<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" (Permanent soundtrack to this recurring feature...)      Welcome back to our weekly review of what&amp;#039;s going on in the several states, where, as we know, all the real work of governmentin&amp;#039; gits done, and where many people are warming up in the bullpen for when Darrell Issa finally runs out of Crazee and they need a fresh arm. We begin in North Carolina, where the state legislature this week protected the public purse by telling very old people that there would be no money for them, even though they were sterilized in the last century, back when North Carolina was run by racist morons who ramped up their program long after the rest of the country realized just how horrible it was. You see, you start compensatin&amp;#039;, well, then, shuckins, y&amp;#039;all be compensatin&amp;#039; for the rest of your born days.... &amp;quot;If you could lay the issue to rest, it might be one thing. But I&amp;#039;m not so sure it would lay the issue at rest because if you start compensating people who have been &amp;#039;victimized&amp;#039; by past history, I don&amp;#039;t know where that would end,&amp;quot; Republican Sen. Austin Allran said. Republican Sen. Don East said last week would not change anything. &amp;quot;You just can&amp;#039;t rewrite history. It was a sorry time in this country,&amp;quot; East said. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m so sorry it happened, but throwing money don&amp;#039;t change it, don&amp;#039;t make it go away. It still happened.&amp;quot; Since Rep. East very likely still has his balls, I don&amp;#039;t see how he&amp;#039;s an expert in what&amp;#039;s proper to do for the folks whose balls the state took away. Just sayin&amp;#039;. Good thing this didn&amp;#039;t come up in Michigan, because the struggle to find appropriate euphemisms might have tied up the state government for days. After last week&amp;#039;s nonsense, the uproar over what words ladies can use while referring to their ladyparts while speaking in the state&amp;#039;s legislature continues apace. Rep. Wayne Schmidt (R-Cretaceous) decided that, dammit, there just hadn&amp;#039;t been enough sexist belittlin&amp;#039; done yet: &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like giving a kid a timeout for a day...You know, hey, timeout, you wanna comment too far, you spoke your piece. We&amp;#039;re gonna let these other people have their dissenting comments, and then we&amp;#039;ll get back to business.&amp;quot; If you&amp;#039;re keeping score at home, Rep. Schmidt now has declared himself opposed to women speaking about va-jay-jays in the legislature, but in favor of college kids packing on campus. The People&amp;#039;s Business! Wandering down south again, while watching our back in case angry Spartans are taking aim, we find ourselves in Alabama, where they&amp;#039;re still trying to figure out how to make the Let The Crops Rot In The Fields Law of 2012 work, and now they have to square it with the president&amp;#039;s new immigration policy, and that&amp;#039;s making some heads go boom: State Sen. Scott Beason, R-Gardendale, has led the charge over the past two years to ensure a tough immigration law in Alabama. He said Friday&amp;#039;s move disregards federal law. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t see how a president of either party can just ignore what is current law. You can&amp;#039;t just change the law because the president says so.... You just can&amp;#039;t make current law null and void,&amp;quot; Beason said. &amp;quot;Of course I&amp;#039;m disappointed he is trying to grant amnesty to folks that are in the state and in the country illegally. Regardless of what he says, it does not just deal with young people.&amp;quot; Actually, Sparky, yes, it does. I am sorry, however, that Senator Beason apparently slept through the first eight years of the current decade. Let&amp;#039;s leave them to keep trying to figure out the whole mess and take the Atchison and Topeka... (Hey, where&amp;#039;s Santa Fe?) (In New Mexico! I kill myself. Really, I do.) ...on over to Missouri, where I said, &amp;quot;Show me,&amp;quot; and they did. They showed me a single piece of legislation that must have arrived on the governor&amp;#039;s desk by freight car: Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon vetoed legislation Wednesday that sought to discourage energy investment in Iran, increase penalties for harming service dogs and change a variety of other laws touching on everything from 911 sales taxes to disabled parking spots. Nixon said he spiked the bill not because he objected to the merits of any particular provision, but because he believed the sheer quantity of different topics violated the state constitution. On top of that, Nixon said, the bill&amp;#039;s original purpose was so dramatically altered that it violated the constitution.In a letter to lawmakers explaining his veto, the governor described the legislation as a &amp;quot;hodgepodge of unrelated matters&amp;quot; rolled into a single bill. (&amp;quot;A hodgepodge of unrelated matters&amp;quot;? Is he sure the legislature didn&amp;#039;t just pass a blog?) I mean, poor Governor Nixon. The guy needs a stepladder to see over this thing in order to say to his staff, &amp;quot;Christ, find me the veto stamp and see if my kids are under there somewhere.