I am looking forward to listening to the new Tiger television announcer, Jason Benetti, this coming season. Jason is young but experienced and has an excellent reputation. He has been the primary announcer for the Chicago White Sox for the last few years when he was not providing national coverage for Fox Sports for the MLB, the NFL, and college football.
Yesterday, Tiger fans got their first taste of Benetti as he announced the Tigers’ spring training game. All the reports I read were very positive. Jeff Seidel of the Free Press reported the following:
After Tiger starting pitcher Tarik Skubal pitched a masterful third inning, striking out the side in order by changing speeds effectively, Benetti offered his best line of the game: “I mean gas pedal, brakes. Gas pedal, brakes. I don’t want to drive with him, but I’ll watch him pitch.” This is my Quote of the Day.
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I am confused. For so many years I believed that conservatives wanted smaller government and less intrusion by government into our personal choices. This principal was a major reason, conservatives despised the Covid-19 mask mandates and other restrictions that were imposed by local and state governments. One of the loudest critics of this intrusion by governments is/was Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
After learning DeSantis and the Florida legislature were trying to mandate how private companies teach diversity and inclusion in the workplace, it seems my understanding of a conservative is out of date. No true conservative would ever tell a private company how to train and teach their employees.
A federal appeals court upheld a ruling Monday that blocked Florida from enforcing a law, backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, that restricts how private companies teach diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
Maybe the former president, Governor DeSantis, and the rest of the MAGA followers are not conservatives at all. Maybe they just want to impose their view of what is right and wrong onto the rest of the country. Fortunately, the U.S. Court of Appeals see things differently.
Thank you to my best friend George, for sharing a Washington Post article about the ruling. Here are excerpts from the article.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled Monday that the “Stop Woke Act” “exceeds the bounds” of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression in its attempts to regulate workplace trainings on race, color, sex and national origin. The appeals court upheld a federal judge’s August 2022 ruling that said the same.
“By limiting its restrictions to a list of ideas designated as offensive, the Act targets speech based on its content. And by barring only speech that endorses any of those ideas, it penalizes certain viewpoints — the greatest First Amendment sin,” Judge Britt C. Grant wrote in Monday’s opinion.
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Yesterday, I expressed my concern that SCOTUS was becoming too political. I am concerned about this as it relates to the former president and the decisions that will be required by SCOTUS over the next few months. I am especially concerned about Justice Thomas, who has shown questionable ethics as it relates to accepting gifts and favors, and who refuses to recuse himself even though his wife Ginni was a strategist for the former president when trying to stay in office after the 2020 election. I am not the only one with concerns about SCOTUS. The following was included in Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American.
There is, perhaps, a larger story behind the (SCOTUS) majority’s musings on future congressional actions. Its decision to go beyond what was required to decide a specific question and suggest the boundaries of future legislation pushed it from judicial review into the realm of lawmaking.
For years now, Republicans, especially Republican senators who have turned the previously rarely-used filibuster into a common tool, have stopped Congress from making laws and have instead thrown decision-making to the courts.
Two days ago, in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern noted that when Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was Senate majority leader, he “realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called ‘law.’”
The country is heading to the point where there are no safeguards with the three branches of government. The party that can control the courts will be the party that controls the country. This is frightening to me.
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Quote of the Day: See above.
Orchid of the Day: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. See above story.
Onion of the Day: Governor DeSantis and the Florida legislature for abandoning their supposed conservative values as they try to impose their version of right and wrong on the private sector.
Question of the Day: Is SCOTUS becoming too political and forgetting their important role in our country’s government?
Video of the Day: My feelings about the direction of this country if the MAGA extremist get control of this country. We are on the highway to hell.
AC/DC – Highway to Hell (Live At River Plate, December 2009) (youtube.com)
SCOTUS chose to abrogate their responsibilities to judge without a partisan slant. The majority have no credibility. The sad part is there is nothing that can be done. Stay tuned. The worst is yet to come.