This week at progressive state blogs is designed specifically to focus attention on the writing and analysis of people focused on their home turf. Let me know via comments or Kosmail if you have a favorite state- or city-based blog you think I should be watching. Here is the March 11 edition. Inclusion of a blog post does not necessarily indicate my agreement with—or endorsement of—its contents.
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Cory Allen Heidelberger at Dakota Free Press writes—[S.D.'s] Daugaard Vetoes Guns in Capitol, Permitless Concealed Carry, Three Other Bills:
Governor Dennis Daugaard scratched his veto itch today. Stricken by the Governor’s pen today were these five bills:
House Bill 1156: This bill would have allowed individuals with enhanced concealed pistol permits to carry their firearms in the Capitol. In his veto message, Governor Daugaard says the Highway Patrol provides sufficient security in the Capitol and far better security than individuals who take one eight-hour training course to get an enhanced concealed pistol permit:
During the legislative session, meaningful debates among the public and legislators are frequent and oftentimes passionate. Where emotions can run high, it is important to be protected by people who are routinely trained to manage dangerous situations. Law enforcement training focuses on knowing when to pull the trigger—and when not to. Our law enforcement officers are uniquely able to protect the public, and I believe this bill would complicate that work [Gov. Dennis Daugaard, veto message on HB 1156, 2017.03.17].
House Bill 1072: This bill would have repealed the requirement to get a permit to carry a concealed pistol. Governor and NRA member Daugaard says our current permit requirements have stopped no lawful gun owners from exercising their Second Amendment rights but have kept permits out of the hands of hundreds of individuals not qualified to carry. The Governor rebuts absolutists by citing Justice Antonin Scalia:
As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller: “There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms. Of course the right was not unlimited, just as the First Amendment’s right of free speech was not.” As an example of a lawful limitation Justice Scalia states that “prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment…” [Gov. Dennis Daugaard, veto message on HB 1072, 2017.03.17].
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A staffer at Colorado Pols writes Bipartisan Resolve To Defend Marijuana Proves Sessions’ Folly:
As Brian Heuberger reported for the Colorado Statesman this week, there may be Republicans in Colorado willing to publicly support parts of the new administration’s agenda–but on the subject of Colorado’s legal marijuana industry, which is under direct threat from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, there is no daylight between Colorado Republicans and Democrats:
With U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions hinting that the Trump administration might intensify the enforcement of federal marijuana laws, Colorado leaders from both sides of the aisle have come to the defense of the state’s legal marijuana industry in an uncommon show of solidarity in what many consider to be divisive political times of unmatched proportion.
High-level Colorado politicians like Republican U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner and Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper have both publicly defended what has become a lucrative recreational marijuana industry for the state. And many other state officials have joined them in contending that Colorado has a constitutional right to legalize marijuana and that the regulations established by the state have been statistically proven to have been effective so far. [...]
The reason why you have all of these public officials in both parties standing shoulder-to-shoulder on marijuana, despite the fact that most of them opposed legalization to begin with, is that the experience of legalized marijuana in Colorado has rendered the issue moot here. Public support has grown, not declined, since Colorado led the way into a legalization trend that has now grown to numerous states—including all-important California, the most populous state in the nation.
Lisa Sorg at The Progressive Pulse of North Carolina writes—With a $9 million bid, Avangrid wins offshore wind farm lease near Kitty Hawk:
This is what $9 million will buy: The historic Powerhouse Square on West Street in Raleigh. More than 11,000 iPhones. Seven heart transplants. Three weekend trips to Mar-a- Lago for President Trump. And 122,405 acres of ocean and its floor off the North Carolina coast.
The Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management today held a lease sale for the acreage, which will be used for a wind farm 27.5 miles east of Kitty Hawk. The online bidding began Thursday morning at $244,000. By 4 p.m., after 17 rounds, four companies had dwindled to one winner: Avangrid, with a bid of $9,066,650. The federal government will still own the acreage, but Avangrid will have the exclusive rights to develop wind energy there.
