyone who’s seen him outside choreographed, heavily edited soundbites. He’s a wooden public speaker. That won’t matter in this race, but it will weigh him down when he runs for president.
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The state judiciary has utterly failed to rein in the desantis administration’s run-amok electioneering with taxpayer money, so, not for the first time, a federal judge has to do it instead.
Breaking: A federal judge has granted a temporary restraining order preventing Florida officials from coercing TV stations to pull ads supporting Amendment 4, which legalizes abortion up to viability. The court ruled the state’s actions violated free speech rights.
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Column | Shad Khan asks more and more from Jacksonville taxpayers, and gives less and less to fans and the city. This is not tenable.
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Column | Gov. Ron DeSantis likes to accuse others - like Democratic prosecutors - of ignoring the law when it suits them. But as controversy over the recent taxpayer-financed anti-abortion ads shows, he possesses only selective reverence for the law.
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holding randy fine in contempt is one of the last bipartisan positions in Florida.
Judge holds #Florida Rep. Randy Fine in contempt of court. He was caught on camera allegedly giving the middle finger during an August virtual court hearing. via @EricRogersFT.
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Column | We can only guess at DeSantis' strange hostility toward arts and culture funding, but it's difficult to avoid concluding he must view Florida's cultural institutions as a threat to the peculiar political culture he is trying to cultivate instead.
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There isn't a lot of armchair psychology necessary here: We have a decade-long record demonstrating bad character judgment, lack of transparency and aloofness toward paying customers. That is, right now, Shad Khan's legacy in Jacksonville.
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Column | To justify hiring this neophyte, the UF board of trustees concocted a version of Ben Sasse as a disruptor, a change agent, an innovator. These are insipid business-school weasel words, the language of scammers. What could go wrong?.
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News: Florida Power & Light’s former CEO previously denied — vehemently — that his company had received a subpoena from federal prosecutors investigating two JEA executives. Not only did FPL get a subpoena, that former CEO was interviewed by the FBI.
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Some college kid rear ends our car in Middle of Nowhere, SC. We are completely fine but the car is totally done. A couple sees what happened, stays like an hour as witnesses and then drives us 30-something miles to a rental car place. People are still kind to one another.
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Column | Finally, belatedly, blessedly, the damned deed is done. Even a racist shooting couldn't move the Jacksonville City Council off its collective, cowardly arse to take down the city's last major confederate monument. So Mayor Donna Deegan did it.
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Column | DeSantis isn't just campaigning against an abortion-rights amendment: He is using the power of state government to kill it, making a mockery of the notion, enshrined in law, that there should be a firewall between governing and electoral politics.
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the next public school to close could be that cute little elementary school in your leafy neighborhood, or the high school you went to, and just try remember who didn't give two shits about that when it happens.
Asked about Jax school closures, @GovRonDeSantis says 'the money follows the student'. Reporting by @AGGancarski. #FlaPol
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Someone who has seen 32,000-plus constituents die on his watch and is gripped only by arrogance. DeSantis' failure to empathize and be humble, and his obvious lack of a desire to find better ways to do things, is frightening.
This roundtable hosted by Florida @GovRonDeSantis has so far concluded that contact tracing has been a "failure," lockdowns are "ineffective" and masks are "harmful.".
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I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the basic point here, but I find it remarkable we're at a point where the governor's office can call people who want to mask their kids child abusers while the rest of us are apparently left with the responsibility of coddling these fools.
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A thing that is really interesting and really cool is that Florida news orgs across the state are either working together or complementing one another's coverage of Florida Power & Light.
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Column | Matt Gaetz, the pompadoured Panhandle populist, the daddy’s-boy imp, the over-coiffed, overly loud, overtly weird attention-seeker, broke the U.S. House of Representatives. Once again, the nation must suffer Florida’s terrible progeny.
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I regret to inform the citizens of New Orleans we have decided to keep their team and will be incorporating them under the Jaguars flag going forward.
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gee I wonder why anyone would think Florida was primed for gruesome acts of violence.
