☕️ RISING STARS ☙ Wednesday, July 8, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Fla's local governments got a costless chance to cut taxes and spent the money instead; a Democrat "rising star" lands in an Alabama jail; and the Times insists we mustn't check for election cheating.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Your roundup includes: hundreds of Florida local governments proving they can't cut a tax even when it costs them absolutely nothing; Governor DeSantis's parting gift to homeowners, now bound for the November ballot; the Democrats' former "rising star" Andrew Gillum, who resurfaced this week in an Alabama jail with a remarkably well-organized travel kit; the New York Times accidentally publishing two of the best election-integrity stories of the year; and a coast-to-coast chorus of officials who will do absolutely anything except answer one simple yes-or-no question. Pour the big cup.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Florida is the state that gave the world hanging chads, the Burmese python invasion, and the guy who got arrested for throwing an alligator through a Wendy’s drive-through window. There is even a small section of Key West called the Conch Republic that officially seceded from the United States (although no one has yet noticed, since its alcohol consumption rates remain stable). But in one of many pandemic miracles, Florida drew the best governor in human history, Ron DeSantis, who, sadly, is terming out in December. But he isn’t just sitting around; in his lame-duck year, Governor DeSantis heroically pushed through what critics called a “reckless and insane” property tax initiative, which is now on the November ballot (albeit severely pruned in the passage process).

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Florida Cities Are Already Cutting Spending Ahead of Pivotal Property-Tax Vote.” This news was essentially buried by other breaking Florida news of the reckless and insane, specifically, Florida man Eddie Inch and his hoverboard-towed golden retriever Loosy riding a jet ski. (Loosy wore a regulation flotation device.) This was not part of a circus performance. It was just Tuesday in South Florida.

Anyway, Florida’s local governments have become morbidly obese on property tax revenue for the past several years. As home values across the Sunshine State went vertical—driven by the entirely predictable consequence of millions of Americans fleeing high-tax blue states to move somewhere that doesn’t force its residents to triple-mask and show vaccine passports to buy gas-station powdered donuts—local tax collections went vertical right along with them. Florida TaxWatch said many counties saw tax revenue increases that doubled or tripled and blew past both inflation and population growth combined.

Here’s the shocking (not shocking) part. Responding to this sudden windfall in unexpected and unspent tax revenue, hundreds of local governments were suddenly and unexpectedly confronted with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lower tax rates without giving anything up. They could be heroes! They could balance the budgets, pay off debts, retire bonds, and lower property tax rates—all without firing a single DEI administrator’s head assistant!

So of course, they did the exact opposite.

Not one of Florida’s local governments lowered residents’ property tax rates. None paid down their debts. No bonds were retired. Out of hundreds of contestants, none managed to balance their budget. Local governments had discovered that “emergency” is a magic word that —shazam!— makes budget discipline disappear faster than a plate of jelly donuts at a school board meeting. There would be no going back.

Nope. Instead, they went on spending sprees, like a corps of Army Rangers back from Fallujah, flush with combat bonuses on an R&R deployment to Las Vegas. Cities expanded DEI departments. Counties added more and more and more goofy wokeness, expanded “programs,” handouts, and expensive nonsense. School boards spent every nickel of additional property tax revenue and staffed up.

I hate to break this bad news, but if you can’t achieve budgetary sanity in Florida —the reddest of red states in 2026— even when it costs nothing and would be a complete political win, then I must regretfully conclude that governmental financial prudence is impossible.

They simply cannot be trusted. I might have predicted this result in my socialist blue outpost of Alachua County. But sadly, even dark-red Republican counties misbehaved. Their spending appetites are insatiable. I can only conclude that we must put them on a forced diet, like sending them to one of those Russian fat camps where they give you one small cup of chicken broth once a day and won’t let you leave for 40 days no matter what you say.

This was also Governor DeSantis’s conclusion. So he proposed ending all property taxes of any kind, replacing annual property taxes with a once-per-purchase sales tax instead. Hysteria ensued. The legislative sausage factory reduced that admirable goal to the current ballot initiative.

Still, Governor DeSantis successfully rammed through a diminished version of the proposed constitutional amendment, called “Save Our Homes from Excessive Property Taxes,” which will appear on the November ballot. Assuming 60% of Florida voters approve it, the homestead exemption —a modest discount on property taxes for residents’ primary residences— will slowly increase from $50,000 to $150,000 in 2027, and then to $250,000 in 2028.

The expanded discount would hardly keep up with the property tax inflation. But still.

