Source: New York Times

The Florida governor delivered an address in Texas that favored oil and gas development over climate agreements and electric vehicles.

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Wednesday unveiled an energy plan in the heart of oil country, criticizing electric vehicles and global climate agreements, promising lower fuel prices and pushing for more oil and gas development.

In a policy rollout at an oil rig site in Midland — a West Texas city that derives much of its economy from oil production — Mr. DeSantis seemed to make a general-election argument, promising to roll back several of the Biden administration’s climate initiatives, calling them “part of an agenda to control you and to control our behavior.”

“They’re trying to circumscribe your ambitions. They are even telling our younger generations to have fewer children, or not to even have children, on the grounds that somehow children are going to make our climate and planet unlivable — and that’s wrong to say,” he told a crowd of a few dozen rig workers and reporters.

Mr. DeSantis mentioned his chief rival in the Republican primary, former President Donald J. Trump — whom he trails by a wide margin in the polls — only once.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/20/us/politics/desantis-climate-energy-biden.html?unlocked_article_code=tAkg3crT0zfueESZwjHZhws4-Z9zBaUfp4jLqUBDwlv_k_MIWObARrcmYFJG_QkssCa0LfbJWd7zSI95lGY40sxGmRaqZ5e0a4hBJefuNu_h0FMkuCEIhSPuBGM-EJCJpQhP3fGI4PR4ZS2Et_wt5cxYWn48RLylji9ir4NqWPwdDD8iPxEY-aIopYjPa-aFCpvA_Mhd8_agY3KIuVIW7nxerBx_eX6etAyVBtMyktDkq3_spZiUwJ65fP6Hs7K3sxIzlvyxx96ucBkIc5W1W2Yz_cXTO38Z7AWE5gIP8VwgyCntnkKz41F5kpQGiUH2CVDJ6enhRqY6wxE3DCIGHE88nd47OHWBc_Pe&smid=url-share

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DeSantis really is trying to show he's an even bigger asshole than TFG.

The company set out to design a silicon chip that would allow it to cut ties with Qualcomm, a longtime supplier and bitter foe

The new iPhone models unveiled last week are missing a proprietary silicon chip that Apple had spent several years and billions of dollars trying to develop in time for the rollout.

The 2018 marching orders from Apple AAPL -2.00%decrease; red down pointing triangle Chief Executive Tim Cook to design and build a modem chip—a part that connects iPhones to wireless carriers—led to the hiring of thousands of engineers. The goal was to sever Apple’s grudging dependence on Qualcomm, a longtime chip supplier that dominates the modem market.

The obstacles to finishing the chip were largely of Apple’s own making, according to former company engineers and executives familiar with the project.

Apple had planned to have its modem chip ready to use in the new iPhone models. But tests late last year found the chip was too slow and prone to overheating. Its circuit board was so big it would take up half an iPhone, making it unusable.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-iphone-modem-chip-failure-6fe33d19?st=9q2j7lgokilywdx&reflink=share_mobilewebshare

Gov. Ron DeSantis dismissed fears about climate change plunging the planet into crisis Wednesday during an event in Texas where he rolled out an energy policy platform focused on developing new sources of fossil fuels.

Once hailed by environmental advocates for his green initiatives as governor, DeSantis positioned himself Wednesday as an ardent critic of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by transitioning to renewable energy sources and electric vehicles.

“We’ve seen a concerted effort to ramp up the fear when it comes to things like global warming and climate change,” DeSantis said.

Noting that phrases like “climate crisis” and “climate emergency” have grown in use, DeSantis said: “This is driven by ideology, it’s not driven by reality. In reality, human beings are safer than ever from climate disasters.”

The comments are among DeSantis’ most aggressive and extensive in pushing back against climate change concerns, which are especially pertinent in his home state of Florida where sea level rise and stronger hurricanes fed by warming waters are a major worry for climate scientists.

https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/politics/elections/2023/09/20/ron-desantis-ignores-climate-change-concerns-in-energy-policy-rollout/70894768007/

Courting evangelical voters in early nominating states, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is looking to become politically reborn – turning his struggling Republican presidential bid fully toward faith-based conservatives.

DeSantis has unveiled endorsements from dozens of pastors and religious activists and spent last weekend campaigning at several Iowa social conservative events, including the state’s major Faith and Freedom Coalition fall banquet.

Leaning into his record in Florida, DeSantis touted having signed a ban on most abortions after six-weeks – a measure whose fate will soon be decided by the state’s Supreme Court, where five of the seven justices are appointees of the governor.

