(02-15-2023, 11:33 AM)Fan_in_Kettering Wrote: It must be awful being a liberal with Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis living rent-free in your heads 24-7.  I cannot imagine being so engulfed in hate that I completely obsess over my political adversaries.

(02-15-2023, 11:33 AM)Fan_in_Kettering Wrote: It must be awful being a liberal with Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis living rent-free in your heads 24-7.  I cannot imagine being so engulfed in hate that I completely obsess over my political adversaries.

(02-15-2023, 11:33 AM)Fan_in_Kettering Wrote: It must be awful being a liberal with Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis living rent-free in your heads 24-7.  I cannot imagine being so engulfed in hate that I completely obsess over my political adversaries.

(02-15-2023, 01:03 PM)HarleyDog Wrote: Headline: Liberals only want one thing and it's disgusting.

(02-15-2023, 11:33 AM)Fan_in_Kettering Wrote: It must be awful being a liberal with Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis living rent-free in your heads 24-7.  I cannot imagine being so engulfed in hate that I completely obsess over my political adversaries.

(02-15-2023, 01:03 PM)HarleyDog Wrote: Headline: Liberals only want one thing and it's disgusting.

Quote:Florida bill would end diversity programs, ban majors, shift power at universities
The measure in the Florida House mirrors recent proposals by Gov. Ron DeSantis.









Students walk across campus at the University of South Florida, which stands to be affected with the state's other universities and colleges by proposed legislation on higher education for 2023. [ Times (2018) ]
By

• Divya KumarTimes staff
  

Published Yesterday|Updated Yesterday



A bill filed this week in the Florida House would turn many of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ wide-ranging ideas on higher education into law by limiting diversity efforts, vastly expanding the powers of university boards and altering course offerings.

House Bill 999, filed by Rep. Alex Andrade, R-Pensacola, proposes leaving all faculty hiring to boards of trustees, allowing a faculty member’s tenure to be reviewed “at any time,” and removing majors or minors in subjects like critical race theory and gender studies. It would also prohibit spending on activities that promote diversity, equity and inclusion and create new general education requirements.



DeSantis’ administration has been alluding to legislation like this for weeks. In early January, his budget office required all universities to detail what they spend on diversity, equity and inclusion programs. And on Jan. 31, the governor held a news conference announcing a sweeping package of changes that mirror those in Andrade’s bill.

Andrade was not immediately available for comment, his office said.

General education courses, the bill says, “may not suppress or distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics, such as Critical Race Theory, or defines American history as contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” It spells out communications, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and math courses that may count as general education credits.

“Whenever applicable,” the bill says, the courses should “promote the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization and include studies of this nation’s historical documents, including the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments there to, and the Federalist Papers.”


In addition to existing metrics like graduation rates and retention rates, universities also would be evaluated on how well they provide industry certifications and whether they are educating students “for citizenship of the constitutional republic.”



In addition, the bill would greatly expand the role of boards of trustees at each school, which in turn would increase the governor’s role in university life. The governor holds the greatest influence on who serves as a university trustee, with the ability to appoint six members to each board. The state Board of Governors can make five appointments, but that panel is also largely appointed by the governor.

The bill would require all faculty hiring to be done by boards of trustees. The boards may delegate the role to presidents, but a president would not be able to delegate the role to anyone else.

“The president and the board are not required to consider recommendations or opinions of faculty of the university or other individuals or groups,” the bill says. It also would make presidents responsible for conducting performance evaluations of all employees making over $100,000.


In addition, the bill would prohibit diversity statements, which are short essays often used during the hiring or promotion process to describe a candidate’s commitment to diversity and equity.

But the measure also makes clear it would not do away with every function that university diversity offices typically tend to. It would not prohibit programs for Pell Grant recipients, first generation college students, nontraditional students, transfer students, students from low-income families or students with unique abilities.



DeSantis’ Jan. 31 announcement included only basic information on the “civics institutes” he proposed at three of the state’s 12 public universities, but Andrade’s bill offers new details.

The Florida Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University, established in 1981, would develop coursework about the origins of the American political system; develop resources for K-12 and college students “that foster an understanding of how individual rights, constitutionalism, separation of powers, and federalism” function; and become a national resource on polling and making civic literacy recommendations, among other duties.

The Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom at Florida International University, funded by the Legislature in 2020, would function as a college — hiring faculty, enrolling students and awarding degrees.

The Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, established last year, would coordinate with the other two centers, according to the bill.

Divya Kumar covers higher education for the Tampa Bay Times, in partnership with Open Campus.

(02-15-2023, 12:31 PM)Nately120 Wrote: You get this same argument any time you say something negative about the Steelers or Tom Brady.  Oh you miserable Bengals fan seething over all their Super bowls living rent free in your  head 24-7. 

