Insight

“We may explain success mainly by one word and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!! Not transient and fitful effort, but patient, enduring, honest, unremitting, and indefatigable work, into which the whole heart is put.” —Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)

Upright

“Don’t even think about looting. Don’t even think about taking advantage of people in this vulnerable situation. … I can tell you, in the state of Florida, you never know what may be lurking behind somebody’s home, and I would not wanna chance that if I were you, given that we’re a Second Amendment state.” —Governor Ron DeSantis

“There are people that wrote on their plywood, ‘You loot, we shoot.’ At the end of the day, we are not going to allow lawlessness to take advantage of this situation. We are a law-and-order state, and this is a law-and-order community, so do not think that you’re going to go take advantage of people who’ve suffered misfortune.” —Ron DeSantis

For the Record

“Will someone please tell the ladies of ‘The View’ the story about what happened on Sept. 19, 1559 to the Spanish conquistadors who established a colony on the Gulf Coast of Florida near what’s now Pensacola. Five weeks after they arrived a powerful hurricane hit them — they apparently weren’t watching the Weather Channel — and destroyed most of the settlement and their fleet. They tried to rebuild but in 1561 the Spanish government gave up. It decided Florida’s Gulf Coast was so dangerous it left and didn’t come back to settle again for 134 years. As far as I know, SUVs, F-150s and Gov. DeSantis had nothing to do with that 1559 hurricane, either.” —Michael Reagan

“Since [Joy] Behar’s birth in 1942, Florida has seen 48 hurricanes make landfall. Three of them have been Category 5 (so worse), nine of them have been Category 4 (including Ian), and 11 of them Category 3. Granted, Behar was not around for 1900’s Great Galveston hurricane, which hit eight years before Model Ts began emitting carbon into the air; it likely killed somewhere around 10,000 people in Texas. The 1926 Great Miami hurricane killed 372, causing an estimated, inflation-adjusted $164 billion in damage. Only around 150,000 people lived in all of Dade County back in those days. The Great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 was tied with 2019’s Hurricane Dorian for strongest maximum sustained landfall winds (185 mph). Those were pretty bad storms, as were many others. Critics will, no doubt, point out the rising cost of insurance payments due to hurricanes and other natural disasters. This is largely due to the concentration of people and wealth in coastal regions, a consequence of both rising population and wealth, and federal insurance programs that incentivize people to take on this risk. Critics will also point out that hurricanes are far less deadly now than they have been in the past because we’ve instituted warning systems and improved infrastructure and preparedness. And that’s right. Acclimatizing to the realities of climate is far cheaper and more effective than any state-compelled dismantling of modernity. No amount of scaremongering can change that reality.” —David Harsanyi

Theater of the Absurd

“It is our lowest-income communities and our communities of color that are most impacted by these extreme conditions. We have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity, understanding that we fight for equality, but we also need to fight for equity.” —Vice President Kamala Harris

“We have a shortage of workers in our country, and you see even in Florida some of the farmers and the growers saying, ‘Why are you shipping these immigrants up north? We need them to pick the crops down here.’” —House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (“Say what you will about the Democrats, they’ve been consistently concerned throughout their history about who we’re gonna get to pick the crops.” —Logan Dobson | “It’s illegal to employ illegal migrants. It’s also disastrous for a country not to make a distinction between legal and illegal migration.” —Miranda Devine)

“I believe that we have to have a secure border and I think that … the president has a plan to address that.” —Nancy Pelosi

A Blind Squirrel Finds a Nut

“There is a limit to how many migrants any society can take without severe disruption and assistance, and our system is based much more on an assumption that things would be more normal.” —Bill Clinton

Lack of Self-Awareness

“When I ran, I said one of the reasons I was running literally was to restore the soul of America. Bring back some decency and honor in the way we talk about one another, the way we deal with one another.” —Joe “Republicans Are Semi-Fascists” Biden

And Last…

“It goes without saying that everyone is free to express disagreement with our decisions and to criticize our reasoning as they see fit. But saying or implying that the court is becoming an illegitimate institution or questioning our integrity crosses an important line.” —Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito

“The sacrifice that women make, especially in relationship to infants, is pretty obvious and should be celebrated. … And any society that doesn’t hold that as sacred is off the rails in some fundamental manner.” —Jordan Peterson