When I wrote my last column on Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s latest scheme to use  his state’s treasury as a presidential campaign fund, the whole thing looked pretty silly and counter-productive. With more than half a million unfilled job openings in his state, why is he scooping up immigrants and flying them to Massachusetts instead of letting them improve Florida’s economy?

At the time, I didn’t know the half of it. The whole thing is starting to look, to steal a phrase from Neal Stephenson’s novel Cryptonomicon, “fractally weird.” That is, any single part of it is just as weird as the whole thing.

Let’s start with my first big mistake (or, rather, the first fact I hadn’t known or noticed when writing the previous column):

Ron DeSantis didn’t pay Vertol Systems, Company Inc. $615,000 to fly immigrants from Florida to Massachusetts. He paid Vertol Systems, Company Inc. $615,000 to fly immigrants from TEXAS to Massachusetts.

Wait, what?

Yes, really.

For all his posturing about immigrants being such a thorn in Florida’s side that he needed a $12 million legislative appropriation to “deport” them to other states, he had to go all the way to San Antonio (nearly a thousand miles from Tallahassee) just to find enough immigrants to fill a plane for his stunt.

Is that even legal? Here’s where it gets even weirder. The $12 million appropriation specifically calls for “a program to facilitate the transport of unauthorized aliens from this state [Florida].”

Not Texas, Florida. Addressing that issue at a press conference, DeSantis threw a Hail Mary.  Many of the immigrants were “intending to come to Florida,” he said, so “you got to deal with it at the source.”

If you hold your mouth just right and pretend words don’t mean things, he was just generously saving them some travel time, see?

But it looks like he partly covered his bases on the legal end, too. He had the immigrants flown from Texas to Florida before flying them from Florida to Martha’s Vineyard.

So it’s all good, right? Except one wonders where he got the money to import those immigrants to Florida before exporting them to Massachusetts. The appropriation doesn’t seem to cover that.

Perhaps weirdest of all is his choice of Martha’s Vineyard as a destination. I hear conservatives chuckling about giving the “coastal elites” a dose of immigrant presence, but the island in question isn’t exactly an elite place, or light on immigrant numbers. Fully 20% of its population are Brazilian immigrants, not counting people from other countries, and its per capita income lags both Massachusetts’s as a whole …  and Florida’s.

Sure, a lot of the “elites” vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. But they vacation AND retire in Florida. And hey, we’ve got TWO coasts. How “elite” does that make us?

The only one way to make any sense of this whole circus is to treat the $12 million appropriation as a taxpayer contribution to Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign fund. He’s a poster boy for the old saying  that politics makes people stupid.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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As of July, CBS News reports, Florida’s unemployment rate stood at 2.7% versus 3.5% nationwide. Most economists consider an unemployment rate of 5% or less to constitute “full employment”:  People without jobs in such a scenario are either in the process of changing jobs, or just not looking for work.

The problem in Florida right now, after nearly a year-and-a-half of economic growth, isn’t unemployment. It’s unfilled job openings. Florida has 588,000 of those. Employers are begging someone, anyone, to please come collect a paycheck.

If you live in Florida, you don’t need the news to tell you that. You see the “help wanted” signs everywhere you go, advertising well above minimum wage … along with reduced hours due to staff shortages.

Governor Ron DeSantis’s response to those growing pains? He’s rounding up workers and sending them to Massachusetts at taxpayer expense.

“Yes,” DeSantis spokesperson  Taryn Fenske told Fox News on September 14, “Florida can confirm the two planes with illegal [sic] immigrants that arrived in Martha’s Vineyard today were part of the state’s relocation program to transport illegal  [sic] immigrants to sanctuary destinations.”

If that doesn’t make any sense to you, you’re looking at it from the wrong angle. DeSantis’s priority isn’t his state’s economy or its residents’ quality of life. It’s positioning himself to run for president in 2024 or 2028.

To assist himself in that positioning, he’s been tapping taxpayer money as, essentially, campaign contributions for some time now.

Last year, he blew millions sending Florida cops to Texas on a “border mission” to assist governor Greg Abbott in some immigration-based political clownery. Apparently they were fresh out of crime to fight in Florida after DeSantis rewarded his police union cronies by seizing power to stop local governments from reducing their law enforcement budgets.

This week’s Martha’s Vineyard stunt is just a carbon copy of Abbott’s “bus them to Chicago” nonsense. Like the police funding and “border mission” capers, it imposes additional costs on Floridians above and beyond the raw taxpayer dollar numbers.

Fewer immigrants in Florida means fewer job openings filled. It means shorter store hours. It means crops rotting in fields instead of getting picked. It means fewer houses and apartments getting built. It means fewer paychecks being spent in stores that CAN find workers.

Ron DeSantis is running for president at the expense of Florida’s voters and taxpayers. Maybe they should think about that before they give him another term as governor.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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US Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) doesn’t like ranked choice voting. It’s “a scam to rig elections,” he tweeted on August 31, after Democrat Mary Peltola defeated Republican Sarah Palin in a special election for US House in Alaska.  “60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican, but thanks to a convoluted process and ballot exhaustion — which disenfranchises voters — a Democrat ‘won.'”

What he leaves out of that claim is that 60% of Alaska voters didn’t vote for “a” Republican. They split their first-choice votes between TWO Republicans, with Peltola getting more votes than either Palin or Nick Begich. Peltola was the second choice of enough voters to give her a majority in the “instant runoff” with Palin.

If this had been a standard “first past the post” election in which a candidate could achieve victory with a mere plurality, Peltola would have won that way too: She received 39.57% of first-round votes to Palin’s 30.79% and Begich’s 28.09%. The ranked choice “instant runoff” merely confirmed that a majority of Alaska’s voters, rather than a mere plurality, preferred Peltola to Palin.

Cotton’s sour grapes tweeting reflects his sense of party entitlement, not any opposition to “rigging elections.”

In point of fact, Cotton’s campaign went to great lengths to “rig” the 2020 US Senate election in Arkansas, sitting on negative opposition research about sole Democratic candidate Josh Mahony until after the filing deadline so that he could hopefully coast to victory in a two-way race with Libertarian Ricky Dale Harrington.

As it turned out, Cotton wasn’t able to clear 2/3 of the vote, even in a deep red state with only one under-funded third-party opponent whom he dared not debate or even acknowledge.

That outcome may explain why Cotton fears and loathes the idea of voters ranking their candidate preferences and making those preferences count,  instead of just heaving a sigh and ticking the box next to whatever supposedly lesser evil one of two parties presents for coronation.

The “major” parties’ shared monopoly on ballot access, debate inclusion, gerrymandering, etc., combines with “first past the post” plurality elections to guarantee political careerists like Tom Cotton the paychecks and power to which they consider themselves as entitled as George III is to his newly acquired throne, crown, and scepter.

Changes that better reflect voters’ priorities and make it more difficult for swamp creatures like Tom Cotton to cling to undeserved power are part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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