The ruling could help loosen former President Donald Trump’s powerful grip on evangelical voters, DeSantis supporters say. Trump holds a 30% lead in Iowa over DeSantis and a 42% margin nationwide among GOP voters, according to Real Clear Politics’ poll averages.

But even as DeSantis was training his focus on evangelicals, Trump called the governor’s signing of the six-week law “a terrible mistake,” heightening the divide between the former president and his closest rival for the GOP nomination.

https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/politics/elections/2023/09/20/desantis-appeals-to-evangelicals-on-abortion-as-he-struggles-in-polls/70889294007/

Republicans made it harder to get abortions in red states. Now they have a punchline for trivializing the journeys people undertake to get the procedure.

By the time Ron DeSantis used the phrase “abortion tourism” in a televised interview last weekend, the phrase had already become a favorite little slogan among antiabortion conservatives.

In an interview hosted by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, the Florida governor and presidential candidate was asked a question related to a military policy of funding abortions for active-duty service members who might have to cross state lines in order to access abortions. “They are breaking, violating the law by funding abortion tourism,” DeSantis replied. “We’re running low on ammunition, our recruiting is in the absolute gutter now, and you’re funding abortion tourism?”

In July, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) told a news anchor that “the military should not be paying for abortion tourism.” In August, Rep. Randy Weber (R-Tex.) used the phrase when he introduced the Ban Offshore Abortion Tourism (BOAT) Act, in order to “prohibit abortions in maritime jurisdiction.”

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) has used it. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) has used it. Focus on the Family uses it; so does the Christian Coalition of America. All of them use it to describe the same broad concept: A patient who needs an abortion travels to a location where they can get an abortion.

When I did a news search to get a sense of how, and by whom, “abortion tourism” was being employed, I found something interesting: The phrase itself isn’t new; its use dates back at least 40 years ago, mostly in European countries, to neutrally describe the act of individuals crossing national borders to end pregnancies. But in the past 15 months, since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the phrase has bloomed in the United States, used almost exclusively by antiabortion Republicans and with obvious intent: to make pregnant people, whom the party has forced into desperate straits by pushing draconian state laws, seem like harlots on holiday.

https://wapo.st/3PofBbh

TEXAS (The Borowitz Report)—Thousands of hardened criminals poured into Texas over the weekend after learning how easy it is to secure an acquittal there.

Interstate freeways were reportedly backed up for miles as acquittal-seeking perpetrators sought to put down roots in soft-on-crime Texas.

Harland Dorrinson, a self-styled recidivist who has been convicted in Ohio, Missouri, and Wisconsin, said that he was heading to the Lone Star state because, “in Texas, no one is below the law.”

“An acquittal is yours for the asking if you’re white, male, and nefarious,” he said. “I check all the boxes.”

When told that one must also be elected as a Republican in order to qualify for Texas’s special “conviction exemption,” the career criminal was unfazed, noting that “even Greg Abbott” managed to do that.

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/criminals-flood-into-texas-after-learning-how-easy-it-is-to-get-acquitted

A dead, irreplaceable battery is often the demise of an otherwise perfectly good piece of equipment, and it can be incredibly frustrating. New research shows, however, that the opposite may be true when it comes to the batteries running electric vehicles.

The Globe and Mail reports that a study done in March by Recurrent Motors Inc. — a Seattle-based battery analysis company — showed that overall, EV batteries are actually very reliable and long-lasting. In fact, they may last longer than the vehicles themselves.

The study took real-world data from 15,000 EVs of various makes and models in the U.S. By linking to the vehicles’ connectivity systems, the company took several battery readings daily, including charging activity, EV battery level, and estimated range.

The data showed that most EVs driven close to 100,000 miles still have at least 90 percent of their original range left.

“I was surprised how well batteries are holding up, and how relatively infrequently batteries are being replaced,” Liz Najman, researcher and marketing manager at Recurrent and the study’s author, told The Globe and Mail. “That was a shock.”

https://news.yahoo.com/researchers-surprising-discovery-lifespan-ev-110000330.html

OK, OK, it was 'to-do lists.' Whatever that means.

Whenever you think you’ve learned all the appalling things there are to know about Donald Trump and his various criminal schemes and enterprises, his betrayals of and utter lack of regard for the United States, another shoe drops. But sometimes the shoes are just so damn stupid.

Who wrote random to-do lists on the backs of classified documents? Donald Trump did. We imagine he did it in that mangled demented moron Sharpie script of his, the one that looks like it comes from one of history’s greatest madmen who was at the same time never taught to read and write.

