Politics

You seemed to pick up on points I wasn't trying to make, and then seemed to ignore the points I was. I'm also not able to agree with several of your observations seeing as how the news shows otherwise.

I am not making any claims that the EPA is corrupt and the comparison to the FCC - the example you gave having been something that occurred because the last horrible president appointed nothing but regulatory capture leadership in nearly every vital public service role in his administration - is really off the mark. It is true that during the last administration, the EPA was also subject to regulatory capture, but the overall mission of the EPA is not corrupt. Almost all of these agencies are only as awful as the president in charge, and I don't see Biden as someone who is actively trying to make the whole world worse in pursuit of a dollar (or evading felony convictions) the way that trump clearly was using the office of POTUS to do.

I'm suggesting that having any stipulation that "I'm on board unless it's unsafe" will play out as "EPA: this is unsafe / Florida: we don't care. Our lobbyists are paying us to accept this. We are moving forward with it, see you in court." And then eventually, "SCOTUS: yeah, it's come to our attention again how much of a Debbie downer the EPA is and we historically love sucking the dick of big business, so we are cutting the EPA at the root since we've been slowly castrating it for decades anyway." I cannot be more strong in my language: this would never get the support of the EPA unless the EPA is already further gutted by this time next year, but Florida will roll it out anyway to the severe health detriment of probably Floridians of low income.

I also highly disagree that there are any progressives in Florida who are in positions of real power. The state legislature literally just voted to make opaque how the governor spends money which suggests to me that the majority in the state lege of Florida are also loonies, the current governor not only ran out a former head of the state department of health because she was showing how Florida's reporting of COVID was unscrupulous at worst and sketch at best, to try to convince tourists that Florida was still DTF. The current governor has also basically used the state to terrorize her by having state officials remove her son from her home under the pretext of CPS intervention because he liked or shared a stupidly edgy meme online.

So pardon if from the outside looking in, I don't share your faith in FDOT.