Governor Ron DeSantis: You Sick and Dying Floridians Better Not Derail My POTUS Dreams!!

[Black Aliss]

[fraurosena]

Remarkable, isn't it, that so many prominent GOP'ers are under criminal investigation...

 

[Xan]

The puzzling thing to me is that he arranged this for people who were in Texas.  They weren't even in Florida.  He couldn't find any immigrants in his own state that he could use for his political stunt?  Did he and Abbott chat on the phone about suitable groups of people seeking legal asylum that they could use?  Did Abbott loan him this group for a favor to be collected later?  

He just wanted to use the video footage for ads and to be able to go to a rally and brag that he taught the liberals a lesson.  I hope this boomerangs back on him fast.  I guess the diehard Republicans will still vote for him but I still know people who live in Florida and they all hate him.

[Xan]

I just read that they think DeSantis is trying this again.  There's another chartered flight that seems to be bound for Rehobeth Beach, Delaware (site of Biden's vacation home) today.  The same company as before was paid $950,000.00   The same tactics are being used.  The people were to be picked up in Texas, stop by the Florida panhandle, and then on to Delaware.  This time, authorities have been alerted and the small town (1,108 residents) is preparing.

Legal authorities need to stop this asshole DeSantis before he spends any more money relocating asylum seekers.  Enough is enough.

[GreyhoundFan]

27 minutes ago, Xan said:

I just read that they think DeSantis is trying this again.  There's another chartered flight that seems to be bound for Rehobeth Beach, Delaware (site of Biden's vacation home) today.  The same company as before was paid $950,000.00   The same tactics are being used.  The people were to be picked up in Texas, stop by the Florida panhandle, and then on to Delaware.  This time, authorities have been alerted and the small town (1,108 residents) is preparing.

Legal authorities need to stop this asshole DeSantis before he spends any more money relocating asylum seekers.  Enough is enough.

It's not like Biden is there at the moment. And Rehoboth Beach is in the part of Delaware that is very red. I go to that area every year on vacation and there are tons of TFG signs.

[sndral]

6 hours ago, Xan said:

I just read that they think DeSantis is trying this again.  There's another chartered flight that seems to be bound for Rehobeth Beach, Delaware (site of Biden's vacation home) today.  The same company as before was paid $950,000.00   The same tactics are being used.  The people were to be picked up in Texas, stop by the Florida panhandle, and then on to Delaware.  This time, authorities have been alerted and the small town (1,108 residents) is preparing.

Legal authorities need to stop this asshole DeSantis before he spends any more money relocating asylum seekers.  Enough is enough.

Yep - here’s an article about the potential Delaware stunt https://www.wesh.com/article/desantis-migrants-delaware/41298212.
It’s absolutely crazy that officials in other states have to monitor where DeSantis is spending money to figure out if they have to prepare for the unexpected arrival of plane loads of people.
DeSantis says he’s sending these planes/buses/whatever to sanctuary cities/places & according to this map https://cis.org/Map-Sanctuary-Cities-Counties-and-States no where in Delaware is sanctuary - so I guess he & Abbot are just focusing on locations where high profile democrats happen to live or own vacation homes 🤷‍♀️. They’re spending a lot of money on petty immature stunts - the world has truly gone mad when the best & brightest the republicans can offer are these yahoos.

First 2 planes cost $600,000+, this batch is $900,000+ so I’m guessing 3 planes & I wonder where he’ll find his immigrants this time - his own state, kidnap from Texas again, or maybe mix it up & find them in yet another state.

[sndral]

Boom - class action lawsuit by the immigrants filed against DeSantis in Massachusetts federal court  https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3652494-migrants-flown-to-marthas-vineyard-file-class-action-suit-against-desantis/ .

Can someone pass the 🍿  please?

[SassyPants]

Sure there is that 30% of crazies who might agree with RD’s tactics, fewer if people have any conservative, economic sense. So does this dude really think that he is electable at the federal level, especially if Trump is still hanging around? 

And his affect and presentation is just so odd. Is it his inability to make eye contact? 

Watching and listening to him, he is just as unpalatable as Trump.

[fraurosena]

Defending the indefensible is hard, y'all.

 

[Xan]

17 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Defending the indefensible is hard, y'all.

 

I saw that and wondered why that was his defense.  It seems to be "we're just not getting enough migrants so I had to borrow some from Texas".  So, he can't wait until the "onesies and twosies" add up to a group?  That's not the positive spin that he thought it was.

[Dandruff]

1 hour ago, Xan said:

I saw that and wondered why that was his defense.  It seems to be "we're just not getting enough migrants so I had to borrow some from Texas".  So, he can't wait until the "onesies and twosies" add up to a group?  That's not the positive spin that he thought it was.

So he's borrowing migrants because his state doesn't get enough migrants for him to claim there's a problem with migrants?  Brilliant.

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good op-ed: "Ron DeSantis’s vile stunt outdoes Greg Abbott in trolling cruelty"

Quote

It’s all so terribly unfair. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has bused more than 10,000 migrants to Democratic strongholds. He has been doing this for months. That’s right: He cleverly figured out that dumping migrants into the laps of elite liberal hypocrites would trigger an epic Fake News freakout. He was the GOP governor who braved liberal and media outrage first.

Yet suddenly, fellow Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has upstaged him with a single incident. Transporting some 50 migrants to Martha’s Vineyard has made DeSantis into the Fake News’s biggest new trigger, all for moving a measly 0.5 percent of the migrants that Abbott shipped!

Does that sound absurd? Well, it’s true: Abbott’s allies and advisers are “stung” and “annoyed” by DeSantis’s stunt, according to the New York Times. Abbott’s office didn’t get a heads-up that DeSantis chartered planes to pick up migrants in San Antonio, sources tell the Times, after which he flew them to Florida and then Massachusetts.