For millions of Florida homeowners who’ve watched their property tax bills balloon faster than Ilhan Omar’s expense account, this seems like generally good news, and apparently the politicians think it will be popular. After all, according to the Journal’s story, they are already buckling down their budgets, while also wailing to anyone who’ll listen about how they can’t possibly go back to their pre-covid lifestyle, which, from the shrillness of their complaints, must have been truly severe austerity.

It’s like listening to a pack of drug addicts begging not to be sent back to rehab. Sorry. It’s for your own good.

They have to go cold turkey. It’s the only way. One hopes that, when he leaves the Governor’s office, Ron DeSantis will find a solid spot in the Trump Administration or possibly even on the Supreme Court. But I digress.

The mind-numbingly common pattern is tax increases. Major tax cuts are vanishingly rare. This one requires a constitutional amendment and a 60% super-majority. Hopefully, other states will soon follow Florida’s historic example.

Which leads nicely into our next story. DeSantis barely won his first election in 2018. It was within 0.2%. He almost lost to Democrat darling Andrew Gillum, who has also been in the news this week. And you thought Graham Platner was bad.

🔥 Andrew Gillum — former Tallahassee mayor, former Democrat gubernatorial candidate, former ‘rising star’ of the Democrat Party, is currently vacationing at the Baldwin County, Alabama jail. Andrew was arrested last week after a police officer pulled him over for erratic driving and noticed, sitting on the center console in plain view, a glass meth pipe. The Daily Beast reported, “Former Democratic Rising Star Arrested on Drug Charges.”

The story’s sub-headline explained, “The arrest marks the latest setback for Andrew Gillum, 46, who could now face up to five years in prison.”

I want to stop here to note that “glass pipe sitting on the center console in plain view” is not a subtle detail. This is not a case of a zealous officer conducting an invasive search of the back of the glove compartment. The pipe was on the console. In the open. Visible from outside the vehicle. It was, in the parlance of law enforcement, what professionals technically refer to as “glaringly obvious.”

Officers then searched Andrew’s car and found three grams of methamphetamine, eight pre-rolled marijuana joints, four cut straws, three pipes, and a bong.

Four cut straws. Three pipes. And a bong. For traveling purposes.

In other words, this is not just a drug user. This is a drug enthusiast. This is a man who has given serious thought to his drug storage and retrieval system. This is someone who, when packing for a road trip, uses a checklist.

In 2018, Andrew Gillum came within 30,000 votes of becoming the Governor of Florida— a razor-thin margin of less than two-tenths of one percent. (A steady stream of late-received mail-in ballots nearly put him over the top till a judge stopped it.) He was the Democratic Party’s golden boy — young, charismatic, progressive, and apparently traveling with enough controlled substances to supply an above-average music festival.

The national media adored him. Barack Obama campaigned for him. Oprah campaigned for him. The New York Times wrote approximately eleven billion glowing words about his inspiring journey, his unparalleled vision for Florida’s socialist future, and his politically inconvenient meth, cocaine, and male hooker habits. Whoops! Sorry! The Times didn’t mention that last part. They knew it; they just didn’t say it.

As noted, this week’s arrest was not Gillum’s first ride on law enforcement’s mechanical bull.

🔥 In March 2020, Miami Beach police responded to a hotel suite at the Mondrian South Beach after reports of a drug overdose. They found Gillum in the room with two other men (one a male escort), and three small bags of suspected crystal methamphetamine.

No charges were filed, allegedly because the drugs couldn’t be tied directly to Gillum, which is the kind of legal outcome that requires a very specific and creative interpretation of the phrase “in the room.” It weren’t MY drugs!

Gillum subsequently ‘came out’ as bisexual. He said his wife, Jai Gillum, had long known and they’d “embraced a new dynamic” in their marriage. (Voters might have benefited from this information, but whatever.) He claimed he’d developed a drinking problem after his 2018 loss, conveniently said he had blacked out on the beach before waking up in that hotel room with all those guys and drugs, and promptly entered rehab.

I don’t think it worked.

The Democratic Party, which had just spent two years calling Gillum the future of progressive politics, nodded sympathetically and moved on, because that is what you do when your rising star wakes up in a hotel room after a bender with a male escort and three bags of crystal meth— you express ‘support for his journey’ and quietly take him off the fundraising email list.

It might be time for more rehab. But despite the corproate media framing, it’s not just drugs and alcohol. In 2022, federal prosecutors indicted Gillum on conspiracy, wire fraud, and false statement charges, accusing him of diverting campaign contributions and NGO grant money for personal use while lying to donors, and of lying to the FBI during its investigation into corruption in the Tallahassee city government.

