<Right-wing firebrand Kari Lake is still claiming to be the duly elected governor of Arizona in exile. Her case went to trial Wednesday, where she’ll need to argue her most extreme election denial conspiracy theories under oath. And while Lake may only be governor in her imagination, her persecution complex is still costing Arizona taxpayers real money.

While Lake may only be governor in her imagination, her persecution complex is still costing Arizona taxpayers real money.

Lake lost to her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs, by over 17,000 votes in 2022, but she accused Arizona election officials of fraud just one day later, before the official count had even been completed. Then came Lake’s sprawling, 10-point lawsuit, with legal briefs filled with fire-and-brimstone outrage and allegations of political persecution, but light on actual facts. Arizona Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson found Lake’s claims to be nonsense.

The Arizona Supreme Court agreed, saying Lake’s arguments lacked any legal merit. Critically, that decision also referred a single point of Lake’s case back to the lower courts for trial: the claim that Maricopa County election officials failed to properly verify signatures on mail-in ballots. That means Lake’s legally-challenged legal team has one last chance to harass election workers before closing the book on 2022.

Most Arizonans believe the 2022 election was fair, including a majority of Arizona Republicans. Ask MAGA Republicans about Lake, though, and you’ll hear a version of events divorced from both political and legal reality.

Former Donald Trump enforcer Steve Bannon confidently declared that Lake actually won the governor’s office in 2022. Trump chimed in too, with the claim that Democrats “took the election away from Kari Lake.” Right-wing podcaster Joe Oltmann, a Colorado resident, drove to Maricopa County to demand election officials hold a statewide “revote.”

Like all good myths, the story of Lake’s victimhood varies a bit depending on the motives of the people doing the telling. But there is one consistent element: In all tellings, Democrats allowed tens of thousands of false ballots to be counted as genuine in Maricopa County. Late last year, Lake told a crowd she’d like to see Maricopa’s election officials imprisoned for what she imagines is their role in her loss.

Meanwhile, Arizonans are footing the bill as Kari Lake turns their court system into her latest performance art venue. Lake has already been ordered to pay over $30,000 in court fees related to her lawsuit against Hobbs, but taxpayers forked out over $141,000 to fight a different single meritless case Lake filed against Maricopa County. For this one, the court was also on the hook for processing over 7,000 pages of “evidence” Lake’s attorneys provided, none of which actually implicated Maricopa County....>

<....Lake has turned filing frivolous election fraud claims into a full-time job. Unlike Arizonans, she’s also profiting handsomely from her bogus outrage; in just shy of two months after her loss, Lake raised $2.5 million from MAGA die-hards with big promises to beat Democrats in the courts. Then she headlined an election denial speaking tour through Iowa, prompting former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis to criticized Lake for “just fundraising at this point (ie grifting).” Now it appears Lake is hoping to turn some of that cash toward a possible U.S. Senate campaign next year.

Like all good myths, the story of Lake’s victimhood varies a bit depending on the motives of the people doing the telling.

That isn’t sitting well with Lake’s likely Democratic challenger, Rep. Ruben Gallego. “Kari Lake is a shameless grifter who’s raised millions of dollars by spreading lies about the 2022 election, while making Arizona taxpayers foot the bill for one frivolous court case after another,” a spokesperson for Gallego’s campaign told me. “Arizona voters rejected election deniers like Lake in 2022, and they’ll do it again in 2024 if she runs.”

In their rush to see Democrats in every shadowy corner, Lake and her allies forget something critical: Arizona’s polling place woes are a direct result of the state’s Republican-led effort to tighten voting restrictions after Trump’s 2020 loss.

In 2021, Arizona’s GOP-majority Legislature and then-Gov. Doug Ducey passed SB 1485, a bill they argued would reduce the risk of election fraud by striking invalid names from early voting lists. That move led to confusion and errors in the early voting process, resulting in more voters showing up in person on Election Day. The snarled lines and overwhelmed poll workers we saw in Maricopa County are absolutely real — but they have nothing to do with Democrats.

Kari Lake understands politics on a Trumpian level. She knows the Republican base will forgive any sin and pay any price as long as someone, anyone, is owning the libs. Lake’s knack for perpetual victimhood has made her a Trump-world celebrity and reportedly a potential vice presidential candidate. That she’s spent much of 2023 picking her constituents’ pockets with bogus lawsuits doesn’t even warrant a shrug from the Truth Social set.

Lake’s trial is almost certain to end just as poorly as all her other election denial efforts. That won’t stop her from spinning the outcome as yet another victimization of the MAGA masses by the deep state, or the left, or whichever bogeyman the far right is concerned about today. Kari Lake doesn’t need a lawsuit to understand last year’s loss. A mirror will do.>

<If you've ever noticed inconsistencies in how DoorDash charges fees, a lawsuit recently filed against the delivery service might help explain why.

A proposed class-action suit claims that the delivery service tacks on extra fees to orders placed through iPhones compared to otherwise identical orders from users with Android smartphones. The suit also alleges that customers who use DashPass, the company's $9.99-a-month service, are charged an extra fee on each order, which eats away at the savings that they get from the subscription.

"The claims put forward in the amended complaint are baseless and simply without merit," a DoorDash spokesperson told Insider. "We ensure fees are disclosed throughout the customer experience, including on each restaurant storepage and before checkout. Building this trust is essential, and it's why the majority of delivery orders on our platform are placed by return customers. We will continue to strive to make our platform work even better for customers, and will vigorously fight these allegations."

The lawsuit, which is seeking class-action status, was filed by Ross Hecox, a single father in Maryland who uses DoorDash and subscribes to DashPass. Also named in the complaint are Hecox's two children, Reid and a minor listed as "R.E.H.," both of whom have used DoorDash in the past.

The lawsuit's key claim concerns the "expanded range fee." The charge isn't defined on a list of fees for customers on DoorDash's website. Customers and Dashers have debated the reason for the fee, which is applied to some orders with delivery addresses near the pickup location and doesn't appear to be passed on to delivery workers.

"In a test on the DoorDash Platform, however, DoorDash applied the Expanded Range Fee to a DashPass account, but not to a standard account when each account placed the same order at the same time to the same restaurant for delivery to the same home," the complaint reads.

In an example, the complaint shows two identical orders from Chipotle: one placed using DashPass, the other without it. Only the DashPass order is assessed a $0.99 expanded-range fee, despite both accounts using the same delivery address.

The expanded-range fee also applies to some orders made through regular DoorDash accounts when customers order using an iPhone, according to the lawsuit. In one case, the same order from a Panera Bread was charged the $0.99 fee on an iPhone but not on an Android device.

According to the lawsuit, "DoorDash charges the expanded range fee on iPhone users more often than Android users and charges iPhone users more for 'delivering' (likely because studies reveal iPhone users earn more)."

"These tactics are simply money grabs," it continues.