Politics and team sports continue to fuse. 


I know I told this story before, but when I was 12 or so one of my classmates said Brett Favre was drafted by the Packers and I said he was drafted by the Falcons.  This kid insisted he was right and I was frustrated.  I went through the trouble of actually finding the info to support my case in the pre-internet age and he just said "Look how upset you are, I'm totally calm" and he just sort of walked away.

I sort of envy that he was able to be so wrong and then just say "Well, you're upset so I won" and that seems like the bottom of the barrel, 12 year old boy argument I'm hearing here. He was wrong, but he changed the parameters of the argument to not be about who was right about Brett Favre's draft team, but to be about who was calm. Oh, Trump and DeSantis piss you off?  Well then your life must suck.  Checkmate.  That's not evening bringing up that Trump and DeSantis themselves represent the party of getting all bent out of shape over everything.

Ah well, so be it.  I'm mellow now.  Guess I win.  George Soros, bitches.

(02-27-2023, 11:51 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: Only one of you two still remember and recite that story multiple times decades later... so was he wrong?  

Quote:Florida bill would require bloggers who write about governor to register with the state
by: Sam Sachs
Posted: Mar 2, 2023 / 12:16 PM EST
Updated: Mar 2, 2023 / 05:25 PM EST



SHARE
[/url]


Video: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis unveils “Digital Bill of Rights” proposal.

TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Florida Sen. Jason Brodeur (R-Lake Mary) wants bloggers who write about Gov. Ron DeSantis, Attorney General Ashley Moody, and other members of the Florida executive cabinet or legislature to register with the state or face fines.

Brodeur’s proposal, Senate Bill 1316: Information Dissemination, would require any blogger writing about government officials to register with the Florida Office of Legislative Services or the Commission on Ethics.


Florida bill targets union due collections for public school teachers

In the bill, Brodeur wrote that those who write “an article, a story, or a series of stories,” about “the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, a Cabinet officer, or any member of the Legislature,” and receives or will receive payment for doing so, must register with state offices within five days after the publication of an article that mentions an elected state official.

If another blog post is added to a blog, the blogger would then be required to submit monthly reports on the 10th of each month with the appropriate state office. They would not have to submit a report on months when no content is published.

For blog posts that “concern an elected member of the legislature” or “an officer of the executive branch,” monthly reports must disclose the amount of compensation received for the coverage, rounded to the nearest $10 value.

If compensation is paid for a series of posts or for a specific amount of time, the blogger would be required to disclose the total amount to be received, upon publication of the first post in said series or timeframe.

DeSantis, others file motions to dismiss migrant flights lawsuit

Additional compensation must be disclosed later on.

Failure to file these disclosures or register with state officials, if the bill passes, would lead to daily fines for the bloggers, with a maximum amount per report, not per writer, of $2,500. The per-day fine is $25 per report for each day it’s late.
The bill also requires that bloggers file notices of failure to file a timely report the same way that lobbyists file their disclosures and reports on assessed fines. Fines must be paid within 30 days of payment notice, unless an appeal is filed with the appropriate office. Fine payments must be deposited into the Legislative Lobbyist Registration Trust Fund if it concerns an elected member of the legislature.

For writing about members of the executive branch, fines would be made payable to the Executive Branch Lobby Registration Trust Fund or, if it concerns both groups, the fine may be paid to both related trust funds in equal amounts.
Explicitly, the blogger rule would not apply to newspapers or similar publications, under Brodeur’s proposed legislation.

Florida moves to expand ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law in coming legislative session
[url=https://www.wfla.com/news/politics/florida-moves-to-expand-dont-say-gay-law-in-coming-legislative-session/?ipid=promo-link-block3]
In additional to the blogger regulations, the bill also removes provisions of state statutes to require judicial notices of sales to be published on publicly accessible websites, and specifies that a government agency can publish legally required advertisements and public notices on county sites if the cost is not paid by or recovered from an individual.

Should the bill pass, it would take effect immediately upon approval.

Quote:Florida courts could take 'emergency' custody of kids with trans parents or siblings — even if they live in another state
Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert 
Mar 4, 2023, 1:47 AM


A new billboard welcoming visitors to "Florida: The Sunshine 'Don't Say Gay or Trans' State' is seen on April 21, 2022, in Winter Park, Florida. John Raoux/AP

• Florida Senate Bill 254 would grant courts emergency custody of kids who receive gender-affirming care.
• The bill, introduced Friday, would also allow the courts to modify out-of-state custody agreements.
• The bill would grant officials authority under the law that protects kids from domestic violence.
  