Heck, DeSantis isn’t even from a Mexican border state! Yet he poached Abbott’s migrant Fox News fodder right from under his nose. As the Times put it:

Mr. DeSantis grabbed the attention of right-wing America, using Mr. Abbott’s tactic, on Mr. Abbott’s turf, to bigger and more dramatic effect.

Why this stunt catapulted DeSantis ahead in the right-wing trolling sweepstakes sheds light on the ugly incentives pulling on GOP politicians with higher ambitions these days. Note that DeSantis recognized he had to associate himself more tightly with the border, as the Times reports:

In Florida, Mr. DeSantis mused to donors last year about Mr. Abbott’s good political fortune to share 1,254 miles of border with Mexico and complained that he didn’t have the same to use as a backdrop, according to one person familiar with the conversation.

So DeSantis simply sent planes to Texas to scoop up migrants, to demonstrate that he’s every bit as determined as Abbott is to dehumanize them.

Indeed, new details about DeSantis’s scheme show how he excelled in that mission. Some Venezuelan migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard explained to The Post how badly they were caught off guard.

One migrant, for instance, says they weren’t told the island was their destination until the plane’s descent. A second says that once there, they sought to figure out how to access populous areas, but were shocked to discover they were “surrounded by pure water.”

That was likely the point: Create maximum chaos and disorientation to catch liberals and Democrats off guard, triggering their supposedly latent, hypocritical disdain for having migrants in their own midst. It failed: The island welcomed and supported the migrants, whereupon right-wing media simply pretended it had succeeded in exposing liberal hypocrisy anyway.

Ultimately, what really indicts the vile trolling exercise is this: One of its leading rationales is baloney. Its perpetrators claim the stunt is designed to show blue states the burdens arriving migrants impose on border areas. As DeSantis put it: “The minute even a small fraction of what those border towns deal with every day are brought to their front door, they all go berserk.”

But blue areas are already dealing with a large proportion of migrants who are seeking asylum, and have for a long time.

At my request, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University (TRAC) analyzed the numbers of asylum seekers awaiting hearings at immigration courts around the country. As of late August, nearly 750,000 people are awaiting asylum hearings in total, TRAC calculates, relying on court records.

Broken out by state, more than 125,000 people are awaiting hearings at the immigration court in California, and more than 110,000 people are awaiting them at the court in New York, per TRAC. Meanwhile, approximately 98,000 are awaiting hearings at the court in Florida. For Texas, it’s around 75,000.

The largest remaining groups are mostly awaiting hearings in courts in blue states such as New Jersey, Massachusetts and Maryland, though some are waiting for hearings at courts in red states.

The upshot? The “burden” of migrants is already widely dispersed. Susan Long, co-director of TRAC, says that while asylum seekers initially arrive in border communities, that’s only the beginning.

“For most, the next leg of their journey takes them to communities all across the country,” Long tells me. “The two states with the highest current number of pending asylum cases are California and New York.”

It is not certain that all those awaiting hearings at a particular state’s court are in that state. But Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, calls this a reasonable “proxy” for gauging their geographical distribution.

“Blue states have had skin in the game for a very long time,” Reichlin-Melnick tells me. “Asylum-seeking migrants often go to places where there are already-strong immigrant communities.”

Defenders of these stunts might say border communities deal with sudden influxes, and that sending migrants without warning to blue areas replicates that. But Democrats want to make migrants’ processing at the border more orderly and efficient, and are advocating reforms to that end.

Meanwhile, shipping migrants along as a surprise gotcha is dehumanizing, and adds needless chaos to something that will happen anyway: Many will go to those same blue destinations (indeed, a few welcomed the free ride).

Such nuances don’t matter to the likes of DeSantis and Abbott. After all, the rewards for generating own-the-libs spectacles for right-wing media are very great indeed. So the race to the bottom will continue. That is, if there actually is a bottom.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[Dandruff]

I hope all migrants who later become US citizens vote at every opportunity, and especially in red states.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Gee, I guess it’s different when a storm hits his state and might impact his re-election bid. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Self-awareness level of zero:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Nancy Sinatra was trending. I found out why:

[GreyhoundFan]

I can’t stand “photo ops” when anyone does them in the middle of a disaster. 

[GreyhoundFan]

The Lincoln Project did a great video:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I like George's assertion:

 

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

16 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Nancy Sinatra was trending. I found out why:

One of his staff hates him and is trolling him. I am trying to figure out if he knew but just had to get the boots on and go so there was no time to demand another pair or if he was truly oblivious. I have to think it was the first. He HAD to know he was putting on ladies’ boots, right? Right?? I bet all the military and police were laughing their asses off. I really hope his office is flooded with emails, cards, and letters reminding him that it’s a fashion faux pas to wear white shoes after Labor Day. 

[GreyhoundFan]

I’m not a big fan of Carville, but he’s 100% correct here:

 

[Anne Of Gray Gables]

9 hours ago, AlmostSavedAtTacoBell said:

He HAD to know he was putting on ladies’ boots, right? Right?? I bet all the military and police were laughing their asses off. I really hope his office is flooded with emails, cards, and letters reminding him that it’s a fashion faux pas to wear white shoes after Labor Day. 

I'm truly at a loss here. I don't care who assured him he looked good in them or whether he can credibly claim these technically qualify as winter white, thereby exempting him from Labor Day rule. The cackles of the late night hosts will die down in a few days. But if Trump starts calling him "Nancy Sinatra" or "Go Go Ronnie",  even just "Bootsie", it's all over for DeSantis.