Avangrid, a US subsidiary of the Spanish company Iberdrola, also operates the onshore Amazon Wind Farm near Elizabeth City.
If fully developed, the lease area potentially could generate 1,486 megawatts, enough to power a half-million homes.
However, construction and permitting could take more than 20 years. Before it’s built, the project must go through a site assessment plan, a construction and operations plan, and an environmental review.
Pandora at Blue Delaware writes—The “Culture” In The Marine Scandal Exists Because It’s Allowed To:
It really is that simple, and it applies to all of our armed services branches. Think about it. What is the mission when new recruits show up? What is the point of boot camp? The mission and the point is to create uniform behavior, to train future servicemen/women to follow orders. Not following orders = big trouble. Apparently not in all cases, tho.
The marines could solve this problem if they wanted to. Listening to the testimony yesterday I was struck by how wishy-washy Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Robert B. Neller came across. Here are some of his statements:
“This is a problem with our culture,” Neller responded. “I don’t have a good answer for you. I’m not going to sit here and duck around this thing. I’m not. I’m responsible. I’m the Commandant. I own this, and we’re going to have to change how we see ourselves and how we treat each other. That’s a lame answer, but ma’am, that’s the best I can tell you right now. We’ve got to change, and that’s on me.” [...]
Imagine if the marines treated insubordination or going AWOL the way they’re treating this behavior. Yep, we’re back to rules, and marines are trained to follow orders. Maybe, the Commandant of the Marine Corps could start by issuing an order? Commandants and other higher ups like issuing orders. That’s pretty much a big part of their job. Wringing your hands over this situation won’t accomplish anything – other than letting the behavior continued. Which seems to be the path we’re on.
Bud Cothern at Virginia Blue, writes—Dubious Dave Brat: “500 constituent meetings in the first two years?”
To the Congressman we ask, setting the reality of Trump’s election and the “bitter divide” aside, how exactly did he manage to hold “500 constituent meetings in the first two years?” Given that there are approximately 730 days over this period of time, that would mean Brat spent over two thirds of his days meeting with constituents? Is there any supporting information for those facts? What is being counted? Every time the Congressman goes to his own club meetings in Henrico? Every time he goes to church and meets fellow parishioners? Every time he goes to a sporting game with his kids? Every photo-op with a constituent? He could straighten all of this out by publishing a calendar of dates and times on his Congressional page. He says he is all about transparency. He’s mentioned that several times. Surely his office keeps a calendar of his meetings and this information would be easy to generate. A number of us have asked him to provide this in the past. Where does this 500 number come from? Is it supported by records or is it just Trumpian in character? Like Don the Con, are we seeing a pattern with Brat of bending the truth to another purpose?
If Trump and Brat can ensure that their supporters believe lies and “mis-speaks” spread by them, then their followers may never realize they were fooled by Don the Con or Dubious Dave, and that things may not pan out the way we were told (like healthcare reform or vouchers in our schools). It will always be someone else’s fault (those up in Brat’s grill…or Obama or Paul Ryan or paid protesters). They were working hard and being accessible. Just hear them: if past is prologue, Dubious Dave will have done 1,000 meetings before 2018 comes along and there will be no more signs saying, “where’s Dave”?
charley-on-the-mta at Blue Mass Group writes—Respect for the ACA:
Over 7 years the Affordable Care Act took its hits. Its passage cost the Democrats their majorities in 2010. It’s been dinged and sabotaged by the likes of Marco Rubio. The GOP voted countless times to repeal it. And even Bernie Sanders — to be sure, a good guy who always voted to increase coverage — says to keep our sights on single-payer instead of getting too wrapped up in defending Obamacare.
I’d like to offer some support for those beleaguered politicians, staffers, activists and other “stakeholders” who made the ACA happen in the first place. It was hard work. I don’t think anyone — certainly not those of us on the left — ever thought it was going to make everything perfect. It included, as even its proponents acknowledged, some pretty bitter pills: The continuation of the private insurance system. The personal mandate. This wasn’t the kind of cradle-to-grave health care that one would envision from scratch.