But a progressive Tallahassee jury acquitted Andrew of lying charges and hung on the rest. So prosecutors just dropped the remaining counts, because the American justice system is a rich tapestry.

But the Florida Commission on Ethics —not afflicted with blue Tallahassee juries— found probable cause that Gillum had ‘improperly accepted gifts’ while mayor of Tallahassee —including trips to Costa Rica and New York, with tickets to Hamilton— from people who turned out to be undercover FBI agents.

Andrew paid a $5,000 fine to settle those serious allegations. Five thousand dollars. For a man who nearly became governor of the third-largest state in the country. That is less than the cost of a barely reliable used car, or, apparently, one well-stocked road trip.

And now, Alabama. Three grams of meth. Eight joints. Four cut straws. Three pipes. A bong. Erratic driving on U.S. Highway 98 at 10:45 p.m. on the Fourth of July. (Gillum posted a $6,500 bond and has declined to comment.)

🔥 What are we to think of Democrats’ nominees and their voting preferences? One of the commenters from the story about Gillum’s most recent arrest said they would still “vote for a drugged-up Andrew Gillum a million times over before I’d ever vote for Ron DeSantis”:

They did wonder about their donation to Gillum’s campaign, though. Ironic.

I hate manifesting this horrific possibility in print, but if the 2018 mail-in ballot counting had continued for one more day: Gillum would have been elected Florida’s governor. The nation would still be under pandemic martial law. And, worst of all, Gillum would have been a serious presidential candidate.

Now we are breathlessly waiting for the next shoe to drop on Governor Newsom’s oleaginous hairdo. We are munching bags and bags of microwave popcorn in rapt amazement at rapey Graham Platner’s Greek tragedy. (Currently: He’s not leaving without his prize bag.) WSJ, yesterday:

Mangling its metaphors again, the Journal explained, “Democrats are scrambling to stave off disaster as the fallout from new allegations against Graham Platner threatens to intensify simmering rifts within the party.” Fallout is radiation from the sky, not a stovetop simmer. And, just how coherent is intensified simmering anyway? Oh, never mind.

One can only conclude that Democrats, frustrated by wicked Republicans stopping them from defunding the police, have transitioned to the other plank of their noble criminal justice-reform platform: elect criminals.

But I remain open to alternative explanations. Let me know what you think in the comments.

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Amidst all this cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs political drama, the New York Times accidentally delivered two terrific stories this morning. First, it reported the latest Trump Administration election-integrity “Plan B,” in a professional, unbiased, journalistically neutral article: “Administration Demands States Change Voting Rules or Lose Antiterrorism Funds.” The sub-headline explained, “Federal officials said they would withhold some money unless states pursue paper ballot systems, verify citizenship and conduct costly audits.”

Eureka! Remember, President Trump is already working on microscopic Postal Service tracking of mail-in ballots. This week, the nonpartisan Times complained, “its latest move would make voting harder and undermine trust in results that don’t go President Trump’s way.”

The New York Times, which included the delightfully biased phrase “undermine trust in results that don’t go President Trump’s way” in its second sentence, would like readers to know that these requirements are radical, dangerous, probably unconstitutional, and also somehow simultaneously both a threat to democracy and completely unworkable.

The Times has not yet explained how something can be both a mortal threat to the republic and also destined to fail immediately in court, but give them time. They have 600 comments to work through.

The actual news was that the Trump Administration informed states that they must verify that voters are actually citizens, switch to hand-marked paper ballots, and conduct post-election audits— or lose 20% of their FEMA terrorism-preparedness grants.

I want to make sure you are sitting down for this next part, because I am about to tell you what countries use paper ballots and verify that voters are citizens. Those countries include: France. Germany. Canada. Sweden. The Netherlands. Japan. Australia. Basically, every functioning democracy on earth that is not the United States, which is the only developed nation that has somehow decided that verifying voter eligibility and counting votes on paper are signs of dangerous extremism rather than, say, normal election administration.

France, which gave the world the guillotine, the Maginot Line, and the unfortunate concept of the mime, nonetheless somehow manages to verify that its voters are French citizens before letting them vote. Germany, which has had some historical experience with the consequences of compromised democratic institutions, uses paper ballots. Canada —Canada, the country so polite it apologizes to furniture it bumps into— verifies citizenship and uses paper ballots.

But in the United States, in 2026, asking whether voters are citizens is a quote-unquote “radical change to election processes.”

