The latest extremist tactic in legislatures of red states is to practice nullifications, tactics to supersede settled federal law. It’s white Confederacy strategy without firing on Ft. Sumter.
It’s been nearly 10 years since Thomas Frank wrote about the conservative takeover of his home state in What’s the Matter With Kansas? Back then, Kansas still had a Democratic governor in Kathleen Sebelius. But after last fall’s civil war, Kansas has emerged a more intense shade of red than even Frank imagined. The state legislature is the most conservative in the United States, and now there is absolutely nothing stopping the Brownback revolution – one which happens to be entirely at odds with any notion of the GOP adapting to the broader social and demographic changes in the country. If anything, these purists argue, Republicans lost in 2012 because the party wasn’t conservative enough.
No one can say that about Sam Brownback, who is rumored to be mulling his own presidential run in 2016 – and using Kansas as a sort of laboratory, in which ideas cooked up by Koch-funded libertarian think tanks can be released like viruses on live subjects. At a national level, the GOP remains stuck in a reactive position, pursuing executive branch “scandals” and blocking Obama’s policies with no real power to effect changes of their own, and so states like Kansas have become very important to the future of the party’s far-right wing. Consider it a test, a case study – proof, finally, that an unfettered hybrid of Randian free-market dogma and theocratic intolerance can create, in the bitter words of outgoing Senate President Steve Morris, one of the ousted moderates, an “ultraconservative utopia.”
The RS piece charts the evolution of it up to and including Sam Brownback’s tenure as governor. The end result is a state that will eliminate taxation for the sake of Koch industries and destroy its educational system. Other matters include declaring an embryo feel pain at 21 days and adjusting state abortion law accordingly while simultaneously creating an environment which encourages violence toward people who work in an abortion clinic. (There is only one in the entire state, George Tiller’s, who you will recall was assassinated.)
In addition, the Kansas legislature has passed an unconstitutional gun law that maintains arms manufactured and sold within the state are not subject to federal laws. It’s a nullification act and a sovereign citizen type of extremism. Indeed, Brownback even uses the word sovereign in a letter warning Attorney General Eric Holder not to mess with Kansas.
All this only underlines the Republican Party’s problem with young people, Rolling Stone’s core audience. Those who read the article would view Kansas as full of bad — old, angry white guys fulminating against the US government and everyone else not exactly like them.
Yet they still lack the nerve to seize a federal facility or jail those passing through from those places in the country they view as un-American.
“[Brownback’s Kansas budget bill] was designed, frankly, to take care of Koch Industries,” one conservative but not crazy politician tells the magazine. “I could see that it took money from very poor people and benefitted me, personally, too significantly. And I’m not poor.”
They subsequently ran him out of office.
Rolling Stone calls Kansas a “rogue state.” A better description is “pariah state.” And the United States has a number of them, all engaged in what people see but awkwardly refuse to acknowledge as a Cold Civil War.
What’s the answer? What was the answer to apartheid South Africa? Putting the squeeze on economically and socially.
What does Kansas export? Aircraft engines, wheat and meat, primarily. But it’s a puny exporter compared to a state like California. Kansas exports grossed 12 billion in 2012, California — 162 billion.
Canada is Kansas’ primary buyer, taking 22 percent of the trade.
Encouraging a major trading partner not to do business with a state with discriminatory law and a government inimical to social welfare and science would be a start. Kansas is a poor state and its current trajectory will make it more so. Even a small number of percentage points shaved off business would hurt under such conditions.
Certainly not easy but conceptually easy to grasp.
“Pariah state” might not even be strong enough.
Sample this, also excerpted from the Rolling Stone piece:
In the current legislative session, the House and Senate voted to rescind a 25-year-old ban on quarantining people with AIDS, and Rep. Steve Brunk of Wichita introduced a bill that would require cities that put fluoride in their water to inform customers that fluoridation lowers the I.Q. of children. The latter claim, of course, is patently false, but somehow fluoride has become a source of paranoia out in the chemtrail/Alex Jones corner of the wackosphere. A group with anti-abortion ties called Wichitans Opposed to Fluoridation actually managed to pass a ballot initiative last fall that would remove fluoride from Wichita’s drinking water.
People ought to be protected from government predation. In this case, the benighted people of Kansas are the ones who need protection — from their state.
