Your name is Ron DeSantis, and you are the Governor of Florida. You are naked ambition personified, and you are running for President, but that hasn’t been going too well for you lately. I wonder why?

Could it be that you have shown yourself to be quite the heavy-handed bully, a cranky, “my way or the highway” kind of guy? After all, you’ve publicly fired elected prosecutors (twice), tried to kneecap the Walt Disney company for disagreeing with your demeaning approach to the LGBTQ+ community, insulted and intimidated high school kids (on broadcast television, no less) for wearing “ridiculous” masks during the pandemic (they kept them on, to their credit), and in your “anti-woke” campaign you personally took control  of public education in the state from kindergarten through college and dictated what could be taught and by whom. You have sown fear throughout state college faculty with the result many faculty have left the state or retired. And woe be to anyone who mentions the country’s history of racism.

But perhaps nothing is worse than your response to the defining issue of our times — the changing climate and its effect on the people of earth, especially those in your little corner of it — Florida.

The just-published Fifth National Climate Assessment suggests dire consequences if states do not make serious mitigation efforts to significantly reduce the burning of fossil fuels in order to forestall what is looking more and more like an approaching, inevitable, global warming catastrophe.

As the Assessment succinctly puts it:

The global warming observed over the industrial era is unequivocally caused by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities—primarily burning fossil fuels. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂)—the primary greenhouse gas produced by human activities—and other greenhouse gases continue to rise due to ongoing global emissions.

The Assessment’s good news is that we are making progress toward reducing fossil fuel dependence. The bad news is it’s nowhere near enough, and if we don’t do better we will lose the battle with calamitous results by 2050. A terrible legacy for our children and their children. Here’s a snapshot to chew on from the Fifth Assessment:

Florida sits on a peninsula with ocean water on three sides. Since 1980, it has suffered 75 disasters, each costing more than a billion dollars. In 2022, at $113 billion, it was the victim of the worst hurricane disaster in U. S. history. That would be Hurricane Ian. According to the Assessment, since 2018 Florida has suffered more damages from billion dollar disasters than any other state.

You would think that might be enough to convince Governor DeSantis there is no time to lose. However, as the Fifth Climate Assessment documents, while cities, such as Orlando, have taken actions to adapt to climate change and mitigate net greenhouse gas emissions, the state of Florida has taken no statewide mitigation efforts since the current governor and candidate for President took office in 2018.

In doing his best to convince Americans to install him at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Governor DeSantis’s coldly calculating character and personality have not lurked obscurely in the political background. Lately, he has put this on full, stark display in his reaction to two pieces of federal legislation: 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act and 2021’s bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

The two Acts complement each other. The Environmental Energy and Study Institute published a detailed analysis of these two mammoth pieces of legislation. Taken together, they total nearly two-trillion dollars. The Infrastructure Act, itself, is the largest infrastructure undertaking since the Eisenhower Administration in the 1950s. The Institute prepared a chart showing how the two Acts work together in a whole-being-bigger-than-the-sum-of-the-parts manner.

The Inflation Reduction Act would have provided $6.4 billion to states to curb tailpipe emissions and reduce the effects of climate change. Florida was set to receive $346 million of that, the third most of any state.

When the Biden Administration announced the funding, the Governor’s Transportation and Environmental Energy departments prepared detailed plans addressing how they would use it and put the plans on their websites. Their focus was on adding trucker parking at rest stops, which staff said could fix the statewide shortage that kept drivers on the road longer, polluting more, as they searched for a place to stop. In 2019, 682 million tons of freight were hauled in Florida, the Transportation department noted. Nationwide, 98% of drivers reported nearly an extra hour of drive time looking for parking. The more time truckers search for parking, the more they burn fossil fuels.

The plans also suggested spending the money on things like electric buses and roundabouts, which reduce the amount of time idling cars spew out climate-warming emissions at traffic lights.

