Now that Disney has done a Dominion Voting Machines to Ron DeSantis, UD will admit that she doesn’t understand this one at all. A hugely pro-business state’s governor seeks to destroy DISNEY?

[T]he company has earmarked more than $17 billion in spending at the resort over the next decade, growth that would create an estimated 13,000 jobs at the company.

Disney paid and collected a total of $1.2 billion in state and local taxes in 2022, according to company disclosures.

Just because Disney people said they disagree with state Don’t Say Gay policies? WEAWY??

So UD figures her problem is that she’s not a Floridian. If she were a Floridian, the state shutting down an unspeakably massively successful enterprise would be yes of course should have destroyed massive jobs and massive taxes years ago good going, man! UD figures if she’d been reading Carl Hiaasen’s novels all these years (and she didn’t do that, even when she lived on Key West), starting with his (and others’) Naked Came the Manatee, she’d be hip to why a governor eviscerating his state’s most successful enterprise makes gobs of sense and guarantees him the next presidency by acclamation.

But our UD is a status-anxious coastal elite who would never be caught DEAD… DEAD, I tell you! in or around Disneyworld, land, resort, park, Euro, communities, residences, monorail UND SO WEITER. Not her thing, not her world, not her problem. In short, things down there had to get pretty funky for UD to notice, much less blog about them. And now, with Disney’s big ol’ lawsuit today, they’re superfunky.

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Best headline so far:

Disney Sues Ron DeSantis

for Being a Colossal Asshole

I think this one ends badly. Flashforward shows an unshaven guv who seems to have lost twenty or so pounds addressing “the nation and the world” in a YouTube of his own making. Weak trills arise in the background – presumably Fla.’s first lady begging him to come out of the bathroom.

“YOU TALKIN’ TO ME? YOU TALKIN’ TO MEEEE?” Bare-chested, trembling. “I told you I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d destroy them and all their mice. I told you if it took my death I’d destroy them. So HERE GOES KIDDIES and you might want to look away.” He takes out this season’s must-have accessory — an AR-15 — and blows off his head.

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Another good one:

Disney Tells Ron DeSantis:

Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes

Joasia Zakrzewski finished third in the 2023 GB Ultras Manchester to Liverpool 50-mile race – but is thought to have travelled by car for 2.5 miles.

The 47-year-old GP, from Dumfries, is understood to have been tracked on GPX mapping data covering a mile of the race in just one minute 40 seconds.

… Or, actually, none of the time.

You know the old English proverb: Be careful what you wish for. The radical anti-abortionists in Idaho made it so women have to have babies – babies babies all the time! – and now we see the rather odd result: Ob/gyns can’t leave the state fast enough; and now an entire hospital has shut down its obstetric unit.

Ain’t dat funny? If you live in Sandpoint, you can’t have a baby or get any kind of natal care there! Wonder where the regional hospital that has some ob/gyns plus the budget to pay for all the lawsuits is.

And hey how bout that death penalty for mothers idea? That‘ll incentivize women to make babies babies all the time too!

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And then there’s Texas.

… and even though his name still emblazons the Arkansas State Medical Board website (he appears twice!), his apparent practice of billing the government – always at the severest level of illness – for patients he’s reportedly never seen has attracted the attention of the Attorney General.

Maybe update the web page? Maybe not so cool that the just-resigned CHAIR of your state’s medical regulator has all this time possibly been a bigtime Medicaid fraudster?

Crime-ridden SF suffers from – along with everything else – constant smashing of car windows to grab anything worth grabbing. A CNN reporter wrote that

her rental car was broken into outside City Hall even with hired security monitoring the vehicle. [Another person shared] a story from a visiting friend, who purportedly lost $10,000 in valuables and is now “scarred forever.”

A local pol ridicules the “scarred forever” thing cuz getting your car smashed and your valuables taken is nothing – this dude’s been car-smashed repeatedly, as have his friends, plus he has friends who have been murdered, for fuck sake! So you lost ten thou and there’s glass everywhere! Big deal! SF = crime, babe, and if you don’t like it move to the suburbs where a bunch of weasels want their families to be safe!

Why don’t our “beautiful sunsets go viral”? Why does it have to be these petty crimes that after all are a structural part of urban life everywhere?

Oh little town of Tenby!

On the western coast of Wales!

Town everyone did envy

For its beachy hills and dales

Its strands so nice and sandy

Its waves so wild and free

Its seals so fun and randy, its porpoises so dandy!

It was a place where tourists loved to be.