A proposed bill making its way through the Florida State Senate would allow the state "emergency jurisdiction" over children who receive or are "at risk of" receiving gender-affirming care — or if their parent receives it themselves.
Senate Bill 254, introduced Friday by State Senator Clay Yarborough, would grant the court authority to take emergency custody of kids under the same statute that protects them from domestic violence and abuse.


The state could take temporary custody of children if "it is necessary in an emergency to protect the child because the child, or a sibling or parent of the child" is "at risk of or is being subjected to the provision of sex reassignment prescriptions or procedures," according to the proposed bill text.

The proposed bill defines sex reassignment prescriptions or procedures as hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and surgeries or procedures that "affirm a person's perception of his or her sex if that perception is inconsistent with the person's sex" at birth.

The court would also be granted "jurisdiction to vacate, stay, or modify a child custody determination of a court of another state to protect the child from the risk of being subjected to the provision of sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures," according to the proposed bill text. "The court must vacate, stay, or modify the child custody determination to the extent necessary to protect the child from the provision of such prescriptions or procedures."

Representatives for Yarborough, who sponsored the bill, did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic and former staff attorney at the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, tweeted that the proposed law would allow "legal kidnapping" of trans kids and is part of a "full on war against trans people in the state of Florida."

"The bill goes even further to violate interstate comity by authorizing the courts to vacate child custody determinations of other courts only if the child is trans. This is a greenlight to transphobic family members to engage in state sponsored kidnapping," Caraballo said, adding: "A transphobic parent could kidnap their trans child in violation of custody agreements and abscond to Florida and be protected by Florida law under this despite likely committing felony kidnapping in their home state." [/url]

Caraballo did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Florida House Representatives Randy Fine and Ralph Massullo proposed a separate bill on Friday that, if passed, would make it illegal for doctors to provide gender-affirming care including puberty blockers and hormone therapy to minors, local news outlet Click Orlando reported.

Last month, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis requested public entities, including hospitals and universities, provide a breakdown of the medical data of patients who received gender-affirming care at their institutions. Students from public universities walked off campus in protest.


The state has seen an increase in anti-LGBT bill proposals and laws in recent years, including [url=https://www.businessinsider.com/florida-ron-desantis-dont-say-gay-bill-law-2022-3]DeSantis' controversial "Don't Say Gay" bill, which limits how teachers may instruct about sexual orientation and gender identity.
Representatives for DeSantis did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

(02-15-2023, 12:31 PM)Nately120 Wrote: You get this same argument any time you say something negative about the Steelers or Tom Brady.  Oh you miserable Bengals fan seething over all their Super bowls living rent free in your  head 24-7. 

Politics and team sports continue to fuse. 


I know I told this story before, but when I was 12 or so one of my classmates said Brett Favre was drafted by the Packers and I said he was drafted by the Falcons.  This kid insisted he was right and I was frustrated.  I went through the trouble of actually finding the info to support my case in the pre-internet age and he just said "Look how upset you are, I'm totally calm" and he just sort of walked away.

I sort of envy that he was able to be so wrong and then just say "Well, you're upset so I won" and that seems like the bottom of the barrel, 12 year old boy argument I'm hearing here. He was wrong, but he changed the parameters of the argument to not be about who was right about Brett Favre's draft team, but to be about who was calm. Oh, Trump and DeSantis piss you off?  Well then your life must suck.  Checkmate.  That's not evening bringing up that Trump and DeSantis themselves represent the party of getting all bent out of shape over everything.

Ah well, so be it.  I'm mellow now.  Guess I win.  George Soros, bitches.

(03-06-2023, 10:58 PM)samhain Wrote: I met a girl at a party once.  She bartended at a place I frequented and she was kind of cute.  At some point, we were sitting together and conversing.  I'd always noticed that she had a tattoo of one of Ralph Steadman's Hunter S Thomspon drawings on her arm.  I was pretty sure I was going to hit this one out of the park.  I asked her if she'd read any of his work, and she said no, but she liked the movies.  The look on my face was probably strike one here.  Strike two was when I said that it was wild that he was actually from Kentucky.  She got very pissy and told me that he definitely was from Colorado, not Kentucky.  Like she was pissed-off mad and kind of hostile at this point.  I let it go.

To this very day, it  annoys the shit out of me.  I guarantee that whatever she's doing now, she probably still believes she was right.  

(03-06-2023, 11:00 PM)Nately120 Wrote: Fun side note, John Oates was his neighbor for those final years.


On a related note, I was in college before cell phones and we were at a diner and oldies radio was on and "The Pina Colada Song" was on and people, my friends and townies alike, all seemed to agree that it was a Jimmy Buffet song.  And I said it was some one-hit wonder guy with glasses who looked like a sex offender but I can't remember his name.

