Bob Shepherd surprised me with this post. I thought he was going to write that you should move to Florida to vote out the scoundrels now running the state and destroying public schools.
I thought he would say to move to Florida because it is 75 degrees there today.
But he has other reasons for you to join him there.
Here are two reasons of his reasons. Open the link to learn about the others.
Economy. It’s the home of free (I mean really free) enterprise. Selling sinkholes and swampland to Yankees has mostly given way to late-night erectile dysfunction infomercials (yes, a big industry in Florida), casinos, tort law, strip clubs, megachurches, guns shows, and charter schools, but it’s still the capital of the con, so, of course, it’s home to Donald Trump. (Mar-a-lago recently won a prestigious award for second tackiest dwelling in the universe, after Trump’s apartment in Trump Tower.) Of course, the man who brought you Trump University would locate here. It’s wilder than the Wild West. How do all those grifters end up here? Basically, ne’er-do-wells throughout the country flee the law until they can’t flee any further because there’s an ocean in the way.
O Florida! Of thee I sing!
Geography. The state has two zones–North Florida (which is basically Southern Southern Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi without the high levels of education for which those states are known) and South Florida, aka, The Swamplands. To get to Florida, go East until you smell it and South until you step in it. The highest elevation in the state is Mount Trashmore, aka the Miami Dump (true), from the top of which you can see all the way to Tallahassee. It’s important for you to relocate to Florida soon, as with global warming and the flatness and low elevation of the state, it soon will not exist anymore.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I was born and raised in the state that Bob is skewering. He is a wonder. He has picked so many, many winners for his true to life tall tales. Best of all is his pitch for his own school.
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Question: Do you know why Donnie couldn’t have a Nativity scene at Mar-a-lago?
Answer: No one could find three wise men and a virgin.
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LOL. Hilarious!
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I live in Northern Florida where the culture is more like Alabama or Georgia. This area is not know for strip clubs except for neighborhoods near the military bases. We have a lot more mega-churches than strip clubs. This is “family values” Florida. I live near the coast and the largest Air Force base in the US. As a result, the atmosphere is more cosmopolitan and diverse as there are many very skilled “secret clearance” jobs on the base. Gentrification is pushing lots of the traditional “rednecks” to the northern end of the county close to the Alabama border. We still have our fair share of con artists. Matt Gaetz is our representative in Congress. He is Trump’s cartoonish attack dog at the moment.
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It’s a fascinating place, this state. It has many, many subcultures. Many people don’t know that CENTCOM has its main headquarters in Tampa and that we have a string of high-tech military contractors all up the East Coast.
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I knew some of these military installations because members of my family did training in them or were assigned to them after training. I grew up in Tampa. McDill airbase was the home of super-big airplanes ready to attack Russia. It also housed a rehab center for vets. As a teen I was recruited to my first adult education course there, teaching the rudiments of watercolor painting.
There once was the Homestead airbase. It was demolished by hurricane Andrew but I spent many holidays there. The fighter jets at that base were at the ready to defend the US from the time of the Cuban Missile crisis. Roads to the base took your through mangrove swamps.
I had one summer camp job out in the mangrove swamps. The road to the camp vanished when it rained. Your imagery of mosquitos and other insects brought back some memories of those critters and their relentless pursuits to find human skin.
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Wonderful stories, Laura! People would be surprised, I think, to learn about how many spooks (people connected to the intelligence services, working in concert with the military) live and work in Florrida. Do you know Patrick Smith’s wonderful novel about Florida crackers, A Land Remembered? A wonderful read. Cracker: from the whips used by drovers to round up feral cattle living in Southern Florida, descendants of ones who had escaped from the Spanish into the bush.
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I just moved here from one of the most corrupt little states in the country and I find what this guy said as an insult to me and other educated people who moved here. Fl is people friendly-tax friendly-retiree friendly and the state I came from is not….And in this Christmas season, it is disgusting for him to throw stones at people here who practice moral Christian living and have a better quality of life than where they came from.
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As for con artists, RI has more than their fair share.
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I have a Rhode Island story to your point, sprawler47. Years ago, my then wife and I were looking for a home in Rhode Island. We found a beautiful one, not far from the beach, for an insanely low price. Why so cheap? I asked the realtor. Well, it’s one of those domestic situations, you know, she replied. On the way out, I took a wrong turn and was stopped by a wire fence with a hazard sign. The house was near an abandoned hazardous waste dumping facility. A little something the realtor forgot to mention.
