Now that two of the three branches of the Federal Government have fallen under the depraved spell of the New American Socialist Regime, it’s up to the states – and their spunky conservative residents – to take things into their own patriotic hands.
And boy have they ever.
Here’s a patriot’s grab-bag from the last couple of weeks:
Louisiana
While the elephant in the room is busy wading ashore, it’s good to see my home state is still able to conduct business as usual:
Persons who have have been qualified to carry concealed weapons should be able to keep them strapped on in a church or temple as a way to enhance security, a House committee said today.
The Committee on the Administration of Criminal Justice voted 8-3 for House Bill 68 by Rep. Henry Burns, R-Shreveport, sending it to more debate on the House floor.
Praise god and pass the ammunition.
Oh, and side note? Even Fox News is now calling bullshit on the Obama-acted-slowly-on-the-oil-spill-so-it’s-just-like-Katrina meme. So I think it’s safe for the rest of us to drop it now, too. That didn’t take long.
Tennessee
…and no, the Nashville flood wasn’t his Katrina either.
In other Tennessee news:
Right-wing extremists who question the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency tried to take on local law enforcement recently — and they seem to have come out on the losing end.
First, a Tennessee man was arrested after walking into his local county courthouse to try to effect a citizen’s arrest of a grand jury foreman who had refused to investigate President Obama’s legitimacy to serve — an encounter partially caught on video. That enraged one Georgia-based member of the far-right OathKeepers group. Responding to a call from an extremist leader, he drove to Tennessee with an AK-47 in a bid to get his comrade released — only to wind up getting arrested himself.
Luckily these “citizen’s” [sic] are working “in mass” [sic]. Otherwise you might mistake them for yokels who’ve never actually read the Constitution and, I dunno, arrest them or something.
Ohio
Samuel Joe the Plumber wins a seat on his county’s Republican committee.
Oklahoma
It’s official: it’s now illegal to be a woman in Oklahoma.
The Oklahoma Legislature voted Tuesday to override the governor’s vetoes of two abortion measures, one of which requires women to undergo an ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the fetus before getting an abortion.
Though other states have passed similar measures requiring women to have ultrasounds, Oklahoma’s law goes further, mandating that a doctor or technician set up the monitor so the woman can see it and describe the heart, limbs and organs of the fetus. No exceptions are made for rape and incest victims.
A second measure passed into law on Tuesday prevents women who have had a disabled baby from suing a doctor for withholding information about birth defects while the child was in the womb [read: it's okay for doctors to not tell expectant mothers about birth defects if they think it would cause them to abort].
…
[Governor] Henry has signed two [other provisions] into law: a measure requiring clinics to post signs stating that a woman cannot be forced to have an abortion, and another making it illegal to have an abortion because of the sex of a child.Two other anti-abortion bills are still working their way through the Legislature and are expected to pass. One would force women to fill out a lengthy questionnaire about their reasons for seeking an abortion; statistics based on the answers would then be posted online. The other restricts insurance coverage for the procedures.
Taken together, the various pieces of legislation would make Oklahoma one of the most prohibitive environments in the United States for women seeking to end a pregnancy, advocates for women and family planning said.
Virginia
Speaking of outlawing women, Virginia Attorney General and End Times warrior Ken Cuccinelli, not content with legalizing sexual profiling in his state, is now on a crusade to ban breasts from his DOJ:
Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli apparently isn’t fond of wardrobe malfunctions, even when Virginia’s state seal is involved.
The seal depicts the Roman goddess Virtus, or virtue, wearing a blue tunic draped over one shoulder, her left breast exposed. But on the new lapel pins Cuccinelli recently handed out to his staff, Virtus’ bosom is covered by an armored breastplate.
When the new design came up at a staff meeting, workers in attendance said Cuccinelli joked that it converts a risqué image into a PG one.
The joke might be on him, said University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato.
“When you ask to be ridiculed, it usually happens. And it will happen here, nationally,” he said. “This is classical art, for goodness’ sake.”
