This week in 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.
Inclusion of a diary does not necessarily indicate my agreement or endorsement of its contents.
At Eclectablog of Michigan, LOLGOP writes—One Republican lying is a joke, all Republicans lying is a strategy:
We got a preview of the clusterfuganonsense that our politics will descend to if the Supreme Court decides to deny 6.5 million Americans tax credits to buy health insurance on Monday.
After President Obama, in his role as President Obvious, said the Supreme Court shouldn’t have even taken King v. Burwell, Senator John Thune sent out a tweet that was widely mocked but geniunely reflects the GOP’s strategy to place the blame for their intentional gutting of Obamacare on Obama. [...]
When one Republican lies, it’s a joke. But when all Republicans get on the same page and start repeating the same lie, it can be devastatingly effective.
Conservative commitment to calling the Stimulus “the failed Stimulus” helped brand the most successful government intervention in the economy since the New Deal as a disaster even though nearly all economists agree it reduced unemployment and the clean energy revolution sparked by the bill — along with some effective activism by Beyond Coal, as Politico‘s Mike Grunwald explains — has led to more Americans working in the solar industry than in coal. Anti-stimulus propaganda was so effective that Democrats never even mention the bill that helped set us on a path to the best job creation of the century.
Republicans have also effectively smeared Obamacare with absurdly circular arguments and horror stories that have proven to be more stories than horror. Republicans hate Obamacare so much that they nominated the guy who invented it to destroy it? The fact that the ACA is really a conservative plan is betrayed whenever Republicans offer a replacement plan that resembles Obamacare.
You can read excerpts from other progressive state blogs below the orange gerrymander.
At Bleeding Heartland of Iowa, desmoinesdem writes—New bipartisan group will battle "overwhelming influence of big money" in Iowa politics:
A new bipartisan group emerged this week, on a mission "to educate Iowans on the need for meaningful reform to address the issue of money in politics." Two Democrats, two Republicans, and a no-party voter are co-chairing Iowa Pays the Price. The most prominent co-chair is Brad Anderson, who ran President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign in Iowa and was the Democratic nominee for Iowa Secretary of State in 2014. The Republican co-chairs are Franklin County GOP chair Shawn Dietz, who unsuccessfully challenged State Senator Amanda Ragan in 2014, and David Niffenegger, who directed operations for Sam Clovis' 2014 state treasurer campaign. After the jump I've enclosed the full statement on the Iowa Pays the Price launch and more background on Issue One, the organization behind the Iowa project.
Speaking to Catherine Lucey of the Associated Press, Anderson said,
"I cannot tell you how many doors I knocked on in 2014 where voters said they were so tired of the mudslinging that they were going to sit out the election." |
Communications research going back to the 1980s and 1990s has produced mixed evidence on whether negative campaigning on television discourages Americans from voting. My impression is that current opinion among political scientists tends toward the view that negative ads do not depress turnout. However, I suspect the avalanche in outside spending following the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United may have changed the equation, because the relentless attack ads run on television, radio, and social media for many months (rather than just a few weeks before election day).
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Louisiana Voice,
tomaswell writes—
LouisianaVoice reader pens open letter to all 144 members of Louisiana Legislature: asks each, ‘What are you going to do?’
“Jindal Vows to Bankrupt State to Preserve Conservative Credentials”
LEGISLATORS: What are YOU going to do about that?
The state of Louisiana is facing bankruptcy – this was utterly predictable and almost feels deliberate. Read The Shock Doctrine by Naomi [Klein] and you will shocked all right, to see that jindal has pulled off an economic coup that has made Louisiana no more than a Third World economy.
I am addressing this to legislators, because YOU are to blame for the coming collapse of state government. YOU, state representative or senator, put political party, out-of-state organizations and misguided individuals ahead of the people of Louisiana in violation of your oath of office.
You legislators are the only people in the state who have the power to fix the mess you have created. The foolishness we are seeing during this legislative session shows that many of you are still abdicating any semblance of responsibility for the common good for our citizens.
A majority of you have played along with Jindal’s disastrous fiscal policies for your own selfish reasons. Just a few of you have stood boldly and courageously in opposition from the beginning of this reign of (t)error. You have allowed an annual fiscal mess that has created a huge corporate welfare state and left us with crippling cuts to government agencies that serve our citizens. Every one of you should hang your head in shame for what you have done to the people of the state you were elected to represent.
