Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who just happens to be running for President, has quietly rejected hundreds of millions in federal energy funding. Biden touts the benefits of its marquee climate law on the campaign trail in battleground states. The total of money that DeSantis has turned away was 377 million dollars that would have been used as grants. What DeSantis did was veto 5 million dollars worth of grants to be administering the funds, so any applications for those funds had to be withdrawn. I lived in Wisconsin when Scott Walker was running for President. President Obama had inherited a huge financial mess from the Bush administration and some proposed some pretty serious stimulus programs on improving the infrastructure of the State which then Governor Doyle accepted. In 2010 Scott Walker became Governor by defeating Tom Barrett. Governor Walker stopped the infrastructure work returning money to the Federal Government. He also returned over 800 million dollars for a high speed rail between Milwaukee to Madison. His goal? He wanted to show how fiscally conservative he was because he had the sights set on a higher office which was the presidency. Walker never became president and in the end he cost the State of Wisconsin money. Does that sound familiar to what DeSantis is doing? I will tell you that the infrastructure that stopped had to be done before he left office because of Foxconn costing the state even more money. It always seems to me that when an acting Governor decides to run for the presidency their State has to suffer so that the Governor can impress the nation.  

I have never lived in a state were a Democratic Governor ran for President so I don’t know if any of them did the same thing so I did a search. It turns out that when Clinton ran for Governor of Arkansas in 1990 he pledged that he would not run for President in the middle of the term. Well, as Gomer Pyle would say “Surprise, Surprise, Surprise”, in 1992 Clinton broke his word. Governor Clinton not only ran for President but he won. This may have been an early warning for the lack of honesty of Clinton that would eventually lead to his impeachment. Clinton lied to Congress and that is why he was impeached. Did his lie really harm the country? I don’t think so. We had been lied to worse before Clinton and worse after Clinton but he lied about sex so that just can’t be tolerated. I am not saying that Clinton didn’t do a good job as President because he did. He was great for the economy and the nation flourished under his leadership but his honesty will always be questioned.  Florida had a law that a Governor had to resign if they wanted to run for the Presidency. They changed that law just so DeSantis could run. Of course even before they changed the law you could tell that he was preparing to run. He was literally globetrotting around the world on a so called Florida Trade mission before they changed the law. The biggest difference between Clinton and DeSantis is the fact that Arkansas was running smoothly and Florida isn’t. We have labor shortages galore. Insurance companies are abandoning the state and the ones that remain and charging triple the national average. We have serious problems and we don’t have a Governor that wants to deal with them. What we may have is a Governor that is making them worse so he looks good on the national stage.

My wife and I have been visiting friends and family in Wisconsin for the last 3 weeks and have now returned home. When I was driving down I75 south of Tampa the temperature in the car registered the outside temperature at 98 degrees. Even for Florida that is hot. After being in Wisconsin for a week and having the morning temperatures in the high 50s and the low 60s this is a big difference. Today when we got up at 6:00 am the temperature was already 81. It is going to be another hot one today. Checking the weather report I don’t see a day below 90 degrees for the next 15 days. It is hard working in that heat and the people that are willing to are afraid to come to Florida. Can’t blame them. This is a pretty hostile environment for Hispanic people to travel to. They are even profiling cars with certain State license plates to make sure that immigrants don’t get into the state legal or illegal. What I see here is no one trying to work on any of the solutions that would make life better in Florida. Just like Scott Walker did in Wisconsin DeSantis is doing the same thing in Florida. Working in the national headlines that will play well in Iowa but failing to look for any solution that would help the people of Florida. When a Governor plays to the national stage like DeSantis their state will suffer. Everything he does and say is to play to the hatred and bigotry in States other than Florida. Woke, Can’t Say Gay, no Critical Race Theory. Do you really thinks that he cares about such things? He just knows that those subjects play well on some national stages and that is the only thing he cares about. What subject doesn’t play well is the fact that Florida has some of the highest inflation in the United States and to know one of the reasons for that all he would have to do it look in the mirror.

When people say that both parties are the same I will disagree with them. If they say that both parties have made the same mistakes that may be a different story. You may not like all of the Democrats solutions but they are at least working on solutions. What are the Republicans doing about labor shortages? What are the Republicans doing to stimulate the economy? What are the Republicans doing about the shortage of volunteers for any of the Armed Services? What I see is nothing much especially the shortages in the military.