Into Darkness

By Zamboni

Everybody's talking about Ron DeSantis's war with Walt World, but is anyone talking about the "other" thing he's doing — aside from that property-tax crisis we wrote about a couple of days ago?

Redistricting. As in, DeSantis is drawing the new Florida Congressional map all his own little self, designing it to break up blocs of Black voters and potentially hand Republicans another four seats this fall. And the State Senate has just rolled over and gone along with it. Why does Florida even bother to have a legislature at all?

Doubtless, this awful map will head to court, and the state will be consumed by nasty fights for the rest of 2022. DeSantis clearly wants not only to be President, he wants to be a dictator.

But his zeal to make the Happiest Place on Earth public enemy number one is puzzling. Dissolving Disney's Reedy Creek tax district as punishment for not agreeing with him on "Don't Say Gay" can't be playing out well in corporate boardrooms — and it should be a wake-up call for big business across America. The years of closing their eyes to what Republicans were saying and doing while writing the GOP huge checks? Let's hope they're over.

Because corporate boards have been stupid and naive. Surely they never expected this kind of payback.

Every year, activist investors and unions introduce shareholder resolutions at annual meetings of publicly traded companies, calling for transparency on political giving and political lobbying. And every year, those resolutions fail. The boards are able to vote them down because the activists and unions represent way less than 50 percent of the voting shares. Now, DeSantis and the Republicans have given us proof positive that the activists and the unions were right all along — and the boards were dead wrong. Egg, meet faces.

It's as inexplicable as Benedict Donald's team marching him into an interview with Piers Morgan without laying down some ground rules first. (Guess they just expected a friendly chat.) We cats HISS.