Florida
Weekend humor from Celia Rivenbark: Finland? The happiest country?
Well, lah-di-dah and pass the Sima! Finland has been named the Happiest Country in the World. Again. For the sixth straight year, if you’re keeping track. And I am. Finland? A word, please? OK, listen. Way back in the 1990s, a very talented American actress named Candice Bergen starred in the wildly popular sitcom “Murphy […]
GOP lawmakers plan to ban more college majors in FL like ethnic studies, ‘radical’ feminist theory
State has been a frequent model for NC Republicans Republican lawmakers are proposing to expand legislation that would further limit majors and minors available to Florida university students, which would exacerbate concerns from faculty and other opponents of the bill that has already shaken up higher education in the state. The legislation also would further […]
Is the new AP African American Studies course dangerous? Students don’t think so
Three days after the nation honored Martin Luther King Jr.’s leadership in the Civil Rights Movement, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Education announced that no Florida public high school would be allowed to teach the nation’s first and only Advanced Placement or AP African American Studies course at the college level. She asserted […]
Touting his environmental ‘success,’ DeSantis is more con man than conservationist
Maybe it’s because I’m from Florida, home to sooooo many slick talkers, but I love a good yarn about con artists. “The Sting,” “American Hustle,” “The Music Man” — the list of great grifter movies is a long one, including “The Grifters.” These stories show how some people can weave a magical spell with words […]
On anniversary of Rosewood attack, it’s sad to see DeSantis embrace FL’s Old South legacy
It began in the usual way: A white woman (her name was Frances Taylor) accused a Black man of beating her. That was on New Year’s Day, 1923. It ended in the usual way, with violence, lynching, and destruction. That Jan. 2, a mob of white men drove to Rosewood, a mostly Black turpentine village […]
Florida is turning its back on the New South, embracing its Dixie-fied past
Florida was once a New South state. From the early 1960s to 2000 or so, Florida had leaders who looked to the future, determined to leave Jim Crow behind and separate ourselves from the likes of Alabama. We had governors committed to equal justice, open government, and voting rights — however imperfectly achieved. No more. […]
Study: More Republicans than Democrats likely died of COVID
It’s already known that hundreds of thousands of Americans would still be alive if every eligible person had gotten vaccinated against COVID-19. Now new research strongly suggests that many more of those “excess deaths” in Ohio and Florida were among people with Republican voter registrations. It’s perhaps unsurprising that Republicans were more reluctant to get vaccinated against the novel coronavirus, which has so far killed more than 1 million in the United States and more than 6.5 million worldwide.
What will Florida’s climate-change-denying pols learn from Hurricane Ian?
We all know that MAGA 2.0 Ayatollah Ron DeSantis takes a strong interest in what gets taught in Florida schools. But now that Hurricane Ian has wreaked virtually unprecedented havoc on the west side of his state, it’s time for him to sit in a class and get schooled on the basics of science. Lesson […]
Jewish congregations mount legal challenges to state abortion bans
WASHINGTON — Thousands of years of Jewish scripture make it clear that access to abortion care is a requirement of Jewish law and practice, according to Rabbi Karen Bogard. “We preserve life at all costs,” she said in an interview with States Newsroom. “But there is a difference between that which is living, and that […]
Religion-based claims are piling up against Florida’s 15-week abortion ban
Legal complaints are stacking up against Florida’s 15-week abortion ban, all of them arguing that the law imposes a narrowly sectarian definition of when life begins upon other elements of the faith community that hold markedly different ideas about the matter. The trend began in early June, when Barry Silver, a South Florida lawyer and […]
North Carolina and Florida become southern abortion havens
[This story was first published by Stateline, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts.] In the month since the U.S. Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion, red states in the Deep South have been one-by-one criminalizing nearly all abortions. As of this week, most abortions are banned in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and South […]
The impending miseducation of Florida’s schoolchildren
As a great president once asked, “Is our children learning?” Well, is they? It don’t look good, what with government schools forcing them to become communists, hate America, and vote wrong. But never fear: Florida’s governor’s fixed that mess with new rules stopping those union-loving, Toni Morrison-reading, evolution-accepting, comfortable shoe-wearing, foreign movie-watching, gay-coddling teachers indoctrinating […]