"Scathing" doesn't do the account justice as Florida governor leads his state to the morgue.

I'm enchanted.

"The not-honest operators are making sick people come to work, refusing to offer paid time off or pay for testing, and that's gonna get people killed."

Not really.

Florida Man Leads His State to the Morgue, by Adam Weinstein (The New Republic)

Ron DeSantis is the latest in a long line of Republicans who made the state a plutocratic dystopia. Now he’s letting its residents die to save the plutocrats.

On Tuesday, DeSantis took a break from welcoming the Republican National Convention to Jacksonville, waving the starting flag at a Nascar race south of Miami, and pushing for schools to open this fall, to announce that “No, we’re not shutting down, you know, we’re going to go forward.” He also echoed President Trump and Vice President Pence in writing off the troubling rise in Covid cases as attributable to higher rates of testing. But all the available data show that Florida has a dangerously high, rising number of positive tests per capita; positive tests now make up as many as 7 percent of all tests in Florida. Testing is finding more afflicted Floridians because there are more afflicted Floridians. “The fact that these are going up means there’s more community spread,” said Palm Beach County health director Alina Alonso. “The virus now has food out there. It has people that are out there without masks, without maintaining distancing. So it’s infecting more people.”

Elected officials everywhere say, "You hold a blow dryer up to your face and you inhale through your nose and it kills all the viruses in your nose."

When I saw this newspaper story mentioned on social media, there seemed little reason to investigate.

Was it The Onion or Babylon Bee?

No, brothers and sisters, it's a real newspaper, and Bryant H. Culpepper really is an elected official, but I'm willing to print the link to the facts and allow it to suffice with no further comment.

That's because during the past 15 years of paying closer attention to local affairs in New Albany and Floyd County, I've heard numerous utterances like this, on a wide variety of topics, emanating from members of both political parties who've been elected to office, often for multiple terms.

Nah. I got nothin'.

Okeechobee county commissioner suggests ways to combat COVID-19 virus, special to the Lake Okeechobee News

OKEECHOBEE – While most of the Okeechobee County Commissioners urge the public to refer to the health information from the Centers for Disease Control, the Florida Department of Health or their own doctor, one commissioner uses the public commission meetings to share his own ideas about COVID-19.

At the March 20 meeting of the Okeechobee County Commissioners, Commissioner Bryant Culpepper referenced a program he said he saw on One American News Network about the coronavirus.

“One of the things that was pointed out in this interview with one of the foremost doctors who has studied the coronavirus said that the nasal passages and the nasal membranes are the coolest part of the body. That’s why the virus tends to go there until it then becomes healthy enough to go into the lungs.

“This sound really goofy, and it did to me too, but it works,” he explained. “Once the temperature reaches 136 degrees Fahrenheit, the virus falls apart, it disintegrates.

“I said how would you get the temperature up to 136 degrees? The answer was you use a blow dryer. You hold a blow dryer up to your face and you inhale through your nose and it kills all the viruses in your nose.

“So that sounds like a really simplified way of doing things, but sometimes the cures for these diseases are very simple.

“Also, if you are worried about it going into your lungs, because that’s where it goes to turn into pneumonia, you can put a pan of water on the stove until it turns into steam and inhale it. It sounds too easy, but at this point, it’s worth trying,” he continued ...

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the Satanic Temple, the Supreme Court and government-sanctioned religion.

Touched by His Noodly Appendage

While I wouldn't "join" the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster any more quickly than the various other religions, pastafarianism might become a key element of my plans for New Albanian religious tolerance as a key element of beer tourism.

But hold the tomatoes. I prefer white clam sauce with my pasta, please, and the real point of the essay linked here is whether the Satanic Temple counts, too.

Devil’s Advocates, by Mark Joseph Stern (Slate)

Thanks to conservative Supreme Court rulings, the government must support the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Satanic Temple.

When Rosenberger first came down, many liberals bemoaned it as a loophole through which Christians could obtain more government funding. It may well be—but it’s also the Satanic Temple’s best shot at getting its display in the Florida Capitol. State officials claim that, because they were generous enough to open up the space to religious groups in the first place, they retain the final authority over who gets to display what. Rosenberger says: absolutely not. If officials didn’t want the Satanic Temple erecting a display in the capitol rotunda, they shouldn’t have let religious groups in in the first place. Now that they’ve opened the gates, they have no right to stop the stampede.

Tony Bennett and Trofim Lysenko: Separated at birth?

To refresh your memory as to Lysenko, Wikipedia's fine.

The biggest loser in the Tony Bennett resignation, by Valerie Strauss (Washington Post)

... What Bennett did in Indiana and the Board of Education did in Florida show how little the rules matter to some school reformers who wrap themselves in the mantle of “accountability for all” but try to escape it themselves. In both Indiana and Florida, the Bush-inspired A-F school grading system had to be changed to keep corporate-influenced school reform from collapsing under the weight of its own illogic, revealing the reform model as bankrupt.