As the Republican establishment looks on in horror, Gov. Ron DeSantis plays with the idea of designating the theme park’s region of Florida, including adjacent acres, The Leprous Regions.

Leprosy Mickey

… with orders to shut its doors.

But if this photograph from the scene

is authentic, the troops are deserting.

The family-friendly, fun-for-everyone, intentionally inoffensive brand has been demonized by politicians like DeSantis and others who have played to the Fox News cameras to raise their own profiles. The truth is that characterizing Disney as a creepy company that aims to morally bankrupt kids has become a mainstream position in GOP media circles.

DeSantis knows this — which is why he was happy to pick this battle with the company. But now that he will be forced to defend it in court, where the laws of reality apply, the war of his own choosing could very well cost him.

THE MANGY FOX

The mangy fox
From out the wood
Enters my garden.

‘Hardened in heart,’
I note his naked tail
His agony face

‘Like a devil’s sick of sin’

And I say to him

Oh you have outfoxed!
You slink raw grief
Into my garden

And I cannot be hardened.

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.

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

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.

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

Another good one:

Disney Tells Ron DeSantis:

Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes

They’ll never be able to find his like again.

[Current] legislation weakens the current civil rights safeguards and allows the government to keep public transportation closed on the Sabbath and separate men and women in educational and public institutions. Not to mention that the religious parties are continuing to press for an ultra-nationalist agenda, including the building of new Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, which they want to annex to Israel…

[The] growing influence of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox and ultra-nationalists could lead at some point to the annexation of the occupied Arab territories, with Arabs constituting at least 50 percent of the population in the area between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. That raises the specter of Israel turning into a third-world Middle Eastern country, that, like Lebanon would be ravaged by ethnic and religious wars.

Israel’s shocking disintegration proceeds apace.

A recent Gallup poll gives greater detail to a back and forth UD and her buddy Rita had not long ago about whether college applicants might begin avoiding schools in states with medieval abortion laws. Looks as though they well might.

“The fact that 74% of Republican unenrolled adults say, ‘I would consider enrolling [in] a state that had greater access’ is, I think, a really impressive number,” [an official at the Lumina Foundation, which cosponsored the poll,] said.

And, you know, it ain’t just abortion. Some representatives in zero-abortion, lock ‘er up, execute her, states are now moving on to trying to ban non-standard sexual practices, contraception… And what sort of … emotional reality do you suppose pertains in campus health clinics in the nation’s Junior Anti-Sex League territories? Many students show up with an STD now and then – or maybe anxiety about an STD – and I wonder how comfy they’ll be discussing such matters with whatever medical crew hasn’t yet run off to New York? With a crew that thinks zygotes have voting rights and unmarried women who aren’t virgins are sinners? This isn’t about abortion only; it’s about sex, sexual ethics, sexual ethos, sexual conversation, sexual atmosphere. “[T]he University of Idaho [has warned] employees that promoting abortion while on the job could be viewed as a felony offense.”

“If you go to a state that doesn’t allow you to have autonomy over your body, then that is not only not appealing, that is offensive to many women,” [the Lumina official] said.

UD ain’t denying that there’s a minority of women who’d revel in the repression of their bodily autonomy, who’d get off on lectures from campus doctors about the importance of keeping their legs clenched. But she thinks it’s a very small minority.

[C]ollege applicants are looking closely at the cultural climate of places where they could spend four—or likely more—years studying and exploring their lives as young adults. Red states were already having a tough time attracting talent among students and professors alike, and veering to the right on abortion is only going to make retaining their rankings and prestige more difficult.

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

[An] exodus of college students from states with abortion bans could join a string of other consequences that abortion bans have brought, amid reports the laws have also driven physicians out of states where they face the threat of felony charges for providing care, impacted recruitment and training at medical schools and caused employees to seek transfers to different states.

East River, that is. Theocratic Israel wants to send a self-proclaimed proud racist over here as consul general. Can’t wait!

… Musk come down.

Just a flesh wound, declares Jack Shafer, who titles his piece Rupert Wins Again.

Getting out from under all of that hurt for $787.5 million is a kind of bargain for a company with a market cap of $17.3 billion. Fox has $4.1 billion in cash and warrants on hand, says the New York Times... [Murdoch always pays] his way out of jams. The Dominion case and the similar Smartmatic case that awaits its place in the defamation docket, are not aberrations for Fox. It’s all a part of Murdoch’s way of doing business.

UD‘s got no doubt Murdoch, like his fellow slashed and amputated knights Berlusconi and Trump, remains a fully intact legend in his own mind. Smartmatic, just to take one of many lawsuits Rupert faces, demands 2.7 billion and will, you figure, get one billion. Doing the big math on Fox/Murdoch is always going to be tricky (he apparently spent 1.7 billion to get rid of his second wife), but even with a ton of assets the enterprise absurdly endlessly drains – and publicly humiliates – itself in what only a nut would call a winning strategy. Just for starters:

[T]he condemning depositions of Fox anchors and executives, admitting that they knew their stories were false and sources were ludicrous, opens Fox’s board to serious claims of negligence and breaches of fiduciary duty—violations of a board’s duty of care and duty of loyalty under Delaware corporate law.

But there’s so much more.

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.

Fox just settled. Will we ever know how much money it had to fork over? UD‘s gonna guess it was something like half of what Dominion asked for. $800,000,000.

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

WHOA NELLIE. Swear I didn’t peek!!

Fox News-Dominion settlement totals more than $787 million, Dominion lawyer says

… against Disney.

… only to turn around in two days and go to Cartagena.