Skip to main content

Casey DeSantis


Casey DeSantis may once (in the distant days of late 2023) have possessed some hope that she would become First Lady of the United States.

Now, though, the First Lady of Florida has adjusted her expectations and wants only to become the Governor of her own state.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5267460-florida-first-lady-casey-desantis-controversy/

As with her husband, Ron, though, so with Casey: nomination has to come before election.  Before she contends with the Democratic Party nominee, she has to contend with her fellow Republicans. And in that respect, she is encountering some turbulence. 

She raised her profile early in her first-ladyship, with a program called "Hope Florida -- A pathway to prosperity" in 2021, a program implemented by the Florida Department of Children and Families.   

The goal of the program is to maintain a network of private sector non-profit and faith based groups that will help individual Floridians develop the resources, skills, opportunities, etc. to become self-sufficient economically. Put more bluntly, "Let's get names off the lists of those receiving public assistance, but do it in a way that doesn't starve anybody." 

A nice thought, but as always with such thoughts, execution is the key. It appears that in the first year of operation of the Hope Florida Foundation, the foundation raised $867,000. But most of it was from corporations doing business with the state government or regulated by it, so this might have seemed a bit like a shakedown from the start. Disbursements within that first year (to the private sector non-profit groups etc.) were minimal. 

Hmmm.  What's going on? On April 15 of this year the chairperson of the foundation told a committee of the Florida House that the organization had no bylaws, budget, or recorded minutes.  

Dana Carvey's Church Lady would point out, in a faith based way, that if something shady WERE going on, that absence of a paper trail would be very, con -veeeeen -ient. 

But then things get weird, with Centene Corp. Centene is a Medicaid contractor with the state.  It appears to have over-billed the state for its services, and to have settled the dispute with a promise to re-pay millions of dollars. Some folks claim a portion of that settlement money was in fact sent to the Hope Florida Foundation and ended up in the hands of political groups campaigning against a ballot measure to legalize marijuana last fall. 

That would be bad. 

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
24 comments
Read more

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...
8 comments
Read more