'You loot, we shoot': @GovRonDeSantis reminds criminals of 2nd Amendment as recovery from #HurricaneIdalia starts. Reporting by @AGGancarski. #FlaPol
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It sure seems fair to ask whether having criminal investigators door knock for little more than innuendo — particularly in the context of other ways state power has been weaponized — is a violation of these voters’ civil rights. Regardless, it’s totally outrageous.
New: Florida residents felt shaken after DeSantis' election crime police knocked on their doors to question the validity of their signatures on petitions that helped get the abortion amendment on the ballot. w/@romyellenbogen @lmower3 .
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The Jaguars’ best super power is and will always be the shattering mind-fuck their successes instill on their competitors, a worst-loss-of-my-life, will-never-recover, we-will-never-forget ass whooping that echoes in eternity. Dak will never be the same after this.
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New: Jacksonville City Council President Ron Salem just said Mayor Donna Deegan and the Jaguars have reached a deal on renovating EverBank Stadium. They will present it to the council on Tuesday. (we, and I'm sure others, filed a records request yesterday for that deal).
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The Duval County (Jacksonville) School Board has bucked @GovRonDeSantis and adopted a mask mandate for the 6th largest school system in Florida during an emergency meeting. Parents can only opt-out with "medical certification." It will last 90 days and begin Sept. 7.
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lake, masters, mastriano, laxalt - desantis personally campaigned for these freaks with high-profile rallies; I'm not quite sure why their failures say a lot about trump's weaknesses and desantis' strengths
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The governor signed a bill this evening that will gut local ethics commissions - rendering it virtually impossible for them to investigate allegations of misconduct and corruption.
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So DeSantis and his allies spout off some crazy bullshit about “lockdowns” and masks. Meanwhile, he leaves the state’s major cities the much harder work of doing actual mitigation (mask mandates, etc.). Florida *is* the state of lockdowns. In part because of Gov. Grievance.
BREAKING: Curfews and causeway closures to control unruly spring break crowds in South Beach will be extended through April 12, the Miami Beach City Commission unanimously decided Sunday during an emergency meeting.
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Random dude pulls up a seat next to me at the bar. He's there for trivia night (I was not). I helped him with the first question and he renames his team, "Lone wolf and friend." He turns out to be a Marine vet, served during the Cold War. We got second place. What a town.
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Feel free to tag @ChristinaPushaw about this. There’s almost no way this didn’t come from the governor’s office. JTA has lit the bridge up with all sorts of colors on all sorts of occasions, with no pushback, until now.
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Gov. Ron DeSantis just now got a very tepid reception at the vigil for the victims of yesterday's shooting. He was also getting jeered some, prompting City Council member Ju'Coby Pittman to chide the crowd.
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“I have friends in Florida,” desantis said in most blatant lie so far.
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desantis is now 15 minutes late for a fake event where he will "give" $1,000 checks to Jacksonville cops that came from the federal bailout he didn't support.
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desantis says providing county-level COVID data "may not be a bad idea going forward." I guess journalists weren't as bad-faith as his office has argued the past several weeks.
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Calls it embarrassing the BoE and Corcoran are "more afraid of the governor" than afraid for the lives of kids and teachers.
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Another revealing moment today was DeSantis’ argument that the citizen-driven amendment process robs voters of their voice: he believes he and the legislature are better able to represent voters than voters are themselves (this is not a unique view on the right).
Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s top abortion banner, dishonestly casts Florida doctors as the state’s true abortion-denying villains .
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Jacksonville says go fuck yourself.
Jacksonville is weird. It’s like the 10th largest city in the country and it has basically no cultural footprint. There’s nothing that really comes to mind to mind when someone says “Jacksonville”. I guess they have a football team?.
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Column | Jacksonville Mayor-elect Donna Deegan's top appointments will put more women in positions of power than any previous administration in the city's consolidation-era government, and they signal an eagerness to break with the recent past.
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we demonized “politics” — a legitimate way to fix things — instead of bad-faith, self-dealing little shits who have no interest in fixing things.
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The governor deliberately broke the law to rob political power away from North Florida Black voters, some of whom booed him in person earlier this week at a vigil for the Jacksonville Dollar General shooting victims. A judge called him on that ploy.
BREAKING: A Florida judge struck down Gov. Ron DeSantis' North Florida congressional districts in the redistricting lawsuit, ordering the Legislature to draw a district that allows Black voters the ability to elect their preferred candidate.
