| Good morning. We’re about to mark the 10th anniversary of when 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in a Florida neighborhood. His 27th birthday would have been earlier this month. The case launched the start of a new civil rights movement and drew nationwide protests. And Florida’s “stand your ground” law was thrust into the national spotlight. George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watchman who shot Martin, cited the law in his self-defense. He was acquitted. Then-Gov. Rick Scott put together a task force to investigate the law; the task force recommended keeping it. A decade after the fateful shooting, Florida’s self-defense law has continued to draw controversy, including in the shooting of Markeis McGlockton in 2018. A 2013 Times analysis showed that the law had begun to be applied with greater frequency around the time of Martin’s death. Over the years, various members of Florida’s Legislature have tried and failed to dismantle the law. This year, Sen. Shevrin Jones, D-Miami Gardens, filed a bill to do just that. And like years before, it seems all but certain to fail in Florida’s gun-friendly Legislature. — Romy Ellenbogen, rellenbogen@tampabay.com |
| CPAC in the Sunshine State |
| The Rundown: For the second year in a row, the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, is coming to Orlando. The largest annual gathering of conservatives in the country will feature speakers including Gov. Ron DeSantis, U.S. Sens. Rick Scott and Marco Rubio, former President Donald Trump and other notable Floridians. Last year's conference followed Trump's 2020 election defeat and was only a month after pro-Trump rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol -- and the false claims of a stolen election were center stage. The conference featured a panel called "Protecting Elections: Why Judges & Media Refused to Look at the Evidence," according to the New York Times, as well as one on the "Failed States" that President Joe Biden won. That thinking has since spilled into states Trump won, like Florida, where grassroots supporters have been trying to push for an audit in their communities. This year, many of the CPAC panels focus on the GOP's top themes for the 2022 campaigns -- like the battle over school curriculum, bashing traditional media outlets and fighting cancel culture, including a panel with "Papa John" Schnatter, who resigned as chairman of the pizza chain in 2018 after it was revealed that he had used the N-word on a conference call. DeSantis will likely speak mostly about these topics, as well as Florida leading the way on abandoning pandemic restrictions, which is a main plank of his re-election campaign. It’s unclear whether he will wade directly into topics like the 2020 election or the Jan. 6 riots, which appear to be highlighted in some of CPAC’s panels this year. (In fact, there's an entire panel dedicated to "The Truth about January 6th" with Julie Kelly, the author of a book that is a "complete exposé of the left’s efforts to create violence and then exploit the violence to smear the Republican Party," according to Trump's review listed on the Amazon description.) On the anniversary of Jan. 6, DeSantis said the riot wasn’t an insurrection and was being weaponized by the media to criticize Trump supporters. DeSantis recently declined to answer a question about whether former Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to overturn the election. Other CPAC panels will harken even further into the past to former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who ran against Trump in 2016. Two sessions have "Lock Her Up" in their title. Our political team will be at CPAC covering it all, so stay tuned. |
No comments:
Post a Comment