In other cases, iPhone users were charged a slightly higher delivery fee, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit asks for damages worth $1 billion "for all consumers who fell prey to DoorDash's illegal pricing scheme over the past four years."

The suit is also sparking a lively conversation on TikTok, given the popularity of DoorDash drama on the platform.

In one video with 2.3 million views, a legal analyst who goes by the user name Lawyer Angela and says she covers class-action suits and settlements showcased screenshots from the complaint, including two Chick-Fil-A orders (above) where an iPhone user was charged $1 more than an Android user.

Scores of commenters were convinced they'd been impacted and asked to be tagged once the suit was resolved. "As an avid DoorDash orderer, this means they owe me approximately $1,425,737.56," one joked.

Others balked at the suit's claim that iPhone users were in a higher-income bracket and thus being charged higher fees. "Not me being unemployed with an iPhone," one wrote.

Some viewers were surprised to learn about the expanded-range fees, which Lawyer Angela said the complaint likened to a "scam."

"Omg I never even look at the fee breakdown just click submit order bc I'm a hungry dash pass user," another commenter wrote. "I feel so violated."

Delivery services' transparency around their fees has become a major issue, including in Washington, DC. In February, a group of Democratic US senators sent letters to Uber, Grubhub, and DoorDash asking about the services' so-called "junk fees" that raise prices for consumers in an opaque or deceptive way, The Washington Post reported.

President Joe Biden's administration is also pushing back on junk fees at a variety of companies, from home-internet services to concert-ticket providers.>

<Claims that homeless veterans were pushed out of a Newburgh, New York, hotel to make room for migrants are false, according to two homeless men who told CNN they were part of a group of 15 who were offered money to pose as veterans.

The men allege they were offered as much as $200 to sell the ruse to a local chamber of commerce, which did not believe that veterans were pushed out for migrants, the men said.

The situation made tensions between the area and New York City worse, as earlier this week a New York state Supreme Court judge granted a temporary restraining order blocking New York City Mayor Eric Adams from sending asylum seekers to Orange County, where Newburgh is located.

“We were scammed,” Douglas Terry, 55, said about Sharon Toney-Finch, a nonprofit leader who houses the homeless. Terry and others identified Toney-Finch as the person who allegedly offered money and never paid up. “It’s messed up how can they do that to us. They scammed us.”

Another man who only gave his first name, William, said the group was allegedly told to say they were military veterans who were pushed out of their hotel rooms. If they were uncomfortable saying that, William said, they were told they should say they suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

“They dangled a carrot in front of an animal and they led us. Now they took the carrot away and we’re angry,” William said.

Toney-Finch denied the allegations to CNN, saying she never offered money to homeless men to say they had to leave the Crossroads Hotel in the Town of Newburgh.

“I never promised to pay anybody,” Toney-Finch said, adding that she only told State Assemblyman Brian Maher that she had homeless veterans who were displaced, not that it was because of asylum seekers.

Maher, a Republican lawmaker who is also a volunteer spokesperson for the Yerik Israel Toney Foundation, which helps veterans in need of living assistance, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

He previously told CNN that some veterans who were staying at the Crossroads Hotel were told on May 7 they had to leave the hotel on short notice.

“They basically told the vets they had one day to leave,” Maher said on Monday.

“No one blames the asylum seekers for what’s happening,” Maher told CNN at the time.

Terry and William told CNN that associates of Toney-Finch allegedly went to a homeless shelter trying to round up volunteers to go with her to Connecticut to speak with a local politician.

She found 15 volunteers and took them to a nearby diner where she bought them all the food and alcohol they wanted, they added.

When the meal was over, Toney-Finch allegedly rounded them up in the parking lot and told them they were instead going to meet with a local member of the chamber of commerce, with instructions that they were to say they were veterans and they were being displaced to make room for asylum seekers. If they weren’t comfortable speaking, Toney-Finch told them to say they suffered from PTSD and couldn’t speak, the two men said.

Toney-Finch allegedly took them back to the shelter once the meeting was done and told some that she was going to come back on Friday with the money, the men said. The men allege she never paid them.

“I never said that and I never did that,” Toney-Finch told CNN.

The office of Orange County Executive Steve Neuhaus referred CNN to the county district attorney’s office and the New York State attorney general’s office.

Orange County Chief Assistant District Attorney Christopher P. Borek told CNN his office doesn’t normally comment on the existence or non-existence of investigations.

In part, Borek said, “The District Attorney’s Office will ensure that all matters involving allegations of fraud related to veterans are thoroughly investigated.”....>

<Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, like his South Carolina counterpart Lindsey Graham, taps frequently into the benefits of MAGA’s passionate America First agenda to win support. Both Senators rally up the base on culture war issues just like a Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert.

But McConnell and Graham know there is more to governance than culture wars — that there are real wars. And the two lawmakers — old school Republicans with more than a half century in the Senate between them — will admit, unlike Greene and Boebert, that Joe Biden and the Democrats aren’t the biggest enemy facing America.

(Greene just announced articles of impeachment against President Biden, the kind of move McConnell would likely never consider.)

This dichotomy of loyalties — to MAGA and to America — puts McConnell in challenging positions. Today McConnell tweeted his outrage that Biden was not taking the GOP debt ceiling threats, led by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, seriously enough, warning the White House that “time is of the essence.”

McConnell, like McCarthy and Graham, knows that — unlike the actions of Russia against Ukraine — the debt ceiling issue is a manufactured crisis and would be a self-inflicted wound triggered solely by the GOP, were McCarthy to follow through on his threat and fail to raise the debt limit as it has been lifted without fail 78 separate times in the last 53 years — including 18 times during Ronald Reagan‘s presidency.

(NOTE: Reagan is considered a GOP standard bearer on the economic front — i.e., it’s “morning in America again.”)

But evincing his challenging position, McConnell is — rather than merely castigating the President for his absence from debt negotiations — also praising Biden’s pursuit of an anti-MAGA agenda during his G7 Japan visit, which includes marshalling further support for Ukraine, support that is anathema to America First adherents.

McConnell tacitly acknowledges that Biden’s business in Japan doesn’t leave a lot of time to simultaneously negotiate with truculent fellow Americans in the House to avoid irresponsibly clobbering the economy for no reason.

Conceding that Biden is busy doing important work in Japan “with our strongest economic partners,” McConnell hopes Biden “will build on the West's support for Ukraine by clearing the way for the transfer of critical weapons” while there.

MAGA Republicans like Greene don’t believe in the U.S. support of Ukraine, saying it falls outside of the America First agenda. But McConnell, in a tough spot, acknowledges that America’s safety and prosperity depends on its global presence, strength, and influence.

Regarding Biden’s work in Japan, McConnell again says the President and the West must understand time is of the essence, imploring him “move at the speed of relevance” — this time against a real, foreign enemy instead of a domestic congressman holding a “hand grenade,” as one Senator has characterized McCarthy.>

<In a late-night posting on his Truth Social platform, Donald Trump lashed out at special counsel Jack Smith for investigating him on multiple fonts and bizarrely claimed that he and his family and friends are on a "treasonous quest."

