Back to my Miami Herald reading list. This evening I got a new headline via email: “Florida high school board to hold emergency meeting after menstruation question controversy.” What’s the “menstruation question controversy,” you ask? Since I’m up to date on Florida politics, I can clue you in.
The Florida High School Athletic Association recently ruled that on the standard form to play high school sports in Florida there will now be a mandatory question about whether a student athlete menstruates: Date of first period, days between periods, most recent period. The strong suspicion is that this was a way to ferret out trans athletes, since it’s not clear why the coaching staff or the schools (where the records would be stored) would have any medical need for this information. Others feared it would be used to find proof of illicit abortions. These forms aren’t protected by anything like HIPAA. Coaches, staff or whoever else can just pull them out of the bank box and see what they say.
From The Springfield News-Leader …
Federal law enforcement officers say they seized 11 guns, a silencer, more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition, body armor plates and several pounds of a binary explosive from a Springfield man with ties to the Boogaloo extremist anti-government group.
I subscribe to a bunch of regional papers, mainly in swing states or states that tend to be politically kinetic. It comes in handy at election time and it keeps me up to speed on things outside the national news generally. One of those papers is The Miami Herald. In the DeSantis Era that turns out to be quite a trip. Almost every day I get an email about some new gambit of his, each of which seems aimed generally at paving the way for his 2024 presidential campaign and specifically at owning the libs. That’s his program, essentially.
Like all upstanding Americans I’m eagerly awaiting the first hearing of the House GOP’s new “weaponization of the federal government” investigations committee. That first hearing will feature former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley and what is being presented as an FBI whistleblower of sorts, a former FBI agent named Nicole Parker who says she left the FBI three months ago in the face of growing politicization and unprofessionalism from the FBI brass. She’s now a regular on Fox News. So she’s the one who will reveal how the FBI has become a haven of wokeness during her 12-year tenure.
I looked her up and saw this opinion piece she wrote for Fox News. And in addition to a lot of verbiage about wokeness and how the Bureau changed during her time there, her one example of politicization was fairly revealing. Parker was offended that during the George Floyd protests in D.C. on June 4 a group of FBI agents in tactical gear kneeled before protestors in what they apparently saw as a deescalation effort.