May 19, 2023

Friday, May 19, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Joe is always busy.

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Kamala is always busy.

You can tell a lot about a person by their musical tastes. Touch below 👇to check out Kamala’s.

The VP has a sore throat.

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Does #RedMeatDeSantis really think he can beat Disney!

A new office complex, and relocation of a division from California, would have created more than 2,000 jobs but was scuttled as the company and Gov. Ron DeSantis continue to feud.

In March, Disney called Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida “anti-business” for his scorched-earth attempt to tighten oversight of the company’s theme park resort near Orlando. Last month, when Disney sued the governor and his allies for what it called “a targeted campaign of government retaliation,” the company made clear that $17 billion in planned investment in Walt Disney World was on the line.

“Does the state want us to invest more, employ more people, and pay more taxes, or not?” Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said on an earnings-related conference call with analysts last week.

On Thursday, Mr. Iger and Josh D’Amaro, Disney’s theme park and consumer products chairman, showed that they were not bluffing, pulling the plug on a nearly $1 billion office complex that was scheduled for construction in Orlando. It would have brought more than 2,000 jobs to the region, with $120,000 as the average salary, according to an estimate from the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity. (New York Times).

Why videos of Florida workers leaving their jobs are going viral.

The videos from Florida aren’t hard to find: Dozens of clips of empty fields, abandoned construction sites, and scores of truck drivers calling for boycotts of the state have racked up hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok and Twitter over the last month. The common thread? Fear and frustration over the state’s newest anti-immigrant law, signed a week ago by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, which mandates that businesses with 25 or more employees verify the citizenship status of workers through the federal online portal E-Verify or face stronger penalties, among other new restrictions.

The new law, which goes into effect on July 1, is the latest move by DeSantis to capitalize on immigration politics as he prepares for a likely but as-yet-unannounced 2024 presidential campaign. The law, one of the most stringent state immigration measures in the US, seems intended to contrast President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration policy as the controversial pandemic-era health rule Title 42 expired last week. But the impact of the bill, critics say, will amount to a wide-ranging and intrusive crackdown on the state’s large immigrant communities, which stand to face the brunt of the new rules.

Florida is home to about 800,000 undocumented immigrants, and many work in the kinds of businesses that would be impacted by the law, known as SB 1718. Many of those affected are also members of mixed-status families — where a son or daughter, for example, might be a US citizen while their parents are not. The bill’s impact extends beyond the workplace to health care and highways: Even family members could be targets of law enforcement under a new provision that punishes anyone who transports an undocumented person “knowingly and willfully” into Florida across state lines.

The law also requires Florida hospitals that accept Medicaid to collect the immigration status of patients and calculate and report the cost of health care for undocumented people to the state; it no longer permits undocumented people to use driver’s licenses issued from other states and prohibits state ID cards to be issued to them.

Combined, these provisions may also deal a devastating blow to Florida businesses that rely on migrant labor, as it may force workers and their families to flee Florida, Samuel Vilchez Santiago, the Florida state director of the American Business Immigration Coalition, told Vox. (Vox).

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Anderson Cooper criticized us for objecting to CNN giving Trump’s lies and rants a platform. Christiane Amanpour feels otherwise.

CNN's Amanpour criticizes network's decision to hold Trump town hall.

NEW YORK (AP) — Veteran correspondent Christiane Amanpour became the most prominent CNN journalist to publicly criticize her network for airing last week’s town hall with former President Donald Trump.

Amanpour told a group of graduating students at Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism on Wednesday that she would have “dropped the mic at ‘nasty person,’” a reference to when Trump lobbed that insult at moderator Kaitlan Collins.

CNN was criticized for hosting Trump at a live event in New Hampshire, where the 2024 presidential candidate repeated lies about the last election before a mostly adoring audience. CNN Chairman Chris Licht has defended the town hall as newsworthy and important, and Amanpour said she had a “robust discussion” with him about it.

Everyone knows Trump tries to seize the stage and dominate at such events, said Amanpour, the chief international correspondent who has worked at CNN for 40 years.
No matter how much flak the moderator tries to aim at the incoming, it doesn’t work,” she said.

Perhaps today’s journalism leaders should learn from those in the 1950s, who refused to give Sen. Joseph McCarthy attention “unless his foul lies, his witch hunts and his rants” reached the basic level for evidence allowed in a courtroom, she said.

“Maybe less is more,” she said. “Maybe live is not always right.”

Amanpour criticized the town hall’s audience, chosen by CNN because they were Republicans or independents who plan to vote in the 2024 Republican primary.

Citing the precedents of past candidate debates or forums, CNN should have insisted “that our invited guests behave themselves — no hooting, no hollering, no jeering, no cheering.”