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“Moral xtian living”
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ad infinitum.
And for all the Spanish speakers: Je je je je je je je ad infinitum.
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sprawler47: no offense intended. This was all in fun. I love Florida.
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“it is disgusting for him to throw stones at people here who practice moral Christian living and have a better quality of life than where they came from.”
I wish people who live in Florida would show some of the ‘moral Christian living’ by voting for politicians who work to help others. Trump doesn’t fit into that category. Neither do Republicans Marco Rubio (serving since 2011) and Rick Scott (serving since 2019).
I have friends who live in Florida. One wishes she could get Medicaid insurance. This state didn’t expand Medicaid even though the federal government pays 90% of the cost. Don’t “Christian values” mean helping those who need help?
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“And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Matt 25:40, KJV
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carolmalaysia
Floridian Christian values only pertain to the fetus, once born you are in God’s hands.
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And if that child living in poverty that is in God’s hand doesn’t get enough food and dies of malnutrition, then it was God’s will.
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Lloyd Lofthouse: Don’t forget that that child can be killed by gunfire, but it God’s law that everyone own a gun.
Good people need guns to kill all the bad people with guns. Also, it is a proven truth that guns don’t kill people.
The Great Orange One speaks:
“Gun and magazine bans are a total failure.”
— DONALD J. TRUMP ON THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS, SEPTEMBER 2015
The candidate says that law-abiding citizens should be allowed to own the firearms of their choice.
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The odds are very high that anything Trump says or tweets is a lie. In China, when the state-run media reports one thing, most of the people expect the opposite is the truth.
The American people should follow the same unwritten rule. That whatever Trump claim has to be the opposite of the truth.
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“In Florida, we have extremely venomous and ill-tempered cotton mouth water moccasins.”
Will have to disagree that water moccasins are as described. The cottonmouths that I have been around have been quite docile. But then again I was just looking from a respectable distance and not messing with them.
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Yup. Don’t try messing with them. LOL. But you’re right. For the most part, they lie like logs.
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In Tampa, there is a wonderful park, Lettuce Lake, with walkways built out over the swamp, from which, in safety, you can gaze down on the gators and the cotton mouths sunning themselves. (I haven’t seen so much indolent sunning since Revere Beach, back in Massachusetts.) I used to love taking my kids there. You would think they would freak out, but their response was, “That’s so cool.”
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However, I found myself, one sunny day in July, on the Hillsborough River, in a kayak, with about thirty gators, some of them bigger than my boat, in the water all around me. “Perfectly safe,” the game warden said to me. I am not exaggerating.
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“lie like logs”
I wasn’t talking about tRumptrainers.
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I know someone “special” that wants me to sell my house in California and move to Florida with her. She lived in Florida from age 15 to 20 and has fond memories of the state.
That was 15 to 20 years ago.
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Lloyd Lofthouse: I just spoke on the phone with one of my friends who lives in Florida. She is going batty living, short time, with friends who are Trump supporters. She hates Trump as much as I do and goes out in her car to speak with me. She doesn’t want anyone to hear what we say to each other.
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It’s a unique place, Florida. My favorite part about it? The sky. Because it’s so flat, the sky is really, really big here, and the storms are a sight to see. The state is a peninsula, and in the summer, wind drives warm water from the ocean over the state, and in the afternoon, this drops as apocalypse-style rain, like a monsoon that lasts for only about ten to twenty minutes. This sort of makes up for its not having my beloved New England mountains. https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/poetry/i-am-an-idiot/
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So, Lloyd, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time here in Florida. And, Lloyd, there are many Floridas. Lots of enclaves, differing vastly from one another.
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Would an election map that shows areas that were dominated by democratic candidates help to identify enclaves where sanity rules instead of greed and the pursuit of wealth and power?
There must be a lot of progressive-liberal dominated areas in Florida since HC took 47.8 percent of the 9,091,260 votes in Florida in 2016, and TrumpleRancidSkin only had 49.1-percent.
I see nine counties in Florida where Hillary earned the majority of votes.
Palm Beach County with 56.5% of the vote
Broward County with 66.5%
Miami-Dade County with 63.7%
Hillsborough County with 51.5%
Osceola County with 60.9%
Orange County with 61/4%
Alachua County with 59%
Leon County with 60.5% (Tallahasee)
AND Gadsden County with 67.9%
https://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president/florida/
And in 2018, the Democrats swept 14 counties
https://www.politico.com/election-results/2018/florida/
I read a piece yesterday that said the odds favored Florida becoming a battleground state in 2020. The Democrats could take the state away from the corrupt and manipulating Jeb Bush machine.