As turned off as he is by tits, though, it’s nothing compared to how he feels about science:
An investigation by Ken Cuccinelli of a climate scientist who was caught up in last year’s “Climate-Gate” flap is being likened to a “witch hunt” — even by global warming skeptics.
South Carolina
Thankfully, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham is focusing on larger questions, such as what rights should be afforded to terrorist suspects:
There seems to be a strong sentiment in Congress that the only constitutional right suspected terrorists have is the right to bear arms.
“I think you’re going too far here,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday. He was speaking in opposition to a bill that would keep people on the F.B.I. terrorist watch list from buying guns and explosives.
Say what?
Yes, if you are on the terrorist watch list, the authorities can keep you from getting on a plane but not from purchasing an AK-47. This makes sense to Congress because, as Graham accurately pointed out, “when the founders sat down and wrote the Constitution, they didn’t consider flying.”
…
Graham wanted to make it clear that just because he doesn’t want to stop gun purchases by possible terrorists, that doesn’t mean he’s not tough on terror.“I am all into national security. … I want to stop reading these guys their Miranda rights,” he said.
To sum up: right to remain silent not okay for terrorists; right to buy guns and explosives okay for terrorists.
And last but not least, Arizona
Oy. Where to begin?
The newly-minted Arizona Gestapo is already asking brown citizens for their papers:
A Valley man says he was pulled over Wednesday morning and questioned when he arrived at a weigh station for his commercial vehicle along Val Vista and the 202 freeway.
…
Abdon was told he did not have enough paperwork on him when he pulled into a weigh station to have his commercial truck checked. He provided his commercial driver’s license and a social security number but ended up handcuffed.An agent called his wife and she had to leave work to drive home and grab other documents like his birth certificate.
Is it any surprise that one of the Republican State Senate backers of the bill subscribes to the twitter feeds of two white nationalist organizations?
Don Black is a Florida-based white supremacist who is banned from the UK for inciting hatred. Arizona State Senate Majority leader Chuck Gray—a proponent of the recent immigration bill—follows him, and another white power feed, on Twitter.
…
[The] Twitter account [of white nationalist organization Stormfront], and another neo-Nazi feed linked to it, are among 4,819 that Arizona State Senate Majority Leader Chuck Gray follows. Stormfront does not reciprocate, however—the group follows no one. Which means that Gray, or whoever is responsible for his Twitter account, sought out the racist organization specifically and decided its tweets were essential reading.
Knowing that, would it further surprise you to hear that the bill’s author is also really into white nationalism? From the New York Times:
The state senator who wrote the law, Russell Pearce, had long been considered a politically incorrect embarrassment by more moderate members of his party — often to the delight of his supporters. There was the time in 2007 when he appeared in a widely circulated photograph with a man who was a featured speaker at a neo-Nazi conference. (Mr. Pearce said later he did not know of the man’s affiliation with the group.)
In 2006, he came under fire for speaking admirably of a 1950s federal deportation program called Operation Wetback, and for sending an e-mail message to supporters that included an attachment — inadvertently, he said — from a white supremacist group.
The “papers, please” law is so popular among flyover conservatives that Arizona may find it’s started a trend. Minnesota wants it and Florida teabagger favorite Marco Rubio is all for it now that he’s realized he was pandering to the wrong constituency when he said he was against it.
Truly, Arizona is flying off a cliff on rollerskates and crapping its pants all the way down. But there’s a certain freedom in that kind of release, and once the shit starts flying it’s hard to get it back in the old bottle:
Just a week after signing the country’s toughest immigration bill into law, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer now must decide whether to endorse another bill passed by her state legislature — one that outlaws ethnic-studies programs in public schools.
Just in case that doesn’t make school time trauma-free for Jim-Bob and Cindy-Lou, this ought to do the trick:
The Arizona Department of Education recently began telling school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English.
Does the list of unacceptable accents include “Inbred Redneck?”