And then,  Ron DeSantis said, “No.” Florida would not accept the money. He had his Secretary of Transportation, Jared Perdue, send a letter to the U.S. Department of Transportation declining participation in the federal program. Perdue said in the letter that the program was an example of government overreach that was “the continued politicization of our roadways.” He was echoing DeSantis, who has said that climate change is “politicization of the weather,” whatever that means. The real reason for rejecting the free cash? It came from the Biden Administration and the DeSantis candidacy could not accept federal largesse from the man he wanted to replace.

DeSantis’s Florida now stands alone as the only state to say it would turn down the money, federal officials told the Tampa Bay Times. Any mention of the plans was wiped from the state’s website.

Even Texas, whose governor often tries to outshine DeSantis on conservative credentials, plans to take its share of $641 million, federal officials told the Times.

In reporting about this, the Tampa Bay Times wrote:

Rather than accepting the federal money, Perdue wrote in the letter that Florida would focus on building roads and bridges, “not reducing carbon emissions.”

While Perdue downplayed climate risks in his letter, the now-deleted documents from within his own agency emphasized bracing “for current and future impacts of climate change.”

Perdue cited state data when he claimed Florida has the cleanest air on record, “with emissions continuing to fall as fast as our state grows.” Yet according to the department he oversees, Florida ranks among the 15 states with the highest levels of diesel emissions. The report with that statistic also appears to have been removed from the department’s website.

To me, there is one particularly heartless aspect of DeSantis rejecting $346 million to help the citizens of Florida. The funding contained provisions to allow Floridians to upgrade the energy efficiency of their homes and receive substantial rebates for doing so. An example is installing split unit heat pumps, which can reduce electricity costs by about 30%. In Massachusetts we already have a similar program, and I have taken advantage of it by installing heat pumps and a new furnace and water heaters in two homes. The rebates from these projects reduced the total costs by about 40%, and I’m grateful. Now, Florida homeowners will not have the chance I had, because their Governor wants to be President more than he wants to give Floridians opportunities others enjoy.

Where he was once the preferred candidate of major Republican constituencies, it now appears Ron DeSantis has about as much chance of becoming President as I do, maybe less. Florida might have taken to his bullying in your face attitude, but the country knows better. Americans seem to be rejecting him with the decisiveness with which he rejected the hundreds of millions of dollars that would have helped Floridians improve the quality of their lives.

A personal note

First, I’ll be taking a short break from writing the Insider to share what I’m sure will be a marvelous holiday season with my family. See you shortly.

Second, I send my very best wishes that you, the readers who continue to accept my screed into your lives, have a wonderful holiday season, as well as the happiest of New Years and a 2024 that brings all of us something we desperately need: peace in our world.

Finally, a heartfelt wish that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar recovers from his broken-hip-fall suffered as he was set to participate in the celebration of the final performance of the Manhattan Transfer at Disney Hall this past week. As he put it in his must-read Substack column, “I’d like to say I fell while trying to save a child from plunging over a balcony, but I just tripped. Hard for me to accept that a once world-class athlete just stumbled. But age is the great equalizer and humbles us all.”

Humbled or not, Kareem is an inspiration in his dedication to telling many truths twice a week. If you don’t subscribe to his column, I strongly urge you to do so. You’ll be glad you did.

Get well soon, Kareem.

Happy holidays!

We are all trying to make some sense, where sense cannot be made, but still we try, out of the deepening tragedy in the Gaza Strip, which is more and more reduced to rubble, and where today the Israeli Defense Forces admitted accidentally killing three of the many hostages it had been determined to rescue. IDF soldiers mistook them for Hamas militants.

After the Hamas barbarity of 7 October, we have seen pro-Palestinian demonstrations praising Hamas on our college campuses and around the world, and, in a weird juxtaposition, we have watched patriotic preening in the U.S. Congress where Members of the House of Representatives have suddenly discovered it pays to condemn antisemitism.

Meanwhile, those same Members let Ukraine twist in the wind, a veritable Russian piñata. Doesn’t matter a Ukrainian defeat would upset the international balance of power and convince a Moscow madman he really is the second coming of Peter the Great. No, it’s more important to exact draconian southern border concessions from Joe Biden. I don’t know why, but I’m still surprised that a bunch of congressional amateurs are having the time of their lives lining up to throw muck into the gears of international diplomacy.