All of this is very shocking, because remember the way Trump drew dicks on hurricane maps when he was president? Yes, all of this is very shocking.

ABC News reports that Trump essentially used American classified documents he stole as scratch paper, no more important than a take-out menu or a picture of a dinosaur Eric made with the crayons the Secret Service gave him. This is according to the testimony of longtime Trump aide Molly Michael, who told the feds all about it.

He “repeatedly” did this, according to Michael.

https://www.wonkette.com/p/trump-drew-dicks-on-classified-flash

Despite spending far more time campaigning across the must-win state, Ron DeSantis still trails Donald Trump by double digits. And now Mr. Trump is stepping up his visits.

On paper, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is doing everything that a Republican presidential candidate should do to win Iowa.

He is doggedly crisscrossing the state, visiting 58 of its 99 counties so far and vowing to make it to the rest. He is meeting voters at small-town churches, meeting halls, county fairgrounds and ice-cream parlors, heavily courting evangelicals and racking up endorsements from influential faith leaders and local politicians. His super PAC is building a formidable get-out-the-vote operation and says it has reserved $13 million in television ads in Iowa through Thanksgiving.

For Mr. DeSantis, who is trailing former President Donald J. Trump in Iowa by double digits, the state has become a must-win. Mr. Trump, who has campaigned sparingly here, appears to know it. The Trump campaign recently announced that he would visit Iowa five times in the next six weeks, including stops on Wednesday, in a clear attempt to scupper Mr. DeSantis’s bid for the presidency with a resounding victory in the Jan. 15 caucuses, the first votes of the race for the nomination.

Mr. Trump’s enduring popularity with the Republican base — so strong that the former president has recently felt comfortable veering away from the party’s orthodoxy on abortion — is only one of Mr. DeSantis’s major hurdles in Iowa. The other is his lack of light-up-the-room charisma and folksy authenticity, qualities that seem required, at a minimum, to beat an established star like Mr. Trump.

“He’s very cerebral, very smart,” said John Butler, 75, an accountant from Pella, Iowa, who heard Mr. DeSantis speak on Saturday at a gathering of Christian conservatives in Des Moines. “But it feels like it can be hard to get to know him.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/19/us/politics/desantis-iowa-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=LMwa_-Xqm1CIRg2qqAYHbZwoH_cwCURBOToBl69pkXz-odhGeO809OMZNHpkVhOk0EcKr9Ji1H0Jt43i7viKsttmbxznYvLKai0xYFhZ9eIJ8v6fXgvd8trE52buhEbrFEBVaxK_SQQMzZv6GXH3WliCREtMZODEcENTx8cbVcXX0b6bA7UAttRoj6c7SMlKruIyK6EIGzeZlcL9n5puyynK_Wrk6SwWgz-SJJwwy4IXVrr8juUasnXqDyAEePVA6mt8qp1yExKACkhIQNRcyvBMTUF7hOtsqIVCWFh2E3S-3edMOXHExN7FJWvf3b6e0G5gL6Ycx-PSJ-5l76ThLCY&smid=url-share

DeSantis has the right qualification for winning the Republican nomination -- he's an absolute asshole; unfortunately for him he's competing against the worst person in the world. It's no contest.

Critics of Mosaic’s plan to test its waste byproduct in road construction say the company is putting profits over human health.

A coalition of state and local lawmakers is making its stance known to federal environment regulators: Don’t allow a Tampa-based Fortune 500 fertilizer company to pave its roads with phosphogypsum, the mildly radioactive leftovers from phosphate manufacturing.

At least 30 lawmakers on Monday urged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to deny an application from Mosaic to use more than 300 tons of phosphogypsum as a test ingredient in road construction at the company’s New Wales plant in Mulberry.

Right now, Mosaic stores its phosphate byproduct in land-based piles, called gypsum stacks or “gypstacks.” But in a move that critics claim is driven by the desire for more profits, the company wants to remove the byproduct from its New Wales gypstack and mix it into a 1,200-foot road.

The controversial plan was first reported by the Tampa Bay Times in June, and the revelation came just weeks before Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill that will allow the state’s transportation department to test the byproduct in roadways. Mosaic lobbied for the bill and covered the costs of a fundraiser — to the tune of $25,000 — for the state lawmaker who sponsored the measure.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/2023/09/19/these-florida-lawmakers-oppose-fertilizer-giant-mosaics-radioactive-roads/

On the plus side, phosphogypsum would probably help melt snow off the roads...