🔥 David Becker, executive director of something called the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told the Times that the election-security requirements “will actually harm election security.” He did not bother to explain the apparently self-evident mechanism by which verifying citizenship and using paper ballots —the two most basic, universally accepted practices in democratic elections worldwide— constitutes a dire threat to election security in the United States, but he said it with great confidence, which is apparently sufficient for a Times quote.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who is receiving approximately $204 million in FEMA security grants, issued a totally non-hyperbolic statement saying the Trump Administration was “putting New Yorkers’ lives at risk to forward their political agenda.”

New York, you will recall, is the state that spent the better part of three years jamming elderly residents into deadly nursing homes, and telling them that they could not attend funerals, visit dying relatives, or eat inside a restaurant —all in the name of public safety— but has apparently located its inner libertarian just in time to oppose the idea of checking whether voters are who they say they are.

The Times helpfully noted that “courts have already blocked similar efforts by the administration,” and that “the executive branch does not have constitutional authority to regulate elections.” This is a fair point.

But it is also a point that the Times did not make with comparable urgency during the previous administration’s various creative interpretations of executive authority, but we are not here to audit the Times’s consistency, because that would take considerably longer than today’s post will allow.

The Administration’s theory appears to be that election integrity is a national security issue. The Democrats’ theory is that this is an outrage. The courts will presumably weigh in, as they have on every other executive action in the past eighteen months, because the federal judiciary has apparently decided that its primary function in 2026 is to be a 24x7 traffic cop.

The Times also noted, this time discovering its internal budgetary hawk, that switching to hand-marked paper ballots “would very likely cost states hundreds of millions of dollars” because states would need new tabulation equipment. This is true.

It is also true that the states currently spending hundreds of millions of dollars on electronic voting systems that also require paper backup anyway could, theoretically, have just used paper in the first place and saved everyone a great deal of money and argument. But that would have required thinking ahead, which is not a core progressive competency.

FEMA’s manual audit requirement —checking 5% of ballots by hand— would “cause significant delays in counting,” the Times laughably reported. This is also true. In France, where they use paper ballots and count them by hand, election results are typically not known until midnight on election night.

In the United States, using sophisticated electronic systems, we sometimes wait fourteen days. The French —not well known for bureaucratic efficiency— have not yet explained how they accomplish this miraculous feat, possibly because no one has asked them, or possibly because the answer is embarrassing.

The administration’s effort will almost certainly be challenged in court. It may well be blocked. There are legitimate constitutional arguments. But it shows how the Trump Administration isn’t quitting just because a few RINO Senators —including the Republican Senator from Maine— obstinately refuse to save their own skins.

The Times argued that these requirements are manifestly radical, dangerous, and rooted in “false conspiracy theories”— a framing that requires you to believe that France, Germany, Canada, and approximately forty other countries have all independently decided to run their elections according to QAnon.

I am just a business lawyer, not a constitutional scholar. But I did once fill out a paper ballot, which apparently makes me a radical. With how much they love Europeans and socialist Scandinavians, you’d think Democrats would embrace the French system. Oh well.

🗳️ But wait, there’s more! Plan C. The next bit of wonderful election integrity news was also reported by this morning’s Times, headlined “Justice Department Threatens Top Election Officials Over Noncitizen Voting.” The sub-headline explained, “The letters come amid President Trump’s effort to tighten election rules to prevent a problem that doesn’t exist: widespread noncitizen voting.”

The New York Times obviously wants us all to know that noncitizen voting doesn’t exist, which is why everyone is so upset about being asked whether it’s happening.

Yesterday, the DOJ’s civil rights division sent letters to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, informing them that federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in American elections, asking states to confirm they are complying with said law, and “threatening criminal prosecution of top election officials if ballots cast by noncitizens were counted in upcoming elections.”

Again, the New York Times, in its subheadline and in its second sentence, repeated that this is an effort “to prevent a problem that doesn’t exist: widespread noncitizen voting in American elections.”

This is a remarkable sentence. The Times is telling us, in the same article, two things: first, that noncitizen voting does not exist; and second, that election officials across the country are furious about being asked whether it exists. If the problem truly does not exist, the correct response to the Justice Department’s letter is “Dear DOJ: You are correct, noncitizens are not voting here, here is our documentation, have a lovely summer.”

The letters are not subpoenas. They require no legal response. They are, in the Times’s own description, largely identical seven-page documents detailing laws that “have been clear for decades.”

And yet the response from coast to coast has been roughly equivalent to what you would expect if the Justice Department had demanded that states surrender their firstborn Priuses.