Everyone assured me it was Jimmy Buffet and it was frustrating. 

(03-06-2023, 11:07 PM)samhain Wrote: Yeah.  I mean, I've been on the other end of it, too.  

I absolutely thought that Springsteen sang the song "Dark Side' by John Cafferty.  Also, you could not convince me that Eddie Money didn't sing "Walkin' in Memphis".

Quote:IN RON DESANTIS’S FLORIDA, A TEXTBOOK PUBLISHER DELETED ANY MENTION OF RACE IN THE STORY OF ROSA PARKS

This is the creepy, fact-free world the Florida governor wants us to live in.

BY 
MARCH 16, 2023

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  [url=https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/ron-desantis-florida-rosa-parks-textbook#]
  

As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, Ron DeSantis has a dystopian vision for Florida public schools that includes pretending LGBTQ+ people don’t exist and teaching kids that white people have never done anything wrong. Because he’s a massive bully who threatens retribution against anyone with a different worldview, some organizations have felt the need to go to extreme lengths to appease him and his ****** up perspective. For instance: a textbook publisher that deleted any reference to race in a widely known story about Rosa Parks.

Yes, The New York Times reports that Studies Weekly, whose curriculum is used in 45,000 schools throughout the country, made a disturbing update to its lesson about Parks’s historic Montgomery bus boycott. In the lesson that’s currently used, segregation is clearly defined with text that reads: “The law said African Americans had to give up their seats on the bus if a white person wanted to sit down.” But in an updated version, it’s as though race doesn’t exist at all. “She was told to move to a different seat,” it simply reads.

The company, according to the Times, made “similar changes to a fourth-grade lesson about segregation laws that arose after the Civil War.” The initial version refers to African Americans clearly and states how they were affected by Jim Crow. However, an update makes virtually no mention of race, and merely states that it was illegal for “men of certain groups” to be unemployed and for “certain groups of people” to serve on juries.

Following questions from the Times, Studies Weekly removed the “scrubbed-down version” of the curriculum from its website and said it had removed itself from the state’s review process. For its part, the Florida Department of Education claimed it had rejected the publisher over a bureaucratic issue with its submission. The FDOE also suggested to the Times that Studies Weekly had gone too far with its edits, and that any publisher that “avoids the topic of race when teaching the Civil Rights movement, slavery, segregation, etc. would not be adhering to Florida law.” But as the company pointed out, one of Florida’s laws is the Stop WOKE Act, which DeSantis proudly signed last year and which bans instruction that would make anyone feel “discomfort, guilt, or anguish” about what people of the same race did in the past. And given DeSantis’s previous comments—like that it’s “inappropriate” and “not true” to teach that America was built on stolen land—it’s not hard to see why the company believed it needed to tread lightly.

Meanwhile, the conservative group Florida Citizens Alliance has reportedly “urged the state to reject 28 of the 38” text books its volunteers have reviewed. The group apparently found too many references to slavery in a fifth-grade text book, and felt that an eighth-grade text book spent too much time on the “negative side” of the treatment of Native Americans, without providing a robust account of the bad things Native Americans did. While it’s not clear if the state will adopt the Florida Citizens Alliance’s recommendations, it seems the group has an in with people in high places: According to the Times, the alliance’s cofounders served on DeSantis’s education advisory committee during his transition to the governor’s office.

Speaking of the governor and what he may or may not approve of in a social studies curriculum, last November, in a story about DeSantis’s time teaching high school history at a private boarding school, a former student told the Times that DeSantis seemed to justify slavery while teaching about the Civil War. “Like in history class, he was trying to play devil’s advocate that the South had good reason to fight that war, to kill other people, over owning people—Black people,” Danielle Pompey said. “He was trying to say, ‘It’s not okay to own people, but they had property, businesses.’” Another former student, Gates Minis, said she remembered that, when it came to the Civil War, DeSantis taught things that were straight-up factually inaccurate.

Per the Times:

Quote:[Minis] remembers him claiming that every city in the South had burned, even though she knew her hometown, Savannah, had not and she called him out on it.

Another student who requested anonymity because he feared repercussions for his job said Mr. DeSantis’s takes on the Civil War were the subject of so much talk that students made a satirical video about him at the time for the video yearbook. The video, which was reviewed by the [i]Times, includes a short snippet in which a voice purporting to be Mr. DeSantis is heard saying: “The Civil War was not about slavery! It was about two competing economic systems. One was in the North…” while a student dozes in class. (A student voiced the role of Mr. DeSantis, because students did not have any actual footage of him, according to a student who helped put it together.)[/i]

Earlier this year, Florida rejected an Advanced Placement African America studies course from being taught in its public high schools. And in January, DeSantis announced that his administration plans to defund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at every public college in the state.