If that’s not enough, this week we were treated to an American President strongly telling our long-time ally to pull back, slow down, end the bloodshed, only to get a sharp stick in the eye for his trouble from Israel’s Prime Minister, who is happy to keep taking boatloads of money from U.S. taxpayers, because he knows we’re not about to turn off the spigot. We seem to need him as much as he needs us.

Friends, this is like parachuting into prime time at a humongous Rap music free-for-all; it’ll make your head spin.

I think it is impossible to appreciate this all-out horrendoma if one does not examine the history that got us here — and I’m not talking about “recent” history.

Jews and Arabs have lived in Palestine more or less collegially for more than 2,000 years. At the time of Jesus, Palestine, then Judea, was part of the Roman Empire, although Rome left governance of the area to its “client kings,” who were Jewish. Herod the Great is a good example. He ruled a stable Judea, as did his sons following him.

Then, in CE66, the Jews revolted and drove the Romans out from Jerusalem. They set up a new government and stabilized the country. In 69, the Roman Emperor Vespasian sent his son Titus, himself to become Emperor following his father, to quell the revolt and destroy Jewish opposition. In the year 70 Titus captured Jerusalem, burned the Temple, and the Jewish state collapsed, although the fortress of Masada was not conquered by the Roman general Flavius Silva until April 73.

Titus returned to Rome, a bona fide hero. His father gave him a victory celebration through the city, where Titus paraded the spoils from his conquest, including captured Jews, now Roman slaves, and the Temple’s Holy Menorah. If you visit the Roman Forum you will see the Arch of Titus, one of the three major surviving arches. The interior of this arch shows the humiliation of the Jews. The Jewish defeat of 70 begins the Jewish diaspora that lasted until 1948 and the creation of the state of Israel.

The Middle East, and Palestine, was relatively stable until the end of the first World War.

As part of negotiations to divide up the spoils of that war, the League of Nations created the British Mandate, and Britain assumed control of Palestine.

Looking back, you could be forgiven for thinking Britain was the dog that caught the bus. Arabs who had helped win the war (remember Lawrence of Arabia?), had been promised the land by double-talking British generals. However, in 1923 Britain and the League of Nations moved the goalposts.

A crucial piece of the British Mandate was its incorporation of the Balfour Declaration of 1917,  in which the British government committed itself to a “national home” for the Jewish people. In part, the Balfour Declaration also states, “… it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”  

The British left in 1948, and Israel became an independent state, whereupon, under the agreement that created Israel, Egypt took control of Gaza and Jordan got the West Bank. However, Palestinians in what was the new State of Israel revolted, and a civil war, the first of many such battles, ensued. Many Palestinians, 750,00 of them, made the long march to Gaza, under the protection of Egypt. And there they stayed. But they never forgot.

From the Balfour Declaration until 1948, Israelis and Arabs had been fighting. The University of Central Arkansas has compiled a chronology of the hundreds of attacks by both sides, which shows how turbulent and vicious the fight was for the land that is now Israel.

If you study the history carefully, you will not be the least surprised at the ferocity of the current war. It is an extension of the long, dark night that is Judea, Palestine, and now Israel.

The only way out of this calamity is for Palestinians and Israelis to stop fighting and negotiate a two state agreement. Both sides have to give, but we seemed to have reached the point where the immovable object has encountered the irresistible force.

Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu says he will not stop until total victory. This, by the way, is the same Netanyahu who has done all in his power over the last 15 years, both publicly and privately, to ensure there will never be an independent state of Palestine.  This is the same Netanyahu who cut a deal with Qatar to send hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas to use in its governance of the Strip, thereby weakening the Palestinian Authority. Much of the money that reached Hamas went to its military wing and led to the horror of October 7th.

If any of you think this can ever end well, I want some of whatever it is you’re smoking.

It seems to me that one can neither appreciate nor understand the current ongoing tragedy without considering the history that led to it, and I’m not talking about “recent” history.

