DeSantis’ ‘anti-woke’ bills are costing Florida millions of dollars in business

 https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/06/economy/florida-convention-business-cancellations/index.html

In recent weeks, at least a dozen organizations have announced plans to either cancel or relocate their upcoming conferences scheduled to take place in Florida, making a statement by having their thousands of attendees and millions of dollars flow into other states deemed safer and more welcoming.

While DeSantis’ office brushes this off as a “media-driven stunt,” tourism officials and community organizations in the state say what’s happening now may be just the beginning.

“Unlike leisure business, which is a very short-term booking window [in weeks or months], conference business is long term,” said Stacy Ritter, president and chief executive officer of the Visit Lauderdale tourism marketing agency in Broward County, Florida. “We’re booking ’26 to ‘30 now, so any impact that this might have is not going to be seen for years to come.”

More Baby Boomers are living alone. One reason why: ‘gray divorce’

 https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/05/health/boomers-divorce-living-alone-wellness-cec/index.html

Brown and I-Fen Lin found that from 1990 to 2010, the divorce rate for people over 50 in the United States had doubled. They dubbed it “the gray divorce revolution.”

Donald Trump: threatening social media post flagged by prosecutors in court filing

 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/05/donald-trump-threatening-social-media-post-flagged-by-prosecutors-in-court-filing

Prosecutors pointed specifically to a post on Trump’s Truth Social platform from earlier Friday in which Trump wrote, in all capital letters, “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!”

Cheated out of learning the latest :"dirt" on the Biden crime family because of a mere heart attack

https://mishpacha.com/the-end-of-youth/ 

 I’m going to skip my planned column on Hunter Biden, in favor of writing about my last five days, including two trips to the Shaare Zedek emergency room and the insertion of a stent into one of two blocked coronary arteries on Tishah B’Av.

Ron DeSantis Sparks MAGA Fury After Dismissing Key Donald Trump Claim

 https://www.newsweek.com/ron-desantis-sparks-maga-fury-after-dismissing-key-donald-trump-claim-1817722

Prominent Donald Trump supporters have responded with fury after Ron DeSantis said "theories" about the 2020 presidential election "did not prove to be true," in what was widely seen as a rejection of the former president's claims of electoral fraud.

Dershowitz slams Barr for ‘dead wrong’ comments on Trump indictment

 https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4139229-deshowitz-slams-barr-for-comments-on-trump-indictment/

Former Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz said former Attorney General Bill Barr’s claims that free speech isn’t on trial in former President Trump’s election fraud case is “dead wrong.”

Fox Radio interview Friday. “Everything involves his exercise of free speech. Not just his First Amendment free speech but also his First Amendment right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” 

GOP statements on Trump indictment clash with initial Jan. 6 remarks

 https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4138110-gop-statements-trump-indictment-jan-6-remarks/

The epitome of that shift has been Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who said Trump bore responsibility for the riot shortly after the rampage before careening back to the former president’s corner in the weeks that followed. He cemented that position Tuesday, when he accused the DOJ using the indictment of trying to “distract” from investigations into President Biden and his family.

“[J]ust yesterday a new poll showed President Trump is without a doubt Biden’s leading political opponent. Everyone in America could see what was going to come next: DOJ’s attempt to distract from the news and attack the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, President Trump,” McCarthy wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

‘Everything has fallen off a cliff': Battleground state GOPs nosedive in Trump era

 https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/02/broke-state-gop-parties-across-the-country-00109387

“It shouldn’t surprise anybody that real people with real money — the big donors who have historically funded the party apparatus — don’t want to invest in these clowns who have taken over and subsumed the Republican Party,” said Jeff Timmer, the former executive director of the once-vaunted Michigan GOP and a senior adviser to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.

VERY NORMAL! LEPROSY CASES SURGING IN FLORIDA, GOVERNMENT SAYS

 https://futurism.com/neoscope/leprosy-cases-surging-in-florida

But the CDC says incidences have more than doubled in southeastern America over the past decade, with Central Florida becoming a particular flashpoint: the region lays claim to 81 percent of cases throughout the state and nearly one fifth of all reported leprosy cases across the country.

How MAGA Reacted to Donald Trump's Third Indictment

 https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-indictment-maga-support-1817448

Representative Matt Gaetz, along with Greene, has renewed calls to defund the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith following the indictment announcement. Also taking to Twitter to defend the former president, he wrote: "Jack Smith and his indictment will forever go down in history as a total disgrace to the United States of America. President Trump defended our democracy, and we have an obligation to defend him against the Deep State's crusade to destroy our movement."

MSNBC Panel Stunned by Trump Lawyer’s ‘Admission’ on Fox News

 https://www.thedailybeast.com/msnbc-panel-stunned-by-trump-lawyer-john-lauros-admission-on-fox-news?ref=home

“What President Trump said is, ‘Let’s go with option D,'” Lauro said on The Ingraham Angle. “Let’s just halt, let’s just pause the voting and allow the state legislatures to take one last look and make a determination as to whether or not the elections were handled fairly. That’s constitutional law. That’s not an issue of criminal activity.”

Lauro said basically the same thing on Newsmax a bit later.

MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell was surprised at the revelation.

“That is a Trump criminal defense lawyer quoting Donald Trump committing a crime,” he said. “Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer tonight added information to Jack Smith’s 42-page description of Donald Trump’s crimes. The conversation that John Lauro just described appears on page 34 of the indictment against his client.”

‘Jack Smith Has Made Sure That the System of Laws Still Holds’

 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/02/trump-indictment-roundup-00109391

It’s important for any democratic nation to hold criminal behavior accountable, to show that our Constitution and institutions and law will be defended when assaulted. It would have been better if Republicans in the Senate had risen to the occasion shortly after Jan. 6 and voted to convict Trump when he was impeached. But some accountability is better than none, and it is important for our civic health that, as someone once said, our democracy doesn’t present the sorry spectacle of justice without a sword or unable to use a sword. The willingness to stand for justice and the rule of law matters. So the indictment seems to me an important civic moment for the nation, if not necessarily a decisive one for our immediate politics.

Trump's attorney tells NPR how he plans to defend against the latest charges

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/02/1191627739/trump-charges-indictment-attorney-jan-6-probe

It's embedded in the statute that they have to prove corrupt intent under 18 U.S.C. 1512, which is the obstruction statute. And corrupt intent means that you don't believe in, not only that you don't believe in the position that you're advancing, but you're doing it for a corrupt purpose, you're doing it to obstruct a government function rather than a truth-seeking function. And here, what we will argue to the jury, and we'll win, is that President Trump was arguing for the truth to come out in that election cycle rather than the truth to be denied. Even at the end, when he asked Mike Pence to pause the voting, he asked that it be sent back to the states so that the states, in exercising their truth-seeking function, could either audit or recertify.

Legal scholars pan Alan Dershowitz’s defense of Trump

 https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/20/politics/dershowitz-trump-legal-analysis/index.html

CNN legal analyst Ross Garber, one of the leading impeachment experts in the country, also rejected Dershowitz’s reasoning. In recent years, Garber defended four Republican governors who faced potential impeachment, three of whom eventually resigned from office.

“I’m not sure of anybody who’s defended more impeachments than I have, and even I think Dershowitz is wrong on this,” Garber said Monday on CNN. “I don’t think you need a technical criminal violation for there to be an impeachable offense, and there are lots of reasons for that.”

One reason, Garber explained, was that there weren’t many criminal statutes on the books when the Constitution was adopted. Another reason came from history, Garber said: The phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors,” was used in England before the framers included it in the US Constitution, and it wasn’t understood to require a criminal offense for impeachment.