&amp;quot; Rep. Craig Redmon, who sponsored the legislation, acknowledged that amendments from colleagues widened the scope of the bill. Yet Redmon said he was disappointed that Nixon vetoed it. &amp;quot;Yeah, maybe it&amp;#039;s not exactly germane _ germane gets pretty fuzzy there at the end of the session,&amp;quot; said Redmon, R-Canton. I suspect the same can be said of many Missouri legislators. We manage (barely) to squeeze through the window of the governor&amp;#039;s office so we can pump the old handcar up the line into Kansas, where our old friend Kris (Papers, Please) Kobach is still Secretary of State, still wondering why his old pal Willard Romney doesn&amp;#039;t call much any more, and still making the lives of ordinary people harder than they have to be. The issue on which Kobach can screw with people this time is about challenges to people who want to be on the ballot for the state legislature. Another highly contested case was filed by Tom Witt, executive director for the Kansas Equality Coalition, objecting to having Rep. Jan Pauls, a Hutchinson Democrat, listed as a candidate in the 102nd House District. She and the group have clashed over issues such as same-sex marriage and greater protections against discrimination for gays and lesbians. Pauls represented the district for more than two decades before she was drawn out of it by the judges. So in order to stay in the district, she listed a former church that she and her husband have owned since 2003 as her new home. Witt argued that based on local records and city ordinances, the former church can&amp;#039;t be a legal residence, making Pauls&amp;#039; filing for re-election invalid. Pauls disputed that argument. She acknowledged that she&amp;#039;s not fully moved into the former church, but she said she has furniture and appliances in the church, is staying there overnight and is receiving mail at the address. Unless Ms. Pauls is doing an impromptu performance of &amp;quot;Alice&amp;#039;s Restaurant&amp;quot; for the folks, I think her story&amp;#039;s a crock. (Home is where your microwave is?) But I&amp;#039;m not Kris Kobach, guardian of democracy, and lovesick former surrogate. Seeking relief from the low, flat heat of the Great Plains, we trek Lewis-and-Clarkishly west and north, to the cool piney forests of Oregon, where the only things in heat, apparently, are the state legislators: Wingard, 39, denied giving alcohol to anyone under 21 and said their sexual relationship did not involve the workplace. But he acknowledged last week that in &amp;quot;hindsight, I should not have entered into the relationship.&amp;quot;  (And the senator, while insisting he was not intoxicated, could not explain his nudity. RIP, WKRP.) This guy has been quite the public show from the minute he hit the stage.... But he was also a controversial figure from the start. In his first legislative race, in 2008, he acknowledged that he had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of hitting his son in the head with a screwdriver. Well, if he&amp;#039;s moved on from hitting his own children with screwdrivers to (allegedly) merely serving them to underage staffers, I&amp;#039;d say he&amp;#039;s some making real progress here. Crossing briefly over the mountains and into Montana, we check in with Denny Rehberg, senatorial candidate and formerly the blog&amp;#039;s favorite American politician. A couple of weeks ago, Denny got into the grill of the head of the EPA, saying he&amp;#039;d had enough, dammit, of those EPA drones who were spying on him and his fellow rugged outdoorsmen as they went about the business of being rugged outdoors. Except, of course, well... In a statement issued by his office Tuesday, Rehberg acknowledged there aren&amp;#039;t any drones spying on farms and ranches to enforce the Clean Water Act. Rehberg&amp;#039;s staff blamed President Barack Obama for the mix-up. &amp;quot;The Obama Administration rarely reveals its secretive plans to anyone but its closest allies. Since Denny doesn&amp;#039;t vote with the President 95 percent of the time, he must often rely on news reports and constituent input,&amp;quot; wrote Jed Link, Rehberg&amp;#039;s spokesman. &amp;quot;In this case, Denny heard from concerned Montanans, saw reports in the media and took the responsible first step - asking the EPA about it.&amp;quot; So, some guy at the bait shop got drunk one night and mistook a Great Blue Heron for a surveillance drone, took a couple of potshots at it that scared the hell out of a guy walking his dog a half a mile away, and then told Denny about it the next morning over the worm counter and Denny took it all the way to the top. He&amp;#039;s now embarrassed because the president didn&amp;#039;t fulfill his constitutionally mandated obligation to keep Denny from looking like a dumbass in public. This is your democracy. America. Cherish it. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a14520/north-carolina-eugenics-victims-9905077/>