Smith is currently conducting several investigations of the former president, including his refusal to return sensitive government documents he took with him to Mar-a-Lago, his ties to the Jan. 6 insurrection which caused lawmakers to flee the Capitol, and his fundraising activities after he lost the 2020 presidential election.

Late Friday, Trump raged at Smith and make his treason accusation, while complaining, "THIS IS ALL ABOUT ELECTION INTERFERENCE."

He began by claiming he is leading in the 2024 presidential election polls, writing: "A Poll just came out where I am way up on Biden in the General Election. What that means is that the Radical Left Democrats will step up their Fake Investigations on me because they now see they can’t win at the Ballot Box."

He then turned to special counsel Smith and raged, "TRUMP Hating Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, whose family and friends are Big Time Haters also, will be working overtime on this treasonous quest. They are scoundrels and cheats. THIS IS ALL ABOUT ELECTION INTERFERENCE."

"I hope Republicans in Congress are watching!!!" he added.>

The game of chess requires accuracy, else one gets embarrassed. Nothing like a self-proclaimed researcher trying to tell others their faults but failing to post chess history accurately. We've seen all this before, so many times before.>

The 'embarrassment' should be from <fredthepharisee>.

There is no evidence whatever that Carlsen drinks, and if there were, that is no business of <fredthepissant>.

<Gov. Ron DeSantis is asking that a federal judge be disqualified from the First Amendment lawsuit filed by Disney against the Florida governor and his appointees, claiming the jurist's prior statements in other cases have raised questions about his impartiality on the state's efforts to take over Disney World's governing body.

DeSantis ' attorney filed a motion in federal court in Tallahassee on Friday seeking to disqualify Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker from overseeing the lawsuit filed by Disney last month. The lawsuit alleges that DeSantis and his appointees violated the company's right to free speech, as well as the contracts clause, by taking over the special governing district that previously had been controlled by Disney supporters after Disney opposed Florida legislation that critics have dubbed “Don't Say Gay.”

The Republican governor's motion was filed a day after Disney announced that it was scrapping plans to build a new campus in central Florida and relocate 2,000 employees from Southern California to work in digital technology, finance and product development, amid an ongoing feud with DeSantis.

DeSantis' motion said Walker referenced the ongoing dispute between his administration and Disney during hearings in two unrelated lawsuits before him dealing with free speech issues and fear of retaliation for violating new laws championed by DeSantis and Republican lawmakers. One of those was a First Amendment lawsuit filed by Florida professors that challenged a new law establishing a survey about “intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity” on state campuses.

Walker, who was nominated to the federal bench in 2012 by President Barack Obama and is now chief judge of the district, tossed out that lawsuit on the grounds that the professors didn't have standing to challenge the law championed by DeSantis and Florida lawmakers.

In the first case, Walker said, “What’s in the record, for example — is there anything in the record that says we are now going to take away Disney’s special status because they’re woke?"

In the second case, the judge said, “And then Disney is going to lose its status because—arguably, because they made a statement that run afoul—ran afoul of state policy of the controlling party,” according to the DeSantis motion.

Disney and DeSantis have been engaged in a tug-of-war for more than a year that has engulfed the GOP governor in criticism as he prepares to launch an expected presidential bid next week.

The feud started after Disney, in the face of significant pressure, publicly opposed the state concerning lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity in early grades that critics called “Don’t Say Gay.”

As punishment, DeSantis took over Disney World’s self-governing district through legislation passed by lawmakers and appointed a new board of supervisors. Before the new board came in, the company signed agreements with the old board stripping the new supervisors of design and construction authority.

In response, the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature passed legislation allowing the DeSantis-appointed board to repeal those agreements and made the theme park resort’s monorail system subject to state inspection, when it previously had been done in-house.

Disney filed the First Amendment lawsuit against DeSantis and Disney-appointed board last month in federal court in Tallahassee, and it landed in Walker's court. The Disney-appointed board earlier this month sued Disney in state court in Orlando seeking to void the deals the company made with the previous board.

The creation of Disney’s self-governing district by the Florida Legislature was instrumental in the company’s decision in the 1960s to build near Orlando. Disney told the state at the time that it planned to build a futuristic city that would include a transit system and urban planning innovations, so the company needed autonomy. The futuristic city never materialized, however, and instead morphed into a second theme park that opened in 1982.>

<The dominos are continuing to fall for Fox News.

One month after firing its most prominent host and election fraud peddler Tucker Carlson — and settling a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million — the network is reportedly dissolving its investigative unit and laying off reporters.

“The rank and file journalists are getting let go,” one Fox employee told Rolling Stone in an article published Friday. “Meanwhile, upper management are sitting pretty while they are the execs responsible for the Dominion debacle. We are the sacrificial lambs.”

Dominion originally sued for $1.6 billion in damages and accused Fox News of intentionally airing lies that the 2020 election was rigged for President Joe Biden. The network is currently also facing another expensive lawsuit from another voting systems company.

The lawsuit notably revealed that Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox News’ parent company, urged the network’s CEO, Suzanne Scott, to be “helping any way we can” to sway the U.S. Senate race in Georgia for Republican candidates in 2020.

Scott, a 22-year Fox News veteran who became the network’s first female CEO in 2018, has since been accused of fostering a toxic workplace for women. However, she wasn’t the only figure named in the lawsuit that staffers have gripes about.

“The outrage is that Suzanne Scott and Maria Bartiromo keep their jobs,” another staffer told Rolling Stone about the CEO and a Fox News opinion host who notably shared her interview questions with then-President Donald Trump ahead of her 2020 interview.

“Meanwhile, the journalists get let go,” the staffer continued. “We are in shock.”

Another staffer confirmed the layoffs and told Rolling Stone they “have happened” and “continue to happen.” A former employee, meanwhile, speculated the network is letting people go “to get money off the books” to “save money because of the lawsuit.”

One source told the outlet that there’s no connection between the Dominion settlement and the layoffs and claimed that some of the people purportedly fired were merely reassigned away from the network’s investigative unit.

Fox News certainly appears to be in trouble, however, as the Smartmatic defamation lawsuit — currently in the discovery phase — is seeking a whopping $2.7 billion in damages.>

<Former Representative Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, is taking top House Republican Elise Stefanik to task for spreading a story about migrants that was recently shown to be a hoax.

Stefanik, the representative for New York's 21st Congressional District and third highest-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, shared a New York Post story to Twitter last Saturday, which claimed that 20 homeless veterans had been made to leave a hotel in Orange County, just north of New York City, to make room for migrants. The newspaper claimed that the migrants were being bused to Orange County by the city's mayor, Eric Adams.