“I can only hope that your trust in us might have been shaken but not shattered, that you believe that we can survive and rebuild that trust,” she said.

A spokesman for Licht did not immediately return messages for comment. In an internal call with CNN staff members last week, Licht noted that people in the town hall audience represented a large swath of America.

“The mistake the media made in the past is ignoring that those people exist,” he said. “Just like you cannot ignore that President Trump exists.” (Associated Press).

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We can’t be cocky but many recent elections point to Democratic success.

New Hampshire Democrats just crushed it in a special election. An even bigger one looms.

As Democrats across the country enjoyed a string of electoral successes on Tuesday night, they were joined by their compatriots in New Hampshire, who saw one of their own, former Nashua Alderman Marc Plamondon, romp in the special election in the closely divided state House. Plamondon's margin stands out not just because he far outperformed other Democratic candidates in his district, but because it's yet one more sign that Democrats are well-positioned to flip a Republican-held House seat in an upcoming special—a turn of events that would yield an exact tie in the 400-member chamber.

While the Hillsborough County district Plamondon successfully defended is safely blue, his 72-28 win amounts to a 43-point margin of victory. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, by contrast, both carried the same turf by 27 points, meaning Plamondon ran 16 points ahead of them. In New Hampshire's gigantic House, districts are very small, and so total turnout was as well—just around 200 votes—so it's wise not to read too much into a single data point. But fortunately, we have more.

Most notably, Democratic state Rep. Chuck Grassie prevailed in a do-over race in February after his November election ended in an exact tie. In that heavily scrutinized and very expensive rematch in Strafford County, Grassie won by 12 points—a huge improvement, needless to say, over his previous deadlock, but also over Biden's 7-point margin. And we've seen that pattern repeated in special elections nationwide this year: In aggregate, Democrats are running almost 7 points ahead of the 2020 presidential results in 18 total specials so far.

That brings us to the forthcoming special election in Rockingham County, which is nestled along New Hampshire's coast, right between Strafford and Hillsborough counties. Republican state Rep. Benjamin Bartlett resigned from the county's 1st District last month, and an election to fill his vacant seat is likely to take place in August or September.

That district (which locals often refer to by the two towns it encompasses, Northwood and Nottingham) is very swingy. Donald Trump carried it by less than a point in 2020, 49.1 to 48.7, and the trends appear to be favorable, since his margin in 2016 was more than 8 points. And according to one analyst, Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan actually won it by 2 points last year while Democrats fell just 10 votes shy of securing one of the district's three seats. (Only one seat will be up in the expected special.)

Given the prevailing winds, Democrats have good reason to think they'll be able to pick up Bartlett's seat. If they can do so (and also win another special in a solidly blue seat in Grafton County), then on paper, the New Hampshire House would have exactly 200 members of each party. It would represent an extraordinary development, given that Republicans gerrymandered the current map to their advantage following the 2020 census. But what would happen next?

It's not clear that formal control of the chamber would change, particularly because a handful of Democrats voted to elect Republican Sherman Packard as speaker by secret ballot following the November midterms. But on any given day in the New Hampshire House, there are always absences, so what matters is who shows up. And Democrats have at times this year enjoyed superior numbers on the floor, allowing them to block GOP bills or advance measures of their own.

It's also not impossible that the unprecedented nature of a tied House could prompt a reckoning that could lead to a power-sharing agreement. But what matters most is preparing for the future. There will assuredly be more special elections at some point, which means that Democrats could take a bona fide majority before long. Even if not, though, they'll want to position themselves for victory in 2024, when the entire legislature once again goes before voters. The more seats they hold now, the likelier they are to meet with success next year. (Daily Kos)

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Hopefully, more children will find adults who love them.

Same-sex couples will now have full adoption rights in Taiwan.


Taiwan's legislature passed an amendment Tuesday that allows same-sex couples to adopt children they are not biologically related to — a move cheered on by LGBTQ advocates.

Taiwan legalized gay marriage in 2019, becoming the only place in Asia that allows it.

However, those married couples could only adopt children related to one of the partners. Lawmakers with the island's Democratic Progressive Party said this was a dangerous setup — especially if one parent died and the other could not get legal rights to the children. They said it could even disincentivize same-sex couples from marrying if one person already had children.

On Tuesday, Taiwan's Legislative Yuan amended the same-sex marriage law to widen joint adoption.

The Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights has been calling for this change. In the wake of the 2019 legalization of same-sex marriage, it said the island "fails to guarantee the full rights of same-sex couples in matters of adoption."

After the legislature took action, "today's success shows that the consensus in Taiwan is to protect the human rights of LGBTI peoples and promote gender equality," the alliance said in a statement, according to CNN. (NPR).