What we now know as Israel was called Palestine and was part of the Roman Empire during the time of Jesus, although the Romans exercised more of an oversight role, leaving governance to its “client” kings who were Jewish. As long as kings like Herod and his sons after him kept stability in the region, Rome took a hands-off approach.

But that all changed in CE66 with the First Jewish Revolt during which the Jews expelled the Romans from Jerusalem, defeated a Roman punitive force under Gallus, the imperial legate in Syria, and set up a revolutionary government throughout Palestine. However, the Roman Emperor Vespasian sent his son Titus to put down the revolt, and in CE70, Jerusalem fell, the Temple was burned, and the Jewish state collapsed.

Titus returned to Rome to a hero’s welcome and a grand parade, in which captured Jews and the spoils from Solomon’s Temple were displayed. If you visit the Roman Forum you will see the Arch of Titus, one of three great arches still existing. Titus’s triumph over Jerusalem are depicted on the inner side of the arch, as well as his parade’s captives and the Temple’s Menorah.

Earlier this week, I described the political misjudgments and misguided priorities that led to Great Britain losing her American colonies over the course of the 18th century. In setting out this tale of missed British opportunities, I sought to show how our Republican-controlled Congress, like the British Monarchy and Parliament in the 18th century, is now sleepwalking its way to losing Ukraine to Russia in order to score a short-term political win while simultaneously embarrassing the Biden administration.

The year was 1763. Britain had just defeated France in the Seven Years War, what we in America call the French and Indian War. During the war, the British national debt had nearly doubled, going from £72 million to more than £130 million. Its budget had risen tenfold from £14.5 million to £145 million.

The 1763 Treaty of Paris, which ended the war and gave Britain triumph over France ceded to Britain all of Canada and the great trans-Allegheny plains in the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi, which were populated by unruly Indian tribes and more than 8,000 French-Canadian Catholics. Not  completely expelled from the continent, the French still held Louisiana and the mouth of the Mississippi, from which the British feared they might stage a comeback.

To defend this territory the British thought they would need a force of about 10,000 soldiers. How to pay for this expense became the question of the day.

The logical answer was to raise revenue from the colonies, revenue that would contribute to their defense. How to raise the needed revenue? Taxation, of course.

Since 1732, when Sir Robert Walpole was Prime Minister, Britain had tried, often in vain, to tax the Americans as a means of providing revenue to the Crown. This came to a head in 1760 when Parliament Passed the Writs of Assistance, which were search warrants allowing tax collectors to enter any home, business or sailing ship to look for contraband. Because the British Navigation Act forbade the colonists from  manufacturing anything, “even a horseshoe nail,” they had taken to smuggling forbidden items out of the country to Caribbean and European ports, which diminished British tax revenue in the Americas to the paltry sum of £1,800 pounds in the late 1750s.

The Writs of Assistance were the first of many British attempts to suck money out of her American colonies. James Otis, a lawyer whom John Adams considered America’s finest orator, challenged the Writs in 1761. The trial was held at the Old Boston Statehouse. His argument lasted five hours, and during it he uttered the phrase which was to become the American slogan leading up to the Revolution: “Taxation without representation is tyranny.”

Otis lost his case, but the Writs were ineffective. In subsequent years, Britain tried the Cider Tax, the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, and more, all of which led to greater and greater resentment throughout the colonies.

I bring this important history up to make two points.

First, and this may surprise you, from the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 until the firing of “the shot heard round the world,” the British never sent a single Minister to America to investigate the profound discontent of the colonists. During the entire 12-year period, British leaders consumed themselves in factionalism and internal, petty squabbles, while America slipped away. The colonists had non-voting, non-speaking representatives in Parliament, but they were ignored, and the Crown had appointed governors in each of the colonies, but they had little power back in Britain.  No one of any serious standing had ever crossed the sea to analyze anything. This pattern continued throughout the entirety of the Revolution. Britain sent generals, but never a statesman. And as a result, King George lost his colonies.

This was a vivid example of a great power, arguably the greatest in the world at the time, acting resolutely against its best interests.