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lol Florida politicians are so corrupt I started a column this morning that mentioned this joker and it's already outdated.
Greenberg stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from his elected office, federal authorities allege, including by using his office’s funds to buy cryptocurrency for himself.
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An additional note here: It's not just that the process was secret. The law requires disclosure of the finalists selected for a given job. By naming Sasse the only finalist, the search committee effectively short-circuited even that one vestige of an open process.
Column | The plundering of the University of Florida.
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This is so wildly disingenuous: The governor who demanded a draconian abortion ban - to prop up his fading presidential prospects - now says doctors can't cite it as a reason not to provide an abortion. So, one the one hand, risk prosecution; on the other, a massive lawsuit.
DeSantis says that certain doctors should get hit with "massive" malpractice judgments if they use state abortion laws as a reason not to treat someone. FWIW - Fla law currently caps $ in malpractice suits & limits who can sue over malpractice.
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Rumors of widespread looting and violence in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina were greatly exaggerated, but they succeeded in fomenting suspicion and, ultimately, harm against fellow residents. They also became useful, disingenuous rhetorical weapons for dishonest politicians.
Lee County, Florida: .TRY TO LOOT .I WILL EAT YOUR FACE .👏👏👏👏
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Column | Gov. Ron "Never Back Down" DeSantis backs down from reviled parks-development plan.
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This is also a giant loss for Sheriff T.K. Waters, whose political brand the Davis campaign relied *heavily* upon.
It is difficult to emphasize what a total upset of the established order this mayoral race is.
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Column | Nearly 180 new laws took effect this week. The upshot: Florida is hotter, meaner, and more dangerous.
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Reported w/ @schindy: Influential Northeast Florida donor, subject of active JSO investigation over alleged sexual misconduct allegations, found dead Thursday.
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The complete dipshittery of the legislature, the governor and everyone else involved is sublime: The judge has found the parent bill of rights actually *empowers* school districts to use their discretion on policies like mask mandates. Literally the opposite of their intent.
This is what can happen when you elect fabulists, clowns and sycophants instead of lawmakers: They end up sabotaging their own agenda.
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Column | It's odd to see the governor of Florida celebrate the defeat of two proposed constitutional amendments supported by strong majorities, but such is the result of a government tailored to be unresponsive to the popular will. The Florida paradox.
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The willingness to selflessly surrender political power is *the* most of American traditions.
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imagine this guy calling you a groomer and meatball and etc and you just turn around and debase yourself for him; these people are such losers.
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This is a big loss for deSantis in purplish Jacksonville. Nathanson was a local right-wing activist who was backed by the governor and had the resources to flood neighborhoods with mailers. desantis had better but limited luck in the open races in red districts here.
Cindy Pearson has apparently retained her @DuvalSchools District 3 board seat, holding just 294 more votes than former @DuvalMoms chair Becky Nathanson.
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My theory of the case basically was that if Trump won, he was going to win no matter what. He didn't even really have a campaign - no real strategy, no ground game. It was just Trump, and apparently that's who we are, braindead racism and all!.
I think Harris ran a strong campaign, and Trump ran a totally fucked up campaign, but ultimately, people preferred Trump's personality and his policies.
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you'll be priced out of your home and desantis shrugs and claims he pays more for mcd's.
Fla @GovRonDeSantis - during an event in Keys - is asked about insurance/Citizens. He says changes made by Fla have helped but overall inflation is a problem affecting rates. Said he & family recently went thru McDonalds drive-thru and it "was 50-some dollars" for a family of 5.
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96 percent of parents apparently don’t agree with @GovRonDeSantis that masks are child abuse.
According to @DuvalSchools, the district has received 4,700 mask opt-out forms out of approx. 127,000 students who are returning to the classroom. That’s 3.7% of students enrolled in brick and mortar school in 2021-22.
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yeah I mean who hasn't been pining for a whooping cough resurgence.
Florida's top GOP state senator on health policy Manny Diaz says he wants to review ALL vaccine mandates in the state. Including longstanding vaccine mandates for mumps, measles and other ones children have LONG had to take to attend classes.
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