New York City has already spent $1 billion to house tens of thousands of asylum seekers and anticipates that figure could climb to $4.3 billion through June 2024 to "manage" the influx of migrants in the nation's most populous city, the city's Deputy Mayor for Health & Human Services Anne Williams-Isom said earlier this week.

In addition, New York City has been dealing with a spike in homelessness before the surge in migrant arrivals, leaving its shelters packed and overwhelmed. More than 60,000 migrants have arrived in New York in the past year, with 4,200 since Title 42 expired on May 11, according to City Hall officials.

"Biden's America. Kathy Hochul's New York. Eric Adams's New York City," Stefanik tweeted last week in response [sic] the Post's story. "A disgrace."

On Thursday, however, the story was shown to have been a hoax in a report from the Times Union, a local newspaper covering upstate New York. In a further report from Mid Hudson News, it was found that the nonprofit group that made the initial claims, the Yerik Israel Toney Foundation, had allegedly recruited 20 homeless individuals to pose as veterans for the story. Sharon Toney-Finch, CEO of the nonprofit, denied the allegations after the report was published, but has not provided definitive evidence for her claims.

In the wake of the story falling apart, Kinzinger, who represented Illinois districts from 2011 to this year, called out Stefanik on Saturday morning for her original tweets about the story.

"Hey [Elise Stefanik] this is a lie," he tweeted in response to a post from Stefanik's personal account. "You spread this one, among many."

"Hey [Elise Stefanik] this story is a complete and total lie," he added in response to another tweet from the congresswoman's personal account. "You should apologize."

"Wow even spread this lie on her official Twitter," Kinzinger wrote in another tweet, this time in response to a post from Stefanik's official congressional Twitter account.

As of Saturday afternoon, Stefanik has not issued a statement on the allegations surrounding the migrant story. Newsweek reached out to the congresswoman's press office via email for comment.

The office of the New York state attorney general has since confirmed that it is looking into the situation. This came after urging from state Assemblyman Brian Maher, a Republican who has advocated for veterans, after he discovered the claims about the story and denounced it as false.

Maher had previously discussed the initial claims from the Post story during an appearance on Fox News, calling the allegations "an embarrassment" and "a slap in the face."

"This is something I believe hurt a lot of people," Maher said in a statement to the Times Union.>

<Walt Disney never wanted a war with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The right-wing political leader, however, went after the biggest single-site employer in his state after its former CEO Bob Chapek made a statement criticizing DeSantis' so-called "don't say gay" legislation.

Hundreds (321 in total) of other companies have signed a petition from the Human Rights Campaign that broadly condemns anti-LGBTQ legislation, but those companies did not specifically call out DeSantis. So, the governor -- in a move that plays to his political base -- has made a bunch of petty moves against Walt Disney (DIS) -

DeSantis stripped Disney of its Reedy Creek special district. He painted that move as taking away special status from the company. The problem is that Florida has thousands of special districts including one for The Villages, a retirement village whose residents are overwhelmingly conservative voters, and the Daytona Speedway, home to the Daytona 500.

The governor isn't some sort of Robin Hood taking away Disney's tax breaks, he's a politician using a well-known company as a plot point in his campaign for president. That's not a part Disney seems willing to play.

Disney CEO Bob Iger made it very clear that his company had other options for its billions of dollars during his company's most recent earnings call. He didn't say anything implausible like that company would leave Florida (it can't and it won't). Instead, he made it very clear that Disney could continue to invest in Florida or it could use that money elsewhere.

Call it a threat, or label it Iger simply showing DeSantis that he wasn't the one with the leverage, but it was a strong statement that Disney followed up on by pulling a $1 billion headquarters project from Florida. The company also canceled moving thousands of workers -- highly-paid white-collar workers -- from California to Florida.

The company then followed that move by having two of its top executives follow Iger in putting DeSantis on notice.

Disney Parks Chairman Josh D’Amaro said that he is hopeful that Disney will be able to continue to invest in Walt Disney World after the company canceled the HQ project.

"I remain optimistic about the direction of our Walt Disney World business. We have plans to invest $17 billion and create 13,000 jobs over the next ten years. I hope we’re able to do so...," he said, according to BlogMickey.

That remark was followed by a much stronger statement from Walt Disney World President Jeff Vahle:

Regarding our world-class destination, our desire is to continue investing in our core business in an effort to attract and welcome millions of visitors to Walt Disney World and Central Florida each year so they can enjoy the kind of hospitality our region is known for around the world. Our plans currently call for us to invest $17 billion in Walt Disney World over the next 10 years and create 13,000 new jobs to continue doing our part as a leading employer in the hospitality and themed entertainment industry. We hope those plans will become a future reality....>

<....Iger, D'Amaro, and Vahle are making it clear that Disney has other options for its billions of dollars in investment. They're trying to calmly show DeSantis that his political retaliation over the company objecting to his legislative agenda has consequences.

DeSantis Responds With Rhetoric

As the governor of Florida, DeSantis has a responsibility to his constituents to act in their best interests. Not angering the state's biggest tourism draw over it choosing to disagree with him on a piece of legislation would be in those best interests, but how DeSantis responded to Disney's pulling its $1 billion headquarters project wasn't met with a call to sit down and talk, it was answered with political bluster.

"Disney announced the possibility of a Lake Nona campus nearly two years ago. Nothing ever came of the project, and the state was unsure whether it would come to fruition. Given the company’s financial straits, falling market cap, and declining stock price, it is unsurprising that they would restructure their business operations and cancel unsuccessful ventures," DeSantis shared in a statement.

And, yes, Disney's market cap and share price have fallen, but "financial straits" simply ignores reality.

In its second-quarter earnings release, Disney reported that revenues for the quarter and six months grew 13% and 10%, respectively. Diluted earnings per share (EPS) from continuing operations for the quarter increased to $0.69 from $0.26 in the prior-year quarter.

Disney also reported $3.23 billion in cash from continuing operations. In addition, the company's domestic theme park business -- Disney World and Disneyland -- grew by 14%.

DeSantis wants to paint Disney as some cash-strapped company that can't back up its threats with money. That just seems silly when you look at the billions it has pumped into Disney World in recent years building immersive lands based on Star Wars, Avatar, and its Pixar properties while also adding massive roller coasters themed to Tron and Guardians of the Galaxy.

Disney has made a real threat. It can't leave Florida, but it can choose to invest much of the money earmarked for Disney World elsewhere. DeSantis can listen, or he can take food off the plates of the constituents he's supposed to serve.>

<Florida's Republican senators are issuing warnings to Governor Ron DeSantis over his ongoing feud with the Walt Disney Company.

DeSantis, a Republican who has served as the governor of the Sunshine State since 2019 and is widely expected to be pursuing a 2024 presidential bid, first began feuding with Disney when the company issued a statement condemning the state's Parental Rights in Education Act. Better known colloquially as the "Don't Say Gay" bill, the law restricted the ability of public schools to discuss gender and sexual identity topics with students, provisions which have since been expanded beyond their original scope.