You chose to allow us to truly suffer the consequences of Jindal’s sociopathic, narcissistic, self-serving ambition. He is finally about to be honest about running for president, and the ever-absent governor will be completely MIA in the state that is paying his salary. Just as he did when he took his salary as a congressman while running for governor. Forgot about that, didn’t you? Jindal is a serial thief via payroll fraud.
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Cottonmouth of Mississippi,
Ryan Brown writes—
Empowering Opponents of Public Education:
In the Haley Barbour years, Mississippi Republicans at least voiced some support for public education. Even then-Lt. Governor Phil Bryant campaigned on the promise that he would always fully fund the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP.) As anyone who has observed the Republicans' shameless tactics to undermine Initiative 42 can tell you, Republican support for public schools has come completely unraveled over the past several years. What's changed?
Many Republicans have probably just started showing their true colors. For years, they would voice support for MAEP while voting to under-fund it. There were a few who really did support public education - mainly from districts with strong public schools, such as Lafayette, DeSoto, Madison, and Rankin counties. Their reversal seems to have been dictated by outside pressure rather than personal philosophy or the interests of their constituents.
Thanks to financial disclosures posted on the Secretary of State's website, we can start to get a picture of who is applying that pressure. A campaign finance report for an anti-public education political action committee, Empower PAC, shows some disturbing information about our elected officials' stances on public education. We already know that Republicans are not supporters of public education, and the information in this report further backs that up.
Between January 1 to April 30, 2015, this PAC received nearly $365,000 in donations from anti-public education forces such as state House candidate Joel Bomgaars of Madison and the Mississippi Federation for Children PAC, an ALEC-aligned organization, which is oddly based in Virginia. Who is the Federation for Children, you might ask?
The national organization is chaired by former Michigan Republican Party Chair Betsy DeVos. Her husband, Richard, unsuccessfully ran for governor of Michigan in 2006, as a Republican, while spending $35 million of his own money on the race. For Mississippi's purposes, the Chairman of the Mississippi Federation for Children PAC is Greg Brock, a person who is listed with a Washington, DC, address. To give you a sense of his feelings on public education, he led an unsuccessful school voucher initiative in 2000. The DeVos family, as well as billionaires Alice and Jim Walton of Walmart, have poured a tremendous amount of money into anti-public education efforts in recent years. That money is now seeping into Mississippi politics.
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The Seminole Democrat of Florida,
Vin Fl writes—
FL GOP kills Medicaid AND refuses to stop their $8 gold packages. HERE'S WHAT WE DO:
The GOP teabagger-ruled Fl House refused a million people in florida the ability to get health insurance by killing the Medicaid expansion. They all complained about getting people dependent on "government handouts".
So in other words, they are saying don't be like them. They made NO change to their sweet, completely taxpayer-funded platinum-package that costs you and I $1 million per month!
The cost of this to the legislators, governor, cabinet and 17,589 select people in state government is a lousy $30 a month for a family, and $8 a month for an individual! It is the most generous in the US.
After the outrage, the House did agree to raise their cost to a whopping $180 a month per family and $50 for an individual. However, the governor, cabinet and those thousands of staff still got to keep the $8 dollar meal.
Unfortunately, the state average for joe schmo is not quite as good. He pays $1347.00 PER MONTH! And he at least is able to get a plan.
My own idiot state rep, R-Jason Brodeur, was offended that anyone would want to take away his benefits that we generously provide him. He works for it! Adding guns to college campuses and trying to make it a lot easier for adoption agencies to discriminate is apparently a lot of work.
I am calling out our Democratic party to do something USEFUL for a change in 2016. I am talking about an amendment to our state Constitution to force the governor, his staff, and the legislators and their staff to pay insurance rates to levels that match the national average until the gap is closed!
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Burnt Orange Report of Texas,
Joe Deshotel writes—
Kids Teaching Adults Civility: That Other McKinney Incident:
McKinney, Texas has been called one of the greatest cities to live in America. After a week of unrelated and unflattering national headlines, it may be time to add an asterisk to that distinction. The fine print might include “depending on your identity.”
Just before the outrage was sparked over the video showing former McKinney officer Eric Casebolt unnecessarily escalating a situation that was fueled by racial bias, middle schoolers in McKinney were told they could not wear “Gay O.K.” shirts in support of their friend who had become a target of bullies at their school. [...]
