On this date in 2014, 2015, as well as 2016, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published profiles of Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin, a Christian theocrat who has somehow, in her mad quest to allow religion to be allowed in state schools and government buildings (including having a pastor brought in to anoint furniture in the state legislature with holy oil), inadvertently opened a loophole that allowed a Satanic Temple to build a statue of Baphomet, just to prove a point to her about the separation of church and state. Fallin also oversaw a botched double-execution from the comforts of an Oklahoma City Thunder game, not wanting to answer her cell phone while a man died in agony on her watch. Her administration’s oversight, or more specifically its lack thereof on the oil and gas industries in Oklahoma has been so lax that a state whose only concern for natural disasters used to be tornadoes has allowed unregulated fracking so that they now are getting more frequently hit with earthquakes. That’s not hyperbole, either, at one point in August 2017, Oklahoma had 7 earthquakes within a 28 hour span and the strength of the quakes are intensifying, now reaching up into the high 5s on the Richter scale. That’s what happens after seven years of Fallin leadership. And taxing the wealthy and those energy companies? Ha! Oklahoma last year reported a $1.3 billion (yes, BILLION) budget shortfall. She’s also infamous for trying to shut down all the abortion clinics in her state, signing a ban on minimum wage increases during our greatest time of economic inequality in almost a century, and trying to do away with the entire state Supreme Court for not granting her absolute domain to do as she pleases (like not allowing her to put monuments of the Ten Commandments up on government property). Not that she understands the role of the courts as one of the three branches of government, of course, because she failed to be able to correctly list all three during a 2015 speech. In the meantime, Fallin continues to make Sarah Palin seem perhaps less like white trash by allowing her 28-year-old daughter to live on the grounds of the governor’s mansion in her very own trailer, rent-free and siphoning utilities. Mary Fallin is so utterly clueless that she went on CNN in July of 2016 and actually made the ludicrous claim that Donald Trump was “trying to campaign as a racial healer”. Yeah, the guy whose campaign began by saying Mexicans are murderers and rapists, and soon called for a ban on Muslims was trying to unify people of all colors and backgrounds, sure Mary. Only eight days later, she went back on CNN after the release of the 2016 Republican Party Platform, which people on both sides of the aisle recognized as the most anti-LGBT platform the GOP have ever produced (Republicans boasted of this like it was a good thing), but Fallin thought that simply just couldn’t be the case because, “there was a gay person on the committee”. She neglected to mention that the one person on that committee was vocally opposed to every one of those anti-gay measures, and was ignored by the majority. Because of course, that’s just a nagging little detail.
Well, less than a month after we had our last check-in on Gov. Fallin, in October 2016 she actually declared a “Oilfield Prayer Day”, where she no-s***, called for people in her state to ask God for his protection over the oil industry. She then quickly had to correct herself that the prayer was open to people of all faiths, because apparently she didn’t want Satanists to assert their dominance over Oklahoma’s oil and gas industry.
Now in full lame duck status as she winds down the last 15 months of her stint as Oklahoma Governor and facing term limits, Mary Fallin cannot even get her own party, that holds a wide, wide majority in the state legislature, to agree on a budget, admitting that to be “embarrassing”. Her disapproval ratings place her as the sixth worst governor in the country, behind such luminaries as Sam Brownback, Rick Snyder, and Chris Christie, who lowered the bar by bankrupting their state, poisoning their own citizens’ water supply and trying to cover that up, and being an utterly corrupt, unflinching ***hole, respectively. It’s only thanks to them being such gentlemen and lowering the bar for her that she’s not relatively the worst in her citizens’ eyes.