It was, expressly, a kluge that could get through a very big-tent, very fractious Democratic Congress in 2010; made politically palatable (supposedly) by being minimally disruptive to the health insurance people already had. It was based on the Massachusetts plan, which was designed to appeal to a moderate-conservative Republican governor. When it went national, even this accommodation was politically perilous: The bill barely survived passage, and many Democrats did not survive the subsequent elections.
But for all its shortcomings, have we noticed that the Overton window changed drastically? That for all their criticisms, people really don’t want to go back to what was the norm, pre-ACA? And that Republicans were prepared only to smash the whole thing, not to actually improve upon it.
Watch the Republicans flounder, with their catastrophic CBO score of 24 million losing coverage. You knew this was going to happen, because every criticism they ever offered was shallow, opportunistic and unrealistic. [...]
countrycat at Left in Alabama writes—State Auditor Jim Zeigler Is Using His Official State Email To Promote His New Book
Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler wants to be governor so bad he can taste it – and can’t resist writing about it. Which is the bigger joke: Jim Zeigler self-publishing a campaign book or being dumb enough to hawk it via an official press release from the State Auditor’s office?
It seems fitting, given Zeigler’s rather erratic behavior at times, that the publisher declined to list it in either the “history” or “fiction” categories, instead placing it in the “Humor” category.
But humor aside, let’s consider the ethics of this press release. For sure, Zeigler didn’t. Even though the Alabama Ethics Guidelines for Public Officials and Employees is a detailed, 24-page document, even someone with a short attention span could surely make it to page 2:
LOLGOP at Eclectablog of Michigan writes—Why liberals can’t stop spreading conservative messages and retweeting Donald Trump:
If you’re a liberal like me, your urge is to say, “Trump promised you something terrific! It’s a terrific kick all the way up your ass.” Or you’ll retweet one of Trump’s bromides about Obamacare killing kitties along with a stinging rebuke about how “terrific” leaving people with cancer at the mercy of insurance CEOs is.
This would be a classic messaging error that the left makes over and over again, according to cognitive scientist George Lakoff.
Every time you repeat your opponent’s frame, you strengthen it in voters’ minds — even if you negate it. [...]
… over and over you’ll hear liberals make arguments like, “Paul Ryan says the ACA is in a death spiral. Not true!” These words not only reinforce the right’s frame, they do it before you even get to the argument you really want to make, “The ACA is healthy and more Americans than ever have reliable insurance they can count on.”
Our rebuttals are doing the right’s dirty work.
I’ve always wondered by the left loves to repeat the right’s arguments and it was the first question I asked George Lakoff when I had the chance to speak to him. And the answer comes down to how liberals see the world — as a logic problem that just needs to be neatly solved. [...]
Andrea Greer at Burnt Orange Report of Texas writes—Is Supplying Lotion and Facial Tissue Aiding and Abetting?
Representative Jessica Farrar of Houston has gone full-tilt Maxine Waters, and it is glorious.
Rep. Farrar is done with bills designed to regulate abortion out of existence.
D-u-n done.
Exhibit A: HB 4260, filed today.
HB 4260 addresses “the regulation of men’s health and safety; creating a civil penalty for unregulated masturbatory emissions.”
Men of Texas, do you want a colonoscopy? A vasectomy? Viagra? Well, hold your horses until your doc can give you a pamphlet containing:
scientific information that must be verified and supported by research that is recognized as medically accurate, objective, and complete by the National Institutes of Health and affiliated organizations. The booklet must contain medical information related to the benefits and concerns of a man seeking a vasectomy, Viagra prescription, or a colonoscopy. The booklet must contain artistic illustrations of each procedure.
The bill’s author did not specify medium or style, so we suggest an artist who can illustrate the pamphlet in the free and easy style of the 70s-era Joy of Sex.
Willykay at Show Me Progress of Missouri writes—A portrait of willful ignorance:
We all know that newbie Governor Greitens has been trying to deal with a dire budget situation occaisoned by a corporate tax cut enacted in 2015 that ended up slashing incoming revenue by $155 million. Chickens are coming home to roost, you reap what you sow & etc., etc.
