Who Moved My Cheese? 🌻 🌻 🌻

Mouse Wars:  Next week Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is expected to formally launch his presidential run, because despite all the time he’s spent out of state in vacation hotspots such as Iowa, until now his campaign hasn’t been official. In preparation he has signed a slew of new laws over the past few weeks.  Mostly those laws, specifically those which target the LGBTQ community, reproductive rights, and gender affirming care, advance his anti-wokeness agenda at the expense of real people trying to live their lives as they see fit, but one of the new ones is unusually personal, it allows Florida governors to run for president without resigning, a law he needed to enact because until now Florida law required that running governors step down and he’s not ready to give up his current day job or the residence that comes with it because it’s not like he’d be welcome at any Disney castle right now. Not so coincidentally yesterday, Disney CEO Bob Iger stole some thunder from DeSantis’ plans, announcing that due to “changing business conditions” the Mouse is scrapping plans to build a $1 billion office complex in the greater Orlando Lake Nona area.  The Nona complex was expected to bring 2000 relatively high paying jobs and lots of tax revenue to Florida. Naturally, DeSantis responded by slamming Mickey and Minnie, asserting that they’d cancelled their Florida expansion plans because they’re facing a precipitous decline brought on by all that excessive wokeness.  While Disney, like many other businesses right now, has been belt tightening, it’s more than fair to assume that the Florida cancellation is intended to be a slap at DeSantis, an escalation of the war against Disney that he started after Disney criticized the first iteration of his anti-gay bill, the one that prohibited discussing sexuality with younger kids but has now been expanded to prohibit discussions through high school. DeSantis, who judging by all those forced laughs he was practicing in Iowa, is working on improving his image, part of his effort to put to bed assertions that he lacks charisma and doesn’t really enjoy being around people. That may be an impossible task, at least that’s what his fellow Floridian Donald Trump, who oozes charisma albeit of the darkest kind, believes. Immediately after the Disney announcement, Trump’s campaign ran an ad slamming DeSantis for costing Florida those highly desirable Disney jobs. For his part, while conveniently ignoring all the other Republican candidates in the mix, DeSantis told major donors that only two of the three people running could win the 2024 race. The two he referenced were himself and Joe Biden. Maybe not quite the slam he thought it was. The DeSantis – Trump slap down is a darkly fun distraction, but we shouldn’t keep our eye off the ball as DeSantis isn’t the only one still going after social freedoms.  The mifepristone abortion drug case is still winding through the courts on its way to SCOTUS.  Yesterday, judges on the all too reliably conservative leaning US 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals seemed particularly skeptical of the DOJ’s argument that the FDA’s 20 year old approval should be left intact.  And because why not, more states keep jumping on the anti-trans care bandwagon with the Texas legislature banning gender affirming care for minors.  The Florida version of that legislation also makes it difficult for adults to receive gender affirming care while another law allows doctors and insurance companies to refuse to provide care that conflicts with their personal religious personal or ethical beliefs. #WTF

Weaponization:  Meantime back in Congress, Gym Jordan’s weaponization committee is busy trying to take down another one of those “woke” institutions, the FBI. Yesterday, he platformed three suspended FBI agents who claimed that they had been victimized by their FBI bosses for being whistleblowers, though none of them were victims nor did they qualify as whistleblowers, but they had been suspended and lost their security clearances for not doing their jobs. Each of them is a supporter of the January 6^th protesters, in addition to being sympathetic to their insurrectionist views, they resisted participating in any of their arrests because maybe those nice weapon wielding Oath Keepers and the like were just tourists?  Two of the suspended FBI guys are being financially supported by Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist who also worked for former Congressman current Truth Social CEO Devin Nunes back when he chaired the House Intel Committee.  When confronted with that little factoid by several Democratic Congresspeople including Committee Ranking Member Stacey Plaskett and NY newbie Rep Dan Goldman, both quick witted and very articulate veterans of the impeachment trials, Gym Jordan responded so what, they need to eat. Gym also had no problem that one of his so-called whistleblowers had given an interview to Russian’s RT.  Nor did he think that it was necessary to share videos or transcripts of their full testimony with the Democratic members of the committee because neither he nor the so-called whistleblowers trust any of those guys.  The endgame of these hearings is to discredit the FBI as part of a strategy to discount the value of any damning evidence obtained in any of the Trump investigations.  Gym doesn’t operate in a vacuum, elsewhere in Congress Margie Q wants to impeach a whole crowd of senior Democrats, including Biden and Speaker McCarthy said that he thinks that Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff should be expelled purportedly because of what was, or really wasn’t, in the Durham Report but maybe also as payback for the Democrats trying to speed the expulsion of George of many names Santos.    

Tick Tock: Trump continues to burn through lawyers. Tim Parlatore, one of the lawyers defending him against Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the purloined Mar a Lago documents has resigned and it appears that another, Ray Smith III who represented him in litigation aimed at reversing Georgia’s 2020 election results believes he may be a target of Fulton DA Fani Willis’ criminal probe. The clock is ticking on all those investigations given the election calendar.  The debt ceiling clock is also ticking and though both sides have expressed optimism that a solution is reachable, nothing is in writing yet.

Tweety Birds:  Elon Musk who shouldn’t be relevant but is because he owns Twitter and is the CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX continues to defend tweeting anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories including claims that the Texas shooter with all those swastika tattoos can’t possibly be a white supremacist.  By the way would it surprise you to learn that Linda Yaccarino, the now former NBC Universal executive that Musk has hired to serve as Twitter’s new CEO is a Trump supporter? Yaccarino was responsible for driving advertising revenue in her prior position, interesting because when Musk bought Twitter, he said he planned to shift from an advertising to a subscription fee-based model.  With the blue check subscription plan swirling the drain he’s apparently moving back to advertising, at least for the foreseeable future.  Yaccarino has her work cut out for her because most of those advertisers she worked with during her NBC days, won’t want their ads to appear aside Musk’s hate messages nor alongside similar messages currently populating the Twitter feed despite their good feelings for her.