Naturally, there is no way a law that enables the quarantining of people with HIV is constitutional or enforceable in the 2013 US.
Nevertheless, its passage illustrates what the red state GOP crazies grasp instinctively once they are in control: They can pass bad or predatory law no civilized society would tolerate faster than it can be brought before the courts to be struck down.
A new term is needed for it, in addition to nullification. How about vexatious legislating?
When Republican Roscoe Bartlett was booted out of the House permanently during the last election, it marked the official death of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy. That’s because the head of the electromagnetic pulse cause in the House went solely into the hands of the leader of EMP caucus, Trent Franks of Arizona.
Trent Franks, in the video below, demonstrates that he barely even qualifies as a human being with the power of thought.
Yes, he’s one of the GOP’s large number of “legitimate rape” wackos.
The only good thing in this character defect from the heart of WhiteManistan is that it completely alienates the part of the country that isn’t despicable as well as insane.
And with the likes of Trent Franks in charge, the Cult of EMP Crazy is never going anywhere.
The fake news — Ted Nugent died in a jet ski accident at an island resort. Ted’s not fit enough to jet ski. He has often been seen walking with a cane (this, friends, is the cane) and has either had or needs double knee replacement.
Click the link. And what kind of dork wears shirts with his initials monogrammed on the pocket? (TNbmf = Ted Nugent, ballistically maximized firepower.)
On the other hand, WhiteManistan is very slowly dying out.
Deaths exceeded births among non-Hispanic white Americans for the first time in at least a century, according to new census data, a benchmark that heralds profound demographic change.
The disparity was tiny — only about 12,000 — and was more than made up by a gain of 188,000 as a result of immigration from abroad. But the decrease for the year ending July 1, 2012, coupled with the fact that a majority of births in the United States are now to Hispanic, black and Asian mothers, is further evidence that white Americans will become a minority nationwide within about three decades …
Nationally, said Kenneth M. Johnson, the senior demographer at the Carsey Institute, a research center based at the University of New Hampshire, “the onset of natural decrease between 2011 and 2012 was not anticipated.??? He attributed the precipitous shift in part to the recession, adding that “the growing number of older non-Hispanic whites, which will accelerate rapidly as the baby boom ages, guarantees that non-Hispanic white natural decrease will be a significant part of the nation’s demographic future.???
But fear of the non-white man in the White House made them vote for the very people whose economic policies (how many red states have decided to fight Obamacare) make their “natural decrease” to increase.
Socialism, tyranny! Over our dead bodies!
Trivia: Clicking on the WhiteManistan link is an easy way to see Google summarize the art and pictures of the blog. It’s an amusing idiosyncratic collection of modern Americana and lethal trinkets.
Question for readers: Should I change the name of the blog? Escape from WhiteManistan? Culture of Lickspittle?
Life in the US is increasingly impoverished and desperate for tens, even hundreds, of millions of people. The economy is shifting rapidly to one that caters to plutocracy. Plus the low level mass business where people still need food and life necessary sundries that can be bought by government subsidy. And, of course, economical pay-as-you-go smartphone plans.
You retain the freedom to high-end shop. This is guaranteed. And so one would expect premier goods to become increasingly bizarre and alienating.
And so it is with today’s “innovation,” behold the 27k smart rifle with vanity social networking included (no link, an “endless load” site):
AUSTIN, Texas — A new company in Texas is selling a precision rifle with a unique technology that allows even an inexperienced shooter to hit a target 10 football fields away. The price tag is a staggering $27,500 …
The TrackingPoint rifles, which are Wi-Fi enabled and have a color display so users can post videos of their shots on Facebook or YouTube, started shipping in May. Schauble said his company is on track to sell as many as 500 of them this year, to clients that he describes as “high net worth hunters” who want to kill big game at long range.
It is said to have set the world record for taking down a “wildebeast” ten football fields away.
For that special wealthy total dickhead in WhiteManistan.
A Texas woman has been arrested in connection with the mailing of three letters containing a form of the poison ricin to President Obama, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg and the director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, federal authorities said.
Shannon Rogers Guess Richardson of New Boston, Texas, originally called the Federal Bureau of Investigation claiming that her husband had sent the letters, officials said. The investigators found that she had sent the letters herself, they said.