Disney, long known for its pro-LGBTQ+ stances, decried the bill's passage, kickstarting a feud that saw DeSantis and his government take action against the company's operations in Florida. The conflict has, by the reckoning of many, gone poorly for the governor, with Disney outmaneuvering him legally and filing a lawsuit against the state government, alleging that it has been politically targeted for exercising its First Amendment rights. On Thursday, Disney canceled its plans to build a new $1 billion office complex in Lake Nona, Florida, citing "new leadership and changing business conditions." The project would have brought around 2,000 new jobs to the state.

With the economic impact of DeSantis's war with Disney continuing to grow, Florida's Republican senators in Washington, D.C., have spoken out, urging caution for the governor moving forward. Senator Rick Scott, who previously held the governorship from 2011 to 2019, noted in an interview how vital Disney is to the state's economy, according to The Hill.

"This is the biggest or second-biggest employer in the state," Scott said. "Half the tourism that comes to our state comes to visit Disney. It's a reason people come to our state. After they come there, people move there. So I think cooler heads need to prevail. My view is we have to do everything to help our businesses grow."

Scott also conceded that he believed the "Don't Say Gay" bill at the root of the battle "was a good bill."

Senator Marco Rubio, meanwhile had similar comments on the situation during an interview with Fox News last month.

"I think where it gets problematic in the eyes of some people is when you start creating the idea—and I'm not saying we're there yet as a state—but the idea that somehow if you run crossways with us politically, whoever's in charge, then you may wind up in the crosshairs of the legislature for political purposes to make a statement at you," Rubio said.

Speaking further, Rubio floated the prospect of a future Democratic governor targeting Chick-fil-A, a popular fast food chain noted for the conservative politics and devout Christian beliefs of its corporate leadership.

"If it starts to be perceived that any corporate entity that's operating directly or indirectly in furtherance of a political agenda that the powers that be don't agree with, therefore we're going to use the power of government to target you, you get concerned," Rubio added. "If a Democratic [governor] and a Democratic legislature takes over Florida, they're going to go after Chick-fil-A?"

Newsweek reached out to DeSantis's press office via email for comment.>

<On the day after his confirmation as chief executive of the U.S. Agency for Global Media in June 2020, Michael Pack met with a career employee to discuss which senior leaders at the agency and the Voice of America should be forced out due to their perceived political beliefs.

"Hates Republicans," the employee had written about one in a memo. "Openly despises Trump and Republicans," they said of another. A third, the employee wrote, "is not on the Trump team." The list went on. (Firing someone over political affiliation is typically a violation of federal civil service law.)

Within two days, Pack was examining ways to remove suspect staffers, a new federal investigation found. The executives he sidelined were later reinstated and exonerated by the inspector general's office of the U.S. State Department. Pack ultimately turned his attention to agency executives, network chiefs, and journalists themselves.

VOA White House Reporter Investigated For Anti-Trump Bias By Political Appointees

The report, sent to the White House and Congressional leaders earlier this month, found that the Trump appointee repeatedly abused the powers of his office, broke laws and regulations, and engaged in gross mismanagement.

USAGM oversees the Voice of America and other international broadcasters funded by the federal government, such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Radio Television Martí. The networks are charged with providing straight news for societies where independent news coverage is either repressed or financially unfeasible and with modeling the value of pluralistic political debate within that coverage.

"It just takes one's breath away."

"This report is remarkable in its breadth and depth and detail of the wrongdoing that was underway at these agencies in the last six months of the Trump administration," says David Seide, an attorney with the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit public interest law firm which has represented more than 30 whistleblowers at USAGM, VOA and its sister networks since Pack took office. "It just takes one's breath away."

The 145-page report independently corroborates many of the whistleblower complaints. It also lends new weight and depth to earlier reporting by NPR, inquiries by a U.S. inspector general and rulings by a federal judge and a local District of Columbia judge.

Taken together, they depict Pack's brief tenure as an ideologically driven rampage through a government agency to try to force its newsrooms and workforce to show fealty to the White House.

Pack punished executives who objected to the legality of his plans, interfered in the journalistic independence of the newsrooms under his agency, and personally signed a no-bid contract with a private law firm to investigate those employees he saw as opposed to former President Donald Trump. The law firm's fees reached the seven figures for work typically done by attorneys who are federal employees.

In Trumpian flourish, Pack promised "to drain the swamp"

In a conversation with the conservative news outlet The Federalist, Pack characterized his moves with a Trumpian flourish: "to drain the swamp, to root out corruption and to deal with these issues of bias." Pack did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.

Pack is a conservative documentarian and former official at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. His appointment was held up for two years in the U.S. Senate over concerns about his highly ideological approach and whether he had been candid over the finances of his business. (His production company ultimately agreed to transfer $210,000 back to a nonprofit that he also controls, which was itself subsequently compelled to dissolve under a legal settlement he reached last year with the D.C. Attorney General's office.)....>

<....Pack, a slight man with an unassuming manner, had tight ties to major conservative figures. He briefly led the Claremont Institute in California, which is influential in Republican circles; he previously developed two documentaries for public television that Steve Bannon helped to produce. Bannon later became Trump's campaign manager and chief White House political strategist.

In early 2020, his nomination still languishing, Pack released his documentary about U.S. Justice Clarence Thomas, based on extensive interviews with the jurist and his wife, the conservative activist Ginni Thomas. He reportedly became friends with the Thomases, writing a book with the former White House attorney who helped smooth Thomas' path to confirmation in 1991.

Pack's own prospects for confirmation revived in spring 2020 when Trump's White House attacked the Voice of America, in almost unprecedented fashion. The White House publicly alleged the news service uncritically relayed Chinese propaganda about the nation's efforts to combat the outbreak of the Covid-19 coronavirus.

A litany of abuses substantiated by federal investigation

The inquiry was conducted by three outside consultants hired by USAGM and endorsed by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, the agency that investigates federal whistleblower complaints. The report concludes that Pack:

Violated the independence of journalists working for newsrooms at the Voice of America and other international broadcasting networks funded by the government and "exercised oversight in a manner suggestive of political bias."

Wrongly retaliated against career executives by suspending their security clearances after they filed whistleblower complaints. Their allegations were later substantiated by the State Department's inspector general's office. Engaged in "gross mismanagement and gross waste" when he paid a politically-connected Virginia law firm $1.6 million in agency money to investigate his executives in a confidential, no-bid contract. A former Supreme Court clerk for Thomas, John D. Adams, was the senior partner who oversaw the McGuireWoods contract with Pack at USAGM.

Imperiled the independence of several of the international networks, politicizing them by stacking their boards with a full slate of ideological appointees all at once. He also abused his powers in trying to make their tenures irrevocable except in the case of a felony conviction.