Second, as of the moment I am writing this, it appears the United States Congress is mimicking the British Parliament of 1763 in acting resolutely against America’s best interests. As  Britain remained laser-focused on taxing her colonies, rather than trying to understand them, rather than trying to negotiate a mutually profitable future with them, so is our Congress laser-focused on extorting draconian  concessions  from the Biden administration, rather than doing what is in the country’s best interests by funding and sending desperately needed arms to Ukraine.

Our Congress is demonstrating the same type of power-hungry factionalism and petty squabbling that lost Britain America 234 years ago. If we lose Ukraine — and that is entirely possible given current circumstances — we will set the stage for a potential worldwide conflagration, because Vladimir Putin has demonstrated time and time again that he will not stop until he is beaten soundly.

“Give us the farm, or you get nothing!”

Once more, down the rabbit hole we go.

This week, congressional Republicans made good on their threat to hold up military aid to key allies — Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan — unless President Biden agrees to draconian changes to policies on the southern border. Never mind that holding up that aid runs the serious risk of costing myriad Ukrainian lives, or that cavalierly denying it demonstrates to the world they have no problem throwing American foreign policy priorities under the bus — priorities that are squarely in America’s self-interest — in order to continue feeding political red meat to their base. Perhaps worst of all, Republicans, who seem to really love this game of chicken, fail to acknowledge that the Biden administration has already gone a good way toward satisfying many of their demands.

Writing in the New York Times today about the Republican demands, Editorial Board member Farah Stockman points out:

They want the resumption of the construction of the border wall. The Biden administration already conceded to resuming construction this fall when it agreed to spend money that Congress allocated for that purpose in 2019.

They want to deny asylum to those who have passed through a third country en route to the United States. That’s an expansion of a rule that the administration has already instituted.

And they are insisting that asylum seekers meet a higher standard during screenings at which migrants have to demonstrate a “credible fear of persecution,” to make sure that fewer claims are granted. The Biden administration has already done that for people who have been apprehended between ports of entry — in the desert, for instance, or crossing the Rio Grande.

The icing on this concessionary cake is this: The administration requested almost $14 billion for border security — an amount much higher than the numbers discussed with congressional leaders over the summer. The funding request includes hiring an additional 1,300 Border Patrol agents — a key Republican demand — as well as 1,000 Customs and Border Protection officers, 1,600 asylum officers and support staff members, and 1,470 Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys. To anyone paying attention, it is obvious the Biden administration has already come a long way toward the Republican position that something big must be done.

But none of that seems to matter, because the House wants more. New Speaker Mike Johnson is insisting the Administration agree to a bill that passed the House this year, but not the Senate. That bill would make it easier for families to be held in detention indefinitely and make it a federal crime to overstay a visa, among other things.

“The House is saying, ‘Give us the farm or you get nothing,’” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council. That’s not compromise; that’s political tyranny.

Immigration policy is something both sides agree needs fixing. The Biden administration calls it “broken.” It’s a serious issue with verifiable roots, not some made up craziness politicians often spout to get a few minutes of fame and airtime on Fox News. Consequently, the Republican Party, the Party in opposition, wants to run with it like greyhounds chasing the rabbit at the racecourse. They have spent years fostering and channeling public anger over immigration, and they’re not about to stop, regardless of what it means for Ukraine.

So, who will blink first?

This political extortion, of course, bears an ironic similarity to Donald Trump’s 2019 attempt to withhold congressionally-appropriated money from Ukraine unless then-newly-elected President Volodymyr Zelenskyy open an investigation into his presidential opponent Joe Biden.

Different subject; same tactic.

Speaking of rabbit holes

Ever dream of being a college president? Well, now is not the best time to have that dream come true. Here’s why.

When Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October in an act of profound barbarism, the entire world was shocked, horrified, and completely sympathetic to the devastation inflicted on Israeli men, women, and children, more than 1,200 of whom Hamas terrorists killed with unspeakable atrocity. Around 250 people were taken hostage and ignominiously dragged off to Gaza. The world’s sympathy lasted about four nanoseconds, because the Israeli Defense Forces, vowing to exterminate Hamas once and for all, unleashed the dogs of war on the Hamas citadel — densely populated Gaza. Innocent Gazans, whom Hamas used as human shields, started dying. According to the Hamas Medical Ministry, the death toll has now passed 16,000,  a number that may be exaggerated, but even if it is….

