Conservatives on the Covid vaccine

 

Conservatives: "Pharmaceuticals in America are too expensive and take too long to bring to market because there is too much regulation and too much bureaucracy in getting them approved. We should slash the regulations and red tape to bring down drug prices." 

 

Also Conservatives: "You shouldn't take the Covid vaccines because they are experimental, they don't have full approval, we don't know how effective they are, and we don't know anything about long term aftereffects."

 

<facepalm>

Why Don't You Move There, Part Duh

Whenever I mention that I like the way some other part of the country or part of the world does something, when I think they do it markedly better than we do here in Florida, USA, there's always some mook who pops up with the question "Why don't you move there".  It happens so often, with the same set of answers, that I'm tired of relitigating it every time it crops up.  Here is a list of answers, and you can pick the ones that apply. 

1. It's too far away from my family.

2. It's too far away from my friends and social network. 

3. There isn't any work for me there with my skill set.  

 4. (conditional) It's too expensive. 

5. (conditional) I don't like the weather. 

6. Fleeing is the easy way out.   Working to improve your home is the much more challenging, and much more rewarding path.  

Governor DeSantis did not have a majority.

 One of the current Republican claims is that Governor DeSantis won the 2018 gubernatorial election with, depending on who is telling the tale, 270,000 votes, or 320,000 votes.  They're wrong.  Governor DeSantis didn't even have a majority, let alone a large majority.  

The expressly nonpartisan site, Ballotpedia, tells the actual story:

https://ballotpedia.org/Florida_gubernatorial_and_lieutenant_gubernatorial_election,_2018

The TLDR is that DeSantis didn't have a majority at all.  He won with 49.6% of the vote, so he had the largest plurality, but not a majority.  Taken as the difference between DeSantis' plurality, and the next largest, Democrat Andrew Gillum, DeSantis won by 32,463 votes.  In fact, the difference was so small that the third largest plurality, that of Reform Party candidate Darcy Richardson, was larger than the difference, at 47,140 votes.  

Any way you slice it, DeSantis' election win was a squeaker, not a landslide.  If Florida had a sane electoral system then we would have had a runoff election between DeSantis and Gillum, and voters would have had another crack at them without the alternate parties.  If we had used ranked choice voting then the outcome might have been different.  

Finally, I'll repeat my observation from the 2018 campaign: If these two mooks are the best our political parties can come up with then we're in real trouble.