When students stood up for the equal treatment, love and tolerance of their friend experiencing hateful bullying, they should have been encouraged not disciplined. What is most troubling is that the kids made the shirts only after reporting the abuse to the school’s Vice Principal who was said to have mocked the 7th grader instead of addressing the mistreatment. Luckily, community response has prompted the district to perform its own review in which they have already acknowledged that the kids were wrongfully punished.
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Blue Oregon,
Nick Abraham writes—
The Oregonian Editorial Board is the albatross around the state's neck:
The Oregonian is a paper divided. On the one hand are investigators like Rob Davis who continue the paper’s tradition of hard hitting stories on crucial issues, one that includes 6 Pulitzers since 1999. On the other, the Oregonian Editorial Board, which is quickly sinking the paper’s credibility by pushing a deeply anti-environment agenda out of step with its readership.
This year alone, the Oregonian has published 17 editorials deriding everything from getting the state off heavily polluting coal energy, electric vehicles and even a baffling attack on the state’s 40 year old bottle bill. Likewise they’ve pushed and even celebrated dangerous fossil fuel projects; everything from coal export terminals to the propane facility planned (and rejected) for Portland.
Most recently, they exasperated readers with their 18th anti-clean fuels editorial in 2 years. This bill has been passed by the legislature, signed by the governor and companies’ are already making $200 million clean fuel investments in Oregon based on it. The Oregonian’s obsession with this bill is telling of their deeply bent agenda.
Earlier this year, when the board set its 2015 editorial agenda, one of the top requests was for more stories on the environment and climate change. The paper’s bizarre answer managed to both mislead and dismiss its readership.
“Readers responded with scores of online comments and dozens of emails and letters to the editor, many of which urged us to focus on climate change…these readers will be disappointed when our agenda appears next month.” ... “It requires either profound myopia or incredible arrogance to pretend that any policy adopted by Oregon lawmakers will have a meaningful effect on the earth's temperature.” |
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The Progressive Pulse of North Carolina,
Rob Schofield writes—
Today’s marriage discrimination vote: Four cowardly minutes:
Today’s vote in the North Carolina House of Representatives to override Gov. Pat McCrory’s veto of Senate Bill 2 — lawmakers’ latest effort to preserve some precious shreds of hate and discrimination in state marriage law — was absurd and offensive for a number of reasons.
There was the substance of the new law that will surely cost the state boatloads of money to defend against constitutional challenges — challenges that will almost certainly prevail.
There was the hypocrisy of the bill sponsors and defenders — all of whom somehow developed a passion for “religious freedom” of magistrates despite having voted countless times themselves without blinking an eye to impose duties on other public officials that could quite conceivably violate those other officials’ “religious beliefs.”
If there was a most outrageous and offensive aspect of today’s developments, however, it was not the substance of the legislation but the ridiculous “process” that House leaders employed to do their dirty deed.
Two-hundred and forty seconds. That’s how long it took for House leaders to run their little orchestrated kangaroo session.
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Rural and Progressive of Georgia,
Katherine Helms Cummings writes—
The language of love:
Conservative Christian leader Franklin Graham, took to Facebook to announce he would move the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s money out of Wells Fargo to “fight the tide of moral decay that is being crammed down our throats by big business, the media, and the gay & lesbian community.” [...]
I’d sure like to know who did the homework on finding a new bank for stashing Graham’s cash. On Monday, Graham announced that the association bearing his father’s name is moving its money to BB&T.
Ooops. BB&T sponsors a Gay Pride parade in Miami. The bank even set up a makeshift chapel in their South Beach branch for a wedding ceremony legally uniting two men who have been together for 55 years.
Graham did mention, while announcing that BB&T is his newly anointed bank, that the organization would save $100,000 a year on fees.
Does this mean if the savings are large enough, it is ok to compromise on “fighting the moral decay” brought on by equality?
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Capital & Main of California,
Bill Raden writes—
New Retirement Ballot Proposal: The Language of Cuts:
The newest front in the battle over the retirement security of California’s public employees opened June 4 with the release of the language for a proposed ballot initiative that would rewrite the state’s constitution to virtually outlaw traditional defined-benefit pension plans for future state and municipal workers.