Broke privacy laws by releasing dossiers compiled by the law firm, McGuireWoods, on those executives he suspended to five right-wing journalists whom he had appointed to various networks funded by the boards. McGuireWoods strongly advised against releasing the dossiers publicly. They were ultimately made public by a sympathetic member of Congress.

Sought to prevent the Open Technology Fund from receiving federal funds for three years because of his animus toward the outfit, "rather than a desire to protect the public interest." The fund helped to subsidize the development of Tor and Signal, technologies that let people access the Web and communicate securely and privately, even in repressive countries. Bannon was among those with ties to figures promoting rival technologies that sought greater subsidies from the fund.

"[P]ut numerous internet freedom projects at risk, including in countries that are State Department priorities" by seeking to block federal dollars from flowing to the tech fund.

Violations found of journalistic independence and the civil workforce's professionalism Not all of the actions under investigation amounted to an abuse of power, a gross waste of federal funds, or a violation of the law. For example, the inquiry found that it was within Pack's authority to remove the heads of the networks, despite objections and protests.

Even in some of those instances, however, Pack was found to have acted improperly, as when he fired the head of Radio Free Asia and directed her replacement to force her out of her subsequent, contractually protected position of executive editor at the network. "CEO Pack's actions were inconsistent with the statutory mandate that he respect the networks' journalistic integrity and independence," the report states.

Nearly every outfit overseen by the USAGM was affected by his actions — or, at times, his inactions. Pack remained mute when his newly installed VOA leaders demoted a reporter who covered the White House for pressing then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for answers about the January 6th, 2021 siege of the U.S. Capitol; he took no action when the acting chief of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting provided a Trump political aide with a link to its content to distribute to a U.S. audience shortly before the 2020 elections, despite laws preventing such dissemination; and he failed to assign a standards editor for Voice of America after reassigning the longtime news executive for four months....>

<....That last maneuver, the report found, constituted gross mismanagement.

NPR has previously reported on many of the matters under investigation, and some others that did not receive official scrutiny.

Based on exchanges among USAGM staffers, NPR previously reported that McGuireWoods intended to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the $1.6 million billed but stopped invoicing the agency late that fall. Pack was about to lose his perch and his patron, as Joe Biden won election in November. Biden would order Pack to resign as one of his first formal acts in office. A spokesperson for McGuireWoods did not return a detailed message seeking comment.

Pack refused special counsel's authority to order an investigation

The inquiry itself was instigated by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. It received the whistleblower complaints and directed USAGM to conduct the investigation.

In one of his final actions in office, Pack wrote that he did not accept the agency's authority to instruct him to initiate the investigation. He called the agency's structure "unconstitutional" and said of those who lodged complaints against him, "They have an axe to grind." That refusal, too, was seen as a breach of Pack's duties.

The Office of Special Counsel appointed a panel of three outside experts, including the former acting chief of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, a former senior executive of the Export-Import Bank, and a former investigative reporter who has worked for the special counsel's office.

NPR spoke to seven current and former staffers at USAGM and outlets and outfits it funds. Each said the report reflected a climate of crisis, fear and reprisal.

In sum, Pack's seven-and-a-half month stint running the agency exemplified Trump's contempt for the press and for the professional federal workforce that prides itself on nonpartisanship. (Pack echoed Trump's designation of that workforce as the "Deep State.")

Yet the people with whom NPR spoke also, independently, noted this account of Pack's tenure may not represent only a past era.

On May 10, Congressman Andy Ogles, a Republican from Tennessee, introduced legislation to prohibit any federal funding for the Open Technology Fund, as Pack had sought to do. Trump announced his support for Ogles' 2024 re-election bid on the next day.

And the conservative Heritage Foundation has drawn up proposals for whom should be hired at federal agencies, should Trump or another Republican win the White House in 2024.

Among the project's leaders is John McEntee, the former personnel chief in the Trump White House who helped set up the cadre of partisans that formed Pack's inner circle at USAGM.

Disclosure: This story was reported by NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by NPR Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp. Because of NPR CEO John Lansing's prior role as CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, no senior news executive or corporate executive at NPR reviewed this story before it was published.>

<Sen. Chris Van Hollen on Sunday argued that House Republicans, led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy, had created an "insane situation" as the White House negotiates with lawmakers on raising the nation's debt ceiling to avoid a potentially disastrous default.

"What we have right now is Speaker McCarthy and MAGA House Republicans saying that they're going to push the default detonator and blow up our economy if they don't get their way," Van Hollen, D-Md., told ABC "This Week" co-anchor Martha Raddatz.

"I'm extremely worried about where we are now," he said.

The federal government risks not being able to pay all of its bills as soon as June unless its borrowing limit, currently $31.4 trillion, is raised by Congress.

House Republicans want concessions on spending in order to do so and say that they aren't fueling fears of a default because they already passed a bill to address the debt limit -- laying the blame instead on the president.

Biden, speaking Sunday from Japan where he was attending a summit, said he was willing to compromise on government spending but that Democrats and Republicans remained far apart on increasing taxes.

For the next two days, "Plan A" should remain the ongoing talks between the White House and McCarthy, he said.

But after that, he saw two backups. "Plan B" would be Democrats trying to move their own deal through the House via a discharge petition.

With a discharge petition, Democrats could force a vote on the House floor without McCarthy's backing. But Van Hollen noted they would need some conservatives to join them to pass an alternative plan.

"We only need five, [to] work together with all 213 Democrats to put together the kind of proposal that even about 30 Republicans were talking about as recently as May," he said.

And "Plan C" would be the president invoking the 14th Amendment, which states that the public debt "shall not be questioned," to get around the debt limit.

Earlier this month, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told ABC's George Stephanopoulos on "This Week" that using the 14th Amendment could incite a "constitutional crisis."

Biden said in Japan that "I think we have the authority" to use the 14th Amendment but suggested the likelihood that it would be challenged in court gave him pause.

"We have not come up with a unilateral action that could succeed in a matter of two weeks or three weeks," he said. "That's the issue. ... So it's up to lawmakers."

Van Hollen acknowledged on "This Week" that "there's a lot of uncertainty around that approach, it will be litigated," but he maintained that the 14th Amendment "would be better than a default."

"The 14th Amendment is not the preferred alternative. A lot of people predict that even if you go the route of the 14th Amendment, you go into a recession -- but if you default, we're talking about depression," he said.

He likened Republican tactics to hostage-taking even though Biden had "put a trillion dollars of cuts on the table already."

"They're not willing to talk about any revenue from very wealthy people," he said of the GOP, responding to House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington, who said in a separate "This Week" appearance that taxes were a nonstarter, in part because the economy may be slowing.

The goal, Arrington said, was to "rightsize and rein in this bureaucratic bloat" in the government and address the "spending problem that's driving the inflation crisis and some of the economic woes that we're experiencing, along with just this massive and unsustainable debt that we're carrying."