********************************

Then rats as big as kittens

Or well – let’s face it – cats

Decided to be smitten

With its cliffsides and its flats.

They love to run about and mate

Inside the cliffside holes

They propagate and propagate.

They’ve taken quite a toll.

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The cliffs are all eroding

The townsfolk stupefied

The signs are all forboding…

It’s time for raticide!

… getting it up.

Good ol’ Mississippi. As we always say of it, somebody’s gotta come in last.

The Mississippi Senate has passed a bill that will stop electric car companies from opening their own dealerships in the state, ensuring that the state famous for being last place in many rankings of all 50 states remains there… [W]hen confronted with a rapidly growing industry – which is currently eyeing the South for billions in investment with new battery and car factories, bringing long-term job prospects and prosperity along with them – Mississippi looked at their neighbors, and at their own last-place rank in everything, and said: “Nah, we’re good here.”…  

[Mississippi also imposes] an annual $150 tax on electric vehicles, far above the amount of taxation that a hypothetical similarly efficient gas vehicle would have to pay. This charge is approximately equivalent to the amount of gas taxes a similarly efficient gas vehicle would pay if it drove 100,000 miles in a year. Meanwhile, gas vehicles benefit from tens of thousands of dollars of incentives over their lifetime, in terms of ignored health and environmental costs of pollution, which harm the health of Mississippians and everyone else in the world.

Pity this simple man who thinks his smart, hardworking, working class son getting admitted to one of the two or three best undergraduate institutions in the world is something to be proud of. His bitter son has endlessly tried taking the wind out of that parental sail, instructing him in Yale’s “hostility to the Almighty and disparagement of America.” 

Yea, woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets. 

But after all these years, Dad still won’t listen, still fails to perceive a Yale education as pure “indoctrination,” a re-education camp in hate America first. His son pats himself on the back for having withstood undergrad and grad school at Yale with his love of country intact!

Though UD wonders about the sort of masochistic orientation that would not only stay in a cesspool for four years (had he not yet heard of transferring?), but extend the agony by staying there for law school.

UD knows it’s none of her business, but did Ron also have his girlfriends tie him down and beat him with a copy of Soul on Ice?

Arkansas Proud!

The mystery of the awful 2021 Tesla crash, about which I wrote here, has been solved.

A final report from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board found that a 2021 fiery crash that killed two people in a Tesla was a result of the driver speeding and being intoxicated… NTSB’s investigation determined the probable cause of the crash was “the driver’s excessive speed and failure to control his car, due to impairment from alcohol intoxication in combination with the effects of two sedating antihistamines, resulting in a roadway departure, tree impact, and post-crash fire.”

You can take the Texas good ol’ boy out of twentieth century car technology, but you can’t take him out of revving the engine plus polypharmacy.

People at the time were quick to blame Tesla.

Their services are held at abortion clinics. “Planned Parenthood” is the name of their denomination. They tithe to abortion providers.

UD‘s a little astonished, but she recalls Katha Pollitt’s words: “Religion is what people make of it.”

I mean. I strongly support abortion rights, but this is really over the top.

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Sing it.

Oh come to the church at Planned Parenthood

Oh come to the church in the mall…

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And by the way – I don’t think all abortion providers are Planned Parenthood affiliated, are they? I think a better name for this denomination would be Church at the Abortion.

If [John] Eastman is ultimately disbarred, it would be a sudden end to an ignominious legal career. He is not very good at reading the Constitution or the law. In 2020, well before he began plotting to overturn that year’s election, he published a widely derided op-ed in Newsweek suggesting that vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris might be ineligible for that office because she was supposedly not a U.S. citizen at birth. You do not need to be a former Clarence Thomas clerk or a former Chapman University law professor, as Eastman is, to Google “Kamala Harris birthplace” and read “Oakland, California,” thus making her a natural-born citizen.

Eastman then suggested, however, that birthright citizenship itself might not be constitutional, a theory that characterizes much of his approach to the law during the 2020 election. The answer to any legal question is whatever John Eastman wants it to be, and if someone as misinformed as, say, the Supreme Court of the United States disagrees, they are also wrong and should correct themselves accordingly. This approach led him to conclude in an infamous set of memos after Election Day in 2020 that the Twelfth Amendment allows the vice president to throw out individual states’ electoral votes at his discretion and personally declare a winner. The point here is not to be right or correct—fortunately for Eastman, because he was neither—but to give a legalistic guise to a coup attempt.

The New Republic

… she’s illiterate.