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Were it not for the election fixing by Repugnicans, Florida would have tipped over into the consistently blue category some time ago. They use every trick in the book here–locating voting places far from black and brown neighborhoods or ensuring long lines in those neighborhoods, closing polls early, not giving people election day off, using felon lists and turning away anyone black or brown who has a name like that of someone on the list, etc. We’re seeing a lot of elections here that are won by hair. We desperately need outside election fairness monitors.
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Like election fairness monitors from democracies like Norway, Sweeden, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, and Scotland. Forget England. Political corruption seems rampant there.
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Rudolph the Brown-Nosed Ghouliani
(to the tune of “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer”)
Rudolph the Ghouliani
had very brown, brown nose,
squandered his prior goodwill,
stroking Trump on TV shows.
All of the other Trumpties
used to laugh and call him names.
Even those abject toadies
thought him crooked and insane.
Then one Foggy Bottom eve,
Trumpty called to say,
“Rude one with your nose so brown,
won’t you bring Joe Biden down?”
What happened then’s sheer folly:
thanks to lows the two then reached,
history will most remember that
Trumpty Dumpty was impeached.
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Ghouliani’s sinuses are also packed solid with Trump’s shite.
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BTW, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” has an incredibly inspiring story behind it. Here: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rudolph-red-nosed-reindeer/
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After reaching adolescence, I soon decided that just about everything that tortures us during the holiday season (all the songs and BS to get us in the “holiday spirit” to increase our personal debt) from Thanksgiving to New Year (actually every holiday designed to get us to spend money on mostly junk that fills up our garages or closets) are fictional gimmicks of some kind to get people to spend more money, even the Easter bunny, Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus feed the greed of the few.
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OK. A little-known fact. In the late nineteenth century, Christmas cards often featured Amanita muscaria mushrooms and elf-like men in beards. Why? Well, the shamans of Lapland would get into their sleighs, ride out over the snow, and gather these shrooms for use in their rituals. They often wore red coats with white dots on them, in imitation of the shroom. The shroom itself is poisonous, so they wouldn’t eat it directly. They fed it to their reindeer and then drank the urine, which cased them to see visions–a religious ritual. So, there you have a bunch of the elements of the standard Christmas iconography–the sleigh, the little men with beards, the red coat, the reindeer, the snow. Many other confluences resulted in the –stories of the tomtar and of Saint Nicolas, of Odin’s annual ride through the sky on a winter’s night, and so on.
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Wow, now that is interesting.
Imagine how some of our modern Christmas music would go over if the songs included lyrics about Santa feeding reindeer poison mushrooms so he could drink reindeer urine that would make him hallucinate while he flew around spreading cheer and handing out gifts.
Instead of a treat for Santa that included cookies and milk, Santa would arrive with a stomach and bladder bursting with hallucinogenic reindeer urine.
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Hey, Lloyd, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. LOL.
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I suspect that the drug culture in the U.S. would start buying reindeers by the dozen and having urine keg-drinking contests. After all, there are no laws “yet” to stop that method of getting high.
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Yes, there is a booming business in the US of use of substances not yet scheduled. Some of these have proved to be extremely dangerous. Even as dangerous as alcohol or tobacco.
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How about, as dangerous as processed sugar?
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Yes, I like that. People have drugs they accept the ones they love to hate, and this has little relation, for most, to the relative dangerousness of them.
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A friend of mine, the songwriter and Burns scholar Andrew Calhoun, posted this:
Why do Santa’s elves look alike? Because they vary very little.
To which I replied:
You sleigh me, Andrew.
Amanita think about this for a while.
Shocked, though, that you would post this racist comment about the Pole-ish peoples.
Keep your comments to your elf.
But their size does dwarf the imagination.
Claus-ette cases, all of them.
I guess Santa keeps them straight by Nick-naming them all–t-WEE-n, d-WEE-b, etc.
They wee-ly, wee-ly wittle.
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I think the drugged reindeer urine could be blamed for why the elves vary very little.
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the red coats, the beards, the sleigh, the reindeer, the sack (for carrying the shrooms) flung over the shoulder. LOL.
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edited version: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/12/28/rudolph-the-brown-nosed-ghouliani-bob-shepherd/
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New Years Resolutions People Actually Keep:
Read less.
I want to gain weight. Put on at least 30 pounds.