The measure, dubbed “The Voter Empowerment Act of 2016,” would effectively shift all new public employees from the various defined-benefit plans currently in place to 401(k) plans, beginning in 2019. It would then lock those plans in place by adding the burden of direct voter approval on government employers who want to continue offering traditional pensions after 2019.
The security offered by defined-benefit retirement plans has been typically used by government employers to compete with the private sector in recruiting quality candidates for public workforces.
The measure is being spearheaded by former San Jose mayor Chuck Reed and former San Diego city councilman Carl DeMaio. It follows on the heels of Reed’s abortive attempt to get a pension-cutting measure before California voters in 2014.
That effort foundered over the official title and summary for the ballot initiative released by California Attorney General Kamala Harris, and over a controversy surrounding revelations that the measure had been paid for with $200,000 in seed money by Texas hedge fund billionaire and former Enron executive John Arnold. Reed subsequently sued over the language but lost in court. [...]
The pair unveiled their new measure last Thursday during a telephone conference call in which they described the initiative as a way to enable local jurisdictions to rein in what they called “skyrocketing pension costs” across the state. The proposed law “empowers the state voters” to make adjustments to future pension plans without political interference.
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Democratic Diva of Arizona,
Donna writes—
Well, Whaddya Know, States with the Most Abortion Restrictions Saw the Least Reduction in Abortion!
Associated Press released a survey they did of states that report abortion statistics where they found that while most states saw reductions in their abortion rates, states that passed no restrictions on abortion since 2011 had larger decreases in the number of procedures reported than red states touted by anti-abortion advocates as “pro-life” champions.
Despite anti-choicers passing several abortion restrictions under the bogus premises of “safety” and “informed consent,” Arizona saw a modest decrease in abortions since 2011, less than half the national average.
Preliminary statistics from the Arizona Department of Health Services for 2014 show Arizona saw a 5 percent decline in abortions since 2011, from 13,606 abortions in 2011 to 12,900 last year.
That compares with a 12 percent decline nationally since 2010, according to the AP survey of all 45 states where abortion reporting is required. Arizona changed its reporting requirements in 2010, so figures before 2011 are not comparable.
Abortion rights advocates say the small drop in Arizona compared with many other states shows that women are not dissuaded from having an abortion once they have made up their mind.
“As you’ve seen across the country, what it doesn’t seem to be related to, at least not very much, are these draconian regulations that state Legislatures attempt to put in place,” said Jodi Liggett, director of public policy for Planned Parenthood Arizona. “And I think what you’re seeing in Arizona is despite the intentions of the sponsors of these bills, they’re not actually moving the needle very much.” [...]
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Leaving aside the availability of more effective birth control methods, which many experts attribute the continuing decrease in abortions nationwide, the ability of some women Arizona women to travel to New Mexico or California to get abortion care, or to get misoprostol from Mexico, could easily account for a reduction of 700 abortions performed in Arizona in 2014 versus 2011. It’s silly to assume that those abortions simply didn’t happen because they weren’t done here by legal providers. But then, I would never expect wisdom from the forced birth crowd. By the way, this stat doesn’t exactly speak well to the efficacy of all those Crisis Pregnancy Centers that have popped up around the state, does it?
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Progress Illinois,
Ellyn Fortino writes—
Whistleblower Becomes Alleged Victim Of Retaliatory Firing At Nippon Sharyo Plant:
Passenger railcar manufacturer Nippon Sharyo has once again garnered the attention of activists and workers' rights advocates, this time for an alleged retaliatory firing. A former Nippon Sharyo worker says she was let go last week after speaking out about alleged unsafe working conditions and unfair treatment at the company's plant in Rochelle, Illinois.
Back in mid-March, then-Nippon Sharyo worker Jennifer Svenkerud filed a whistleblower discrimination complaint with the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), claiming that she was written up and sent home without pay after speaking to company officials about an alleged fall hazard in the non-unionized facility.
Svenkerud, 42, worked at Nippon Sharyo's Rochelle plant as an interior railcar assembler. Before filing her complaint with OSHA of the U.S. Labor Department, Svenkerud said she was assigned on March 3 to work inside a passenger railcar that lacked handrails and safety boards to prevent falls.
"They had me drilling up into a ceiling, and I had a five-foot drop within about a half an inch from me," she told Progress Illinois. "And we're supposed to have boards there. So I went to my boss to get boards there, and they told me that that was part of my job, and I didn't need the boards."