Richardson is an actress with minor roles on television shows like The Walking Dead and the Vampire Diaries, and was arrested in Arkansas on charges that will be filed Friday afternoon …
From her Facebook page, did not like husband or the president, apparently.
It’s been obvious for a long long time WhiteManistan, the Republican Party, and all the Ted Nugent-ized people operate with punishment toward those deemed their lessers always in mind.
Medicaid rejectionism will deny health coverage to roughly 3.6 million Americans, with essentially all of the victims living near or below the poverty line. And since past experience shows that Medicaid expansion is associated with significant declines in mortality, this would mean a lot of avoidable deaths: about 19,000 a year, the study estimated.
Just think about this for a minute. It’s one thing when politicians refuse to spend money helping the poor and vulnerable; that’s just business as usual. But here we have a case in which politicians are, in effect, spending large sums, in the form of rejected aid, not to help the poor but to hurt them …
[Republican] spitefulness appears to override all other considerations. And millions of Americans will pay the price.
“What it might do, however, is drive home to lower-income voters — many of them nonwhite — just how little the G.O.P. cares about their well-being, and reinforce the already strong Democratic advantage among Latinos, in particular,” he adds.
Cold Civil War 2, hatred of the black President and the neo-Confederacy roll on.
These bizarre [ricin mailing] culprits are merely the dull tip of the spear when it comes to the gun-crazed individuals who live among us. The NRA has morphed from an organization that taught firearm safety and responsible gun ownership into a lobbying group for the armaments industry. Their heartless hysteria after the Newtown child slaughter caused gullible gun owners to panic that their rights were in jeopardy, especially after the NRA participated in spreading the false rumor that there was a government plot to buy up the civilian supply of ammunition after a media-induced run on bullets created a shortage.
Unable to see through Fox News and hate-radio propaganda that closing gun-show loopholes will lead to Black Hawk helicopters over Shreveport, these angry citizens live in fear of their own government and walk around with violent fantasies floating through their fevered minds. If you are told all day by right-wing media that you are at war with your government over your basic freedoms, then sending a toxin-laden letter to the chief executive doesn’t make you a terrorist. In your own mind, it makes you a patriot …
So, when a person who watches Fox News bile all day finally goes insane with paranoia, why should it be surprising when that person decides to take action against their government and its officials.
The entirety of the US mainstream media has also not touched the most obvious but most unpleasant fact in the ricin mailing fad.
President Barack Obama is the first president in US history to get not just one, but three ricin letters. In fact, he’s probably the only person in American history to have ever been mailed three poison letters within less than 60 days.
And he just happens to be the first African American president.
Just a coincidence. Yup.
And now you’ve read the first person to point it out.
First music video with ricin mail in it, ever. That’s worth something. Factual and timely, too.
Tommorrow: Bean-Pounding Blues, the song.
Meanwhile, the only ricin and domestic trouble soap opera, ever, that involved sending a poison letter to the president, continues:
There are still no arrests in the ricin investigation in East Texas, but an attorney for a man whose home has been searched by the FBI is speaking out.
FBI agents first searched the home of Nathan and Shannon Richardson in connection with the mailing of ricin-tainted letters to President Obama, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the Mayor’s gun control group in Washington D.C.
Attorney John Delk says his client Nathan Richardson approached him about getting a divorce a year before the FBI searched the couple’s house.
Richardson’s wife reportedly alerted authorities to suspected ricin in the couple’s New Boston home.
“We have very good reason to believe it was a setup,” said Delk.
One feels a bit sorry for the FBI men who have to sort it. They know the investigation of such trivial pests is a huge waste of time and money, but necessary procedure because of the bed we’ve made for ourselves over the last decade.
It’s unlikely you’ll ever meet any of these para-police officers, wearing their bright orange vests and ID tags. But if you’re one of the millions of travelers who fly into Chicago every year, you might want to thank them — because they’re helping the FBI, Transportation Security Administration and other authorities protect you from terrorists.
Another in the occasional media favorite: exaggerating the hobbies/roles of middle-aged white guys in service to the nation. The silver-lining: They’re not home much to embarrass their kids.
Someone tell them the war on terror’s kinda over.
Modern day equivalent of the middle-aged white guys who always wanted to use their metal detectors on the grounds of the community swimming pool after hours.