Arrington said Biden had slow-walked negotiations until the default deadline was truly looming, even though House Republicans passed their debt ceiling bill last month.

Biden has cut his foreign trip short, opting to forego traveling to Papua New Guinea and Australia to return to the U.S. and resume debt ceiling discussions. He was set to talk with McCarthy on Sunday as he returned from Japan.

But Van Hollen said he's "always been skeptical."

Part of the problem, he contended, was that McCarthy is a "weak speaker" with little power over House Republicans: "He cannot take back a reasonable proposal to his caucus and expect it to get the votes, especially when you have Donald Trump egging them on and saying, 'Don't give an inch.'">

Not quite, tho:

<In the lead-up to this spring’s release of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s book “The Courage to Be Free,” a funny thing happened on the internet: His first book, published in 2011 before his political career began, disappeared.

“Dreams From Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama,” was once available at the click of a button as an e-book, but no more. A used hard copy is selling for $1,950 at the only online bookseller that appears to have it. The publisher, a small vanity label in Florida called High-Pitched Hum Publishing, did not respond to phone calls or social media messages about why the e-book was removed.

Fortunately, The Washington Post purchased a digital copy last summer, in anticipation that it may someday become more relevant. Now, with DeSantis (R) expected to declare his bid for the presidency officially this week, that time has come.

“Dreams From Our Founding Fathers,” in title, cover and content, is essentially a troll of former president Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir “Dreams From My Father,” which recounted Obama’s upbringing and young adulthood before he entered Harvard Law School.

In his book, DeSantis, who has moved to stop history lessons in Florida that might make students uncomfortable and who attacked an AP African American Studies course he said “lacks historical value,” dismisses slavery as a “personal flaw” of the Founding Fathers, irrelevant to the really important stuff: context-free, cherry-picked quotes from James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.

His writing is coherent, pretty lively and includes — angels and harps! — footnotes to his sourcing. This alone makes it better than the vast majority of politicians’ attempts at writing history. And though DeSantis aligned himself with the tea party movement when he wrote the book, he does not subscribe to its conspiracy theories claiming Obama was a secret Muslim or born in Kenya. He also does not think “death panels” are real — though “concerns about them are not foolhardy,” he writes.

But DeSantis’s thesis is twofold: that Obama was conducting a dangerous power grab, and that the Founding Fathers would have been appalled if they were still alive to see it.

How will Obama be remembered? A massive oral history project will help shape his legacy.

According to DeSantis, evidence of Obama’s power grab includes the auto-industry bailout, the 2009 stimulus package and Obamacare. The president’s anti-American principles, DeSantis alleges, come from the usual boogeymen — activist-writer Saul Alinsky, formerly incarcerated professor Bill Ayers, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — plus poet Frank Marshall Davis and the father who abandoned Obama when he was 2. DeSantis then writes a laundry list of bad things these men once said and pins them onto Obama.

If that seems like a bit of a stretch, the balance of the book is devoted to performing a similar maneuver on the Founding Fathers, glomming DeSantis’s loathing for the 44th president onto quotes from Madison and Hamilton. Other Founders are mentioned only in passing and only so far as they can be made to support DeSantis’s argument, with one exception: a late chapter about George Washington.

Slavery ‘a fact of life’

Any history book about the Founders must acknowledge that many of them were enslavers, and DeSantis gets to it in the introduction with a whiff.

“Slavery,” he writes, “had been a fact of life throughout human history.” It’s a variation on the false argument that “people didn’t know it was wrong back then.” In any case, the form of slavery practiced in the early republic — lifelong, inherited, race-based, chattel slavery — was particularly severe and relatively new, as far as human history goes.

Some of the Founding Fathers, like Gouverneur Morris and Benjamin Franklin, opposed slavery anyway, DeSantis writes. True enough, though he hardly mentions either man again until the conclusion of the book, when he repeats that some of the Founding Fathers opposed slavery. It’s as if Morris and Franklin have nothing to offer DeSantis by way of writing, philosophy or the “First Principles” of his book’s title (read: limited government) and are simply useful as permission slips to skip the yucky parts.....>

<....DeSantis concludes his brief discussion of slavery with: “Though it was not immediately abolished, slavery was doomed to fail in a nation whose Constitution embodied such philosophical truths” as liberty. Many of the Founders believed in the inevitability of slavery’s gradual end, but anyone today capable of typing “cotton gin” should know that isn’t what happened. By the time of the Civil War, fully eight decades after the revolution, American slavery was bigger, crueller, more entrenched and more profitable than ever.

Cherry-picking to bash Obama

It would be impossible (or at least brain-meltingly boring) to run down every single quote in DeSantis’s book and see whether he gave it proper context. But, for those The Post reviewed, it can safely be said that he did not.

One example: DeSantis seethes in Chapter 9 about Obama urging young people to aim for a life of public service instead of pursuing “big money” and a “fancy enough car.” “This negative view of financial success is yet another instance of Obama not being in tune with the Framers,” he concludes, splicing in bits of Hamilton quotes, not even full sentences, about Americans’ “industrious habits” and “pursuits of gain.”

Hamilton despised slavery but didn’t confront George Washington or other slaveholders

The phrases come from Federalist No. 8, which is about preventing conflicts between states. In its full context, Hamilton is exploring the pitfalls of keeping a standing army: “The industrious habits of the people of the present day, absorbed in the pursuits of gain, and devoted to the improvements of agriculture and commerce, are incompatible with the condition of a nation of soldiers, which was the true condition of the people of those [previous] republics.”

DeSantis also seems here to diminish his own life of public service. The U.S. Navy has been his employer; since he published the book, he’s been employed by Congress and the state of Florida.

James Madison’s plantation vowed to share power with Black descendants. Then things blew up.

DeSantis devotes a chunk of his book to the sacredness of property rights and Obama’s alleged disrespect for them (regulations on credit-card companies, the individual mandate), but in doing so he commits a much bigger cherry-picking blunder on slavery. He describes an elderly James Madison heroically lifting his creaky bones from retirement to speak at Virginia’s 1829 Constitutional Convention. There, DeSantis recounts, Madison “advised the delegates that ‘these natural rights cannot be separated. The personal right to acquire property, which is a natural right, gives to property, when acquired, a right to protection, a social right.’”

Madison, though, was not talking about the deed to your house or an unfair tax. The 1829 convention was called because in Virginia only White men who owned property were allowed to vote, and a bunch of White men who didn’t own property wanted to vote, too. Madison didn’t want such men to have the right to take away his slaves or make slavery less profitable....>

<....See for yourself. Here is Madison, two paragraphs after the quote DeSantis cites:

“To come more nearly to the subject before the Committee, viz. that peculiar feature in our Community which calls for a peculiar provision, in the basis of our Government, I mean the colored part of our population; It is apprehended, if the power of the Commonwealth shall be in the hands of a Majority who have no interest in this species of property, that, from the facility with which it may be oppressed by excessive taxation, injustice may be done to its owners.” Only people who own people, Madison is arguing, should be allowed to vote on matters concerning the owned people. It is a very specific kind of property.

