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.
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.
[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.
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.
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[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.
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.
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.
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WHOA NELLIE. Swear I didn’t peek!!
Fox News-Dominion settlement totals more than $787 million, Dominion lawyer says
The Fox/Dominion Voting trial has suddenly been delayed, and people speculate that Fox may be trying to settle mucho money on Dominion so it can run away.
And babe, when I say mucho, I mean like a billion. Cuz Dominion has little reason to settle; plus it knows the rest of us are desperate for things to proceed so that more astounding revelations about Murdoch’s trash enterprise may emerge.
… shows that we’ve moved from late night sketchy gunfight locations (hookah bars) to wholesome kids’ dance class locations. Look at the Facebook page for this once-wonderful, now utterly bloodied, place.
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Four dead, many injured, most in their teens. UD‘s gonna go ahead and guess that what got the fight going was the same old shit – two guys arguing over a girl. But now, along with fists, lots of kids have got a gun.
And it was so innocent a place – a dance studio for kids – that I’m sure no one thought they’d need to pat people down for weapons.
Yet surely they knew that everyone in this story lives (died) in the seventh most gun-friendly state in America. Guns per capita: 33.15. Look at this list! Do people in Alabama look at these lists??
Not to be mean, but what the fuck sort of thing do people think is going to happen.
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Keenan Cooper, the DJ at the party, told WBMA-TV that the party was stopped briefly when attendees heard someone had a gun. He said people with guns were asked to leave, but no one left.
See how it is? No security. “Asked to leave.” WTF. Alabama has to accept what it is – 33.15 guns per capita – and act accordingly. No place is even a little safe with 33.15 per capita. Get it?
Nope. Deadville’s nihilist mayor says “trying to control guns would prove … futile … .”