I will start buying lottery tickets at a luckier store.
Stop exercising. Waste of time.
Watch more TV. I’ve been missing some good stuff.
Watch less T.V. on the small screen and buy a bigger one.
Gain enough weight to get on The Biggest Loser.
Watch more movie remakes.
Procrastinate more.
I will do less laundry and use more deodorant.
I will become a vegan for a day and subsequently learn that it was a missed steak.
I will no longer waste my time relieving the past, instead I will spend it worrying about the future.
Drink.
Drink some more.
Stop buying worthless junk on Ebay, because QVC has better specials.
Start being superstitious.
Spend more time at work.
Stop bringing lunch from home: I should eat out more.
Take up a new habit: maybe smoking!
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LOL. Love this!
Make myself richer. –Jeff Bezos
Subsidize new film to be called “The Apotheosis of Bill Gates.” –Bill Gates
Turn every discussion back to ME. –Donald Trump
etc.
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I am not a big fan of Florida to put it mildly, despite having spent good chunks of my college life on the beaches of the panhandle. My strongest memory of the state is going into a very large diner in Sarasota for lunch (where I was the youngest customer by 30-40 years) before I had an afternoon speaking engagement. The horrors of the sights are still with me today. All I could think was, “Haven’t any of these people heard of long pants?”
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I love this state. Years ago, I was sent by a company I had done a literature series for to Daytona to speak to teachers about the program. I arrived in the middle of bike week–a hundred thousand folks in leather and dog collars, on Harleys. Quite the scene! So, I’m like, hey, you guys want to hear a little about Sir Phillip Sydney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia?
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cx: Philip
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So happy you love Florida! That’s the thing about this country at its best, we find places we love and understand and respect why people appreciate those places we don’t. Growing up between the South and Germany made me somewhat schizophrenic. I couldn’t imagine living in the South ever again, nor in a big city where I spent half my life in a car or subway (although I like visiting them). I love four seasons, or at least when each begins. By the time they’re nearing an end, I hate ’em. For me, there are few things more beautiful than a fresh snowfall on a clear sky, full moon night. Those of us here, thanks to Diane, find a community we need to help us realize we’re not losing our minds.
Just remember, those great blue herons you see in Florida nest and multiply here in Ohio (Akron, to be precise)! They ain’t stupid.
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Thank you for signing our petition calling on Justice Kavanaugh to recuse himself from the pending Consumer Financial Protection Bureau case. If we’re going to win, we need to put as much public pressure as possible on SCOTUS. Can you help mobilize more pressure on Kavanaugh?
You can also forward this email to your friends and family and ask them to sign the petition here:
https://act.demandprogress.org/sign/kavanaugh-cfpb/?source=conf-email&aktmid=tm6942658.-a6AFQ&akid=a45955909.2233676.yr00tj&t=4
Thanks for taking a stand,
Salma and the Demand Progress Team
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Feel the BERN!!
Michael Moore: Sanders Can Beat Trump in 2020
By Marina Pitofsky, The Hill
28 December 19
ilmmaker and activist Michael Moore, a frequent critic of President Trump, believes Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) can defeat the president heading into the 2020 election.
Moore argued that “the weakness of the president” could make Sanders’s White House bid successful in 2020 in a Tuesday interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.
Trump was impeached by the House last week on two articles of impeachment: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Moore added that Sanders was being “perceived as the real deal” by voters, and that could also be a boost to his campaign.
“He’s outside the box the way Trump was [in 2016]” Moore told Matthews.
Matthews pressed Moore on whether Sanders, who is 78, could “go the distance, all the way through four years.”
Moore responded that he saw Sanders give a speech Saturday “that went an hour and a half” and he “didn’t use that lectern as a crutch or anything.”
“He stood there and powerfully told the people that what we have to do to make this a better country. It was so amazing, and if you’d been there — I’ll tell you, it wasn’t the old Bernie stump speech,” Moore said.
Moore endorsed Sanders among the crowded field of 2020 Democratic candidates in October, saying that “he absolutely can win this” at the time. Moore also endorsed Sanders over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary.
“Why me for Bernie?” he said in an MSNBC interview. “Bernie understands that capitalism and the greedy form of capitalism, especially, that we have now is at the core of so many of the problems that we’re talking about.”
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I am glad you mention that Florida is in 2 time zones. The networks with all their smart people were giving election results when Bush and Gore were running before the polls closed in Northwest Florida because they didn’t know the difference.
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