State Republicans, however, who were adamant that the corporate tax cut wouldn’t hurt a bit and was, in fact, necessary to stimulate growth, are now pretending that they didn’t know how distressed chickens behave, or, alternatively, that they just didn’t know what they were sowing:
“We had bad information when we passed that bill,” House Budget Committee Chairman Scott Fitzpatrick told The Associated Press. “I think if we’d have had the correct information, we wouldn’t have passed it.”
But somehow Democrats in the legislature knew that no good would come from fact-free tax cutting – and they tried to tell the GOP ideologues in the Assembly:
Democratic senators who spoke against the bill said they worried it would threaten Missouri’s excellent credit rating and reduce state funds for education.
“We can’t afford to do a tax cut at this level,” said Senator Jolie Justus, speaking on the Senate floor, citing services that she said were already severely underfunded. “We are on the wrong track.”
Democratic Governor Nixon also knew. He called the bill “ill-conceived,” and correctly vetoed it. But nobody on the Republican side was listening. The determined Republican legislative majority covered their ears and passed the tax-cut over Nixon’s veto.
Dan Burns at MN Progressive Project writes—Trump isn’t killing Meals on Wheels. But that’s not the point:
Something directly stating or at least very strongly implying that the Trump budget proposal, if passed, would end the Meals on Wheels program for seniors was a common sight on the Internet, yesterday. Per Snopes and others, that’s not accurate. Only a small amount of the program’s funding, it varies from place to place but apparently always less than 5%, comes from the Community Development Block Grant program that the Trump budget would eliminate. With need rising, this is certainly not the time to be considering any cuts from any source; quite the contrary. But most of the extraordinarily righteous work that Meals on Wheels does is not at immediate risk.
This brings us to the wide and fuzzy line between political hyperbole and outright falsehood. I suppose that headlines like “Trump would end funding for Meals on Wheels” or “Trump wants to starve seniors,” are on that line, at best. (Those aren’t real-world examples, just generalizations of what I’ve seen. They‘re not outright false. Federal funding for Meals on Wheels from CDBG would end, and the sociopathic Trump doesn‘t care if people are malnourished, except insofar as it might hurt him politically.) But the Trump proposal is, on the whole, indeed a savage assault, especially on the vulnerable.
Given the critical need to stop Pr*sident Trump and his vile minions, this is not the time to get hung up on prim niceties when making important points. I generally try to be a little more careful in my own blogging. But that doesn’t mean that that’s always the way to go. I don’t see a need to leave useful attention-drawing tactics aside, given what’s at stake. The other side certainly doesn’t. Quite the contrary.
AZ Blue Meanie at Blog for Arizona writes—AZ Supreme Court unanimously upholds Prop. 206:
The Arizona Supreme Court unanimously ruled against a challenge brought by our corporate overlords in the Chamber of Commerce organizations to the voter-approved Prop. 206, the minimum wage initiative, raising the state’s minimum wage and providing for paid time off regulations. The Arizona Capitol Times (subscription required) reports, Supreme Court upholds minimum wage law:
The justices rejected arguments by a group of plaintiffs, led by the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, that Proposition 206 led to an unconstitutional mandate for the government to spend money. Attorneys for the chamber argued that expenses caused by Prop. 206, which raised the minimum wage to $10 per hour on January 1, violated the Arizona Constitution’s revenue-source rule.
Adopted in 2004, the rule requires ballot initiatives to identify funding sources for any new government spending. [...]
The Chamber of Commerce organizations will now double-down on a slate of bills they have before the Arizona legislature to make your constitutional right to enact laws by citizen initiative virtually impossible to do by erecting new barriers and requirements to exercising your constitutional right. Focus on defeating these bills already approved in the Arizona House:
HB 2404, sponsored by Rep. Vince Leach, R-SaddleBrooke, would effectively eliminate the ability of groups to use paid circulators by prohibiting payment by the number of signatures gathered. Paid circulators would still be allowed — but only if compensated on an hourly or other basis. But that removes any incentive for circulators to gather as many signatures as possible. [...]