The letters were sent by Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department’s civil rights division. They asked election officials to respond within five days with details on how their states intended to comply with federal laws prohibiting noncitizen voting, and helpfully offered the department’s assistance.

Utah Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson —a squishy Republican, which the Times featured prominently because it is useful to have a Republican complaining— wrote on social media that she had received “another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution.” She described the letters as “truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.”

With respect to Lieutenant Governor Henderson, who is a Republican and therefore presumably not a reflexive opponent of election integrity enforcement: the letter is simply asking whether noncitizens are voting. The answer, if they are not, is: “no.” This does not require five days. It does not require a social media post. It requires the two-letter word “no,” followed optionally by some documentation, followed by a return to your regularly scheduled duties.

The fact that this particular “no” has proven so difficult to produce is, at minimum, an interesting data point.

🗳️ David Becker —who you may remember from our previous story, where he was busily explaining why paper ballots and citizenship verification would “harm election security”— coincidentally reappeared in this article to describe the DOJ letters as “what panic and desperation looks like.” Mr. Becker, who runs something called the Center for Election Innovation and Research, added that the administration has “had 18 months to find evidence of a crime that was never committed, and found nothing.”

Mr. Becker is quite a busy man. In the span of two consecutive news cycles, he has argued that: (1) requiring paper ballots is dangerous; (2) verifying citizenship is radical; and (3) asking whether anyone verified citizenship is panic and desperation. He has not yet explained what a non-panicked, non-desperate election-security posture would look like, but one imagines it involves fewer questions and more trust.

The Times noted that an initial review of nearly 50 million voter registration records by DHS referred roughly 0.02 percent of names for further investigation. The Times presents this as evidence that noncitizen voting is not a problem. It is worth noting that 0.02 percent of 50 million is 10,000 people — which is, depending on the state and the race, potentially quite a lot of votes. The Times did not note this.

The Times also did not note that 0.02 percent was the result of an “initial review,” not a completed investigation, and that the department was seeking additional data to conduct a more thorough review. But we are not here to audit the Times’s arithmetic.

DOJ also sent letters to Detroit, Lansing, and East Lansing, Michigan, announcing that federal election monitors would be present for the upcoming primary. The stated reasons included a lack of provisional ballots at polling locations and voting machines that were non-operational in multiple locations during the 2024 election.

Detroit’s City Clerk Janice Winfrey shot back that the Justice Department’s claims were “false assertions” forming a “baseless conclusion.” She also noted that no DOJ representatives attended Detroit polling places in 2024, and that if they did, they had not signed in with supervisory staff as required. Rules for thee.

This is a fascinating defense. Detroit’s city clerk argued, simultaneously, that the Justice Department’s observations from the 2024 election were false— and that the Justice Department was not actually there to make any observations. Which is it? These two claims might not be impossible to reconcile, but they do require some creative geometry.

The Times, Mr. Becker, the various outraged election officials— they all have something in common: not one of them has simply said in a straightforward way that “noncitizens are not voting in our state, and here is how we know.”

They have said the question is insulting. They have said the tone is inappropriate. They have said the letters are politically motivated, legally dubious, and evidence of panic. They have said, with great feeling and drama, that the people asking the question are bad.

What they have not done is answer the dang question. This is what, in American political discourse, we call a tell.

The laws that the DOJ relied on, as the Times admitted, “have been clear for decades.” In other words, the Justice Department is not inventing new requirements. It is merely asking states to confirm they are following existing ones, and the problem is non-existent.

In a country where the answer is obviously yes, this should take about as long as it takes to write the word “yes.” But in a country where the answer is complicated, you get 600 comments and a quote from David Becker.

To review: The problem doesn’t exist. Also, confirming that it doesn’t exist is an outrage. The DOJ must be feeling like it cannot win no matter what it does— which, to be fair, is exactly how you feel when you ask someone a simple question and they respond by calling you a bully, issuing a press release, and phoning their lawyer.

It has often been observed that the innocent have nothing to hide. The innocent also, generally speaking, do not require five days and a social media campaign to say “no.”

As I said, I am just a poor business lawyer, not a voting rights expert. But I did once confirm my citizenship to vote, which apparently now makes me a participant in a crude campaign of transparent bullying.

Pro tip: when someone asks whether you are doing something illegal, just say “no.” Regardless, once again, we see the Trump Administration fighting this battle on multiple fronts. He isn’t giving up on paper ballots. He’s not going to quit, either. Which is why T.A.W.

Have a terrific Wednesday! Avoid strange mimes and maneuver back here tomorrow morning, for another installment of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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