After Israel began shelling Gaza in preparation for a ground invasion, the tide of public opinion started to turn. We now have two warring camps in America. Camp One sides with Israel, maintaining that the small country of 9 million, 21% of whom are Arab, will never be safe so long as Hamas exists. Camp Two, without acknowledging the horror of 7 October, decries the civilian loss of life in Gaza and demands that Israel stop. Camp One points to Hamas’s stated goal of annihilating the state of Israel and all the Jews within it, which is the very definition of genocide. Camp Two claims loudly that Israel is right now committing genocide on the Palestinian population of Gaza.

Although, as I have written previously, this is a terribly complex and complicated issue, it has now been reduced to the binary. If you’re sympathetic to Israel, you obviously hate innocent Palestinian Gazans; if you’re sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians, you’re against Israel. In other words, you’re Anti-Semitic.

On college campuses, Camp Two is winning, as large groups of protesters march through Harvard Yard chanting “Intifada now,” and students at Penn do the same and spray paint Anti Semitic slogans on campus buildings. Jewish students at both schools are now living in fear.

This puts college presidents in a no-win position. They don’t want to stifle free speech, but where do they draw the line between free speech and speech that puts people in danger? Is there any room for “context” in this horrid situation?

But “context” is what college presidents are wrestling with right now, which was on vivid display this week as the presidents of three elite schools, Harvard, MIT, and Penn, were grilled by Republican and Democratic  members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Committee members, particularly Elise Stefanik (R-NY), wanted a “simple yes or no” to a question. “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment? Yes or no?” she demanded of Claudine Gay, the new president of Harvard University.

“It’s targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals,” Stefanik said.

Representative Stefanik, the Number 4 Republican in the House, asked the same question to the other two presidents testifying. To Stefanik, as well as to the other members of the  Committee, the three presidents did nothing but equivocate. Even Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, after the Hearing, said the three were “lacking in moral clarity.”

Following their testimony, judged inadequate by just about everyone, the three presidents now face serious calls for their terminations. At Harvard, President Gay apologized for her testimony in an interview with the Harvard Crimson, saying she “got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures.”

“What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged,” Gay said.

At Penn, lawyers for a major donor, Ross Stevens, wrote to Penn’s general counsel yesterday threatening to withdraw a gift valued at $100 million because of the university’s “stance on antisemitism on campus,” unless Penn President Liz Magill is replaced.

However, notwithstanding the thin ice beneath the feet of college presidents, on college campuses opprobrium continues to rain down on Israel. With that in mind, let me ask you a question.

Following the atrocities of 7 October, what was Israel supposed to do? Ignore it? Tell Hamas never to do it again, or else? What’s “else?” Plead with the United Nations to intervene? Ask the Palestinian Authority to use its non-existent muscle to stifle Hamas? Lob a few shells into Gaza and say, “That’ll teach ’em?” What?

We, here in America, were twice in that position. First, on 7 December 1941 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, killing more than 2,400. Today is the 82nd anniversary of the day after, when FDR asked Congress for a Declaration of War in his “Day of infamy” speech. That war ended with two atomic bombs that killed somewhere between 129,000 and 226,000 Japanese, no one actually knows the right number. Not many college students marched in protest after that.

The second time we faced an existential crises was on 11 September 2001, 9/11. We marshalled our forces and with a NATO coalition attacked Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. During that conflict, Afghan civilians were also used as human shields by the Taliban in a US-led attack on Marjah, and, unfortunately, many died.

Helping Ukraine survive, doing the same for Israel while striving to create a viable and safe two-state solution, fixing a “broken” immigration system, combating Anti-Semitism — these are questions that do not lend themselves to easy sound-bite solutions. But solutions they must eventually have.

If not, our ever-darkening rabbit hole will get only deeper.

I hope you have a good weekend. I’ll be back Monday.