Either DeSantis was unaware of that context of the quote, or he intentionally left it out. The former suggests sloppy research; the latter suggests the kind of “distort[ed] history” he has claimed “woke” educators in his state are trying to impose.

A warning for democracy

The ending chapters focus on Washington’s miraculous humility, how he voluntarily gave up his commander in chief status after the end of the Revolutionary War, and how he limited himself to two terms as president, setting a standard that only one president (a Democrat!) ignored. DeSantis describes this well and accurately and, if anything, understates Washington’s reticence to take power; historians like Alexis Coe have shown that Washington wanted to step down after one term, had to be persuaded to serve another and regretted it when he did.

DeSantis brings up Washington’s humility to warn against Obama’s “self-reverence,” “cockiness,” and “inflated sense of himself,” which, he claims, could threaten the republic if Obama were reelected in 2012. (It did not.) Twelve years have passed since DeSantis gave this warning, and in those 12 years, DeSantis’s record of taking principled stands against ego-driven presidents has not held up.

DeSantis sought and relished an endorsement from former president Donald Trump, who claimed in his nomination acceptance speech, “I alone can fix it.” DeSantis ran fawning ads in which he read to his children not from the Federalist Papers but from Trump’s “The Art of the Deal.” Even now, as he is expected to mount a primary campaign against his former ally, DeSantis has not condemned the former president’s false claims about the 2020 election or his unprecedented efforts to stay in the White House.

MLK and an avoidance of race

The premise of “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers” devolves as it goes on. A later chapter claims the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville would also have hated Obamacare. It’s an odd inclusion in a book purportedly about the Founding Fathers, considering Tocqueville was not one of them.

There are long asides about Supreme Court cases, and even a nod to Martin Luther King Jr. — the sanitized version trotted out in annual tweets, anyway. DeSantis quotes King as complimenting the Constitution’s “magnificent words.” According to DeSantis’s footnotes, he grabbed it not from its context — pushing for civil rights legislation in the “I Have a Dream” speech — but from the Yale Book of Quotations.

DeSantis’s book depicts history as Useful Quotes from Great Men, not a rigorous study of the past in all its complexities, contexts, perspectives and, yes, hypocrisies. His attacks on history education should come as no surprise; given the chance to literally write history here, he took great pains to ignore African American history up until it could produce King’s quote.

Madison largely wrote the “magnificent words” under which the United States has governed for 234 years. When Madison relaxed at home, most of the people around him were enslaved Black people, whose labor — and the profits their labor produced — allowed him the time to develop, as DeSantis put it, “a deep knowledge of the full spectrum of philosophical, political, economic and religious thought running through the [Constitutional] Convention.”

These realities coexisted uncomfortably long before our current history wars. Perhaps in a society — or in a state, or with a candidate — at peace with its past, there would be nothing controversial in saying so.>

<<You are sow [sic] low, you would have to climb a ladder 10 miles high ... just to reach the level of whale excrement.>

Why bring a pig into the discussion? Beats me.>

<In March, the Biden administration authorized a huge area of the Gulf of Mexico to be auctioned to oil companies for oil and gas drilling, the Guardian reports.

The parcel is called lease 259, according to the Guardian. It stretches from the southern tip of Texas to the Alabama-Florida border, covering 73.3 million acres, an area as large as Italy.

The first 1.6 million acres were put up for auction in March. Thirty-two oil companies bid a total of $309.7 million for the license to drill in the region at the Department of the Interior’s auction, the Guardian reports.

It is expected that the companies who win the rights to lease 259 will drill in the area for the next 50 years, producing 1 billion barrels of oil and 4.4 trillion cubic feet of gas, the Guardian says.

According to the Biden administration, this auction is required by the terms of the recent Inflation Reduction Act, the Guardian reports. While the bill made strides in shifting the U.S. to more affordable and cleaner sources of energy, it included compromises with the oil industry.

However, according to the Guardian, while Biden was required to allow some drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, he was not forced to sign over such a huge area. “If this continues, all of the good Biden has done for the future will be undone by Biden himself,” Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, told the Guardian.

The massive drilling projects being planned in the Gulf of Mexico will cause two major problems, the Guardian explains. First, the drilling itself will cause pollution that will impact both the ocean environment and the Gulf Coast. This area was heavily damaged by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, and more drilling could lead to a repeat of the disaster.

Second, the fuel extracted from the region will pollute the air. A recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said governments around the globe are using too many of these polluting fuel sources, the Guardian reports. At the current rate, the world will pass the recommended limit on carbon air pollution before 2030. Governments need to cut back — and the recent auction is a step backward.

“Sad to see,” said one commenter on Reddit.

Another user added, “So how’s the public opinion on the BP spill these days? They forgot? Good, do it again.”>

Glad to see they are so concerned over the environment.

om*g

<Tesla employees allegedly engaged in egregious violations of customers’ privacy, according to a disturbing report released by Reuters.

What Happened?

According to Reuters, Tesla employees were able to access video footage from the cameras built into Teslas to assist in driving. They shared those videos and images in an internal company messaging system, often to mock customers.

This information was supplied to Reuters by nine ex-Tesla employees, some of whom said that they could even access footage from the cameras when the Teslas were parked in a garage and ostensibly turned off. This allowed the employees to essentially see inside customers’ homes without consent.

“We could see inside people’s garages and their private properties,” one ex-employee told Reuters. “Let’s say that a Tesla customer had something in their garage that was distinctive, you know, people would post those kinds of things.”

“I saw some scandalous stuff sometimes, you know, like, I did see scenes of intimacy but not nudity,” claimed another ex-employee. “And there was just definitely a lot of stuff that, like, I wouldn’t want anybody to see about my life.”

Perhaps even more disturbing, employees allegedly shared video footage from accidents, including one where a Tesla driver hit a child on a bicycle.

Even Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk was not immune, as employees shared footage of the inside of his garage, where he had parked a prop from a James Bond movie for which he had paid $968,000 in 2013, according to Reuters.

Why Is This Concerning?

The allegations made by former Tesla employees are a clear violation of customers’ privacy rights and in direct contradiction to how Tesla itself explains the built-in cameras, which it says are “designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.”

In a broader sense, although Tesla certainly deserves some credit for helping to popularize electric vehicles (EVs) around the world, this is just the latest in a long list of questionable business practices that have made the company the subject of controversy.

What Is Being Done?

Tesla did not respond to questions from Reuters about the report and is likely hoping that this controversy, like many before it, will blow over.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which enforces federal laws concerning customer privacy, would be the appropriate agency to intervene, but it also refused to comment. It is not known at this time whether the FTC will open an investigation.

It is also worth noting that there are now many companies that have EVs on the market for much lower prices than Tesla.>