Evil garden gnome Ron DeSantis won’t talk to Harris or Biden about that little ‘ol hurricane

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has refused to take a call with Vice President Kamala Harris about Hurricane Milton, a source close to the governor told ABC News.

The DeSantis team believes the call from the vice president is politically motivated, according to the source, and is thus refusing to take the call.

DeSantis staffers also said the governor has not spoken to President Joe Biden in at least the last few days in the wake of Hurricane Helene and as the massive Hurricane Milton takes aim at Florida.

“If you have the president and you have the vice president reaching out to offer up assistance provided to your constituents, the people who live in your state, to make sure we are doing everything that we need to do from federal response — and we’re reaching out, offering our support, that’s where … it is up to [DeSantis] if he wants to respond to us or not,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday afternoon.

Despite the lack of communication between them, Jean-Pierre said the administration is still working with state and local officials to make sure that teams are pre-positioned ahead of Milton’s landfall.

DeSantis is term limited so he’s out as governor of God’s unpleasantly humid waiting room after 2026. He’s probably delusional enough to think Trump just has to kick it for Little Boots to become America’s new fascist of choice, so that probably explains his current bout of snottiness.

As for Milton, it went from 85 mph last night to 175 mph a couple of hours ago, and is headed pretty much straight toward Tampa Bay. The reason the Tampa-St. Pete area is so vulnerable to storm surge is that the continental shelf to the west of the bay makes for a very shallow ocean: it’s still less than 100 meters deep 150 kilometers off shore. This means that 48 straight hours of major hurricane winds are going to pile up a massive wall of water that will swamp the entire area even if winds decline somewhat just before landfall.

The last time a major hurricane hit (1921) the total population of the four-county area was 160,000 people. Now it’s 2.5 million, plus sea level has risen several feet since then, and everybody wants to live as close to the water as they can. Basically Florida was built by central air conditioning and is going to be gradually shut down by insurance companies. I read that homeowners already have to replace their roofs every ten years as a condition of not having their insurance cancelled, and of course a huge amount of hurricane damage is essentially already uninsured and uninsurable. I’m all for compassion, even towards Republicans (up to a point), and I get that there are more Democrats in Florida than in the vast majority of the other states. but OTOH the rest of the nation can’t keep bailing out people who either don’t believe in climate change or act like they don’t.

Population of Florida

1950: 2.8 million

1980: 9.8 million

2023: 22.6 million