(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin' gets done, and where now's not the time for your tears.

We begin this week in Wisconsin with one of the least surprising pieces of analysis ever, and it comes on a week that included the sudden appearance on the electric Twitter machine of Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus once hired by Koch Industries to manage this particular midwest subsidiary. It turns out that, if you don't fund education, education has no money, and then education goes straight to hell. Who knew? From UpNorth News:

In compiling the report, the organization traced a decade's worth of budget decisions enacted by the GOP-controlled Legislature that resulted in record cuts to public education. In short, the report found many state lawmakers have deemed tax cuts more important than supporting Wisconsin’s 400-plus public school districts.

The loss in public education dollars was accomplished by diverting millions toward the expansion of the private voucher school program, offering tax cuts primarily aimed at the wealthiest households and wiping out business taxes in manufacturing agriculture, according to the report. Next school year, the state will spend $75 million less in state aid than a decade earlier, based on inflation, the report states. That means a 1.2 percent reduction compared to state aid for schools in 2011, according to Tamarine Cornelius, the report’s author.

If you don't collect money, you have no money to spend on stuff. Again, who knew?

Since January 2011, the Legislature has enacted more than 100 tax cuts, the report shows, totaling $13.6 billion during the past decade. The combined cost of those reductions has grown each year since, starting at $60 million in 2012 and growing to projected $2.4 billion in 2021, adjusting for inflation, the report states. Those tax cuts have drained dollars from public schools, Cornelius said.

According to the report, if lawmakers had not approved the tax cuts and instead would have appropriated the tax dollars to public schools, an additional $727 million would currently be available for the public school system. Simply eliminating the manufacturing credit given to Wisconsin businesses and instead dedicating the taxes collected to public schools would have boosted funding above 2011 levels, Cornelius said.

Rumors out of America's Dairyland have it that Walker's got an itch to run for public office again. Please, Wisconsin, regain your sanity as quickly as possible.

(In other Wisconsin-related news. the president* seems to have been obsessed with badgers, and this is not crazy at all.)

Kris Kobach returns to the headlines. Mark Reinstein Getty Images

We skip on down to Kansas, which is still trying to right itself after spending years under the conservative economic fanaticism of Sam Brownback. They did a good job of it in 2018, rejecting the candidacy of king vote-suppressor Kris Kobach, who is currently annoying the state's GOP by trying to run for Senate. Meanwhile, Brownback moles are still busily trying to undermine enough institutions to create an opening to sneak back into power. From The New York Times:

Even some of Secretary of State Scott Schwab's fellow Republicans believe that at least Sedgwick County, which is home to the state's largest city, Wichita, is ready to allow voters to cast their ballots at any of its dozens of polling places. Democrats accuse Schwab of dragging his feet, and one lawmaker said during a lunch meeting with him and other lawmakers Wednesday that Schwab is engaged in a “voter suppression program.”

The simmering dispute shows how voting rights issues remain contentious in Kansas even though firebrand conservative Republican Kris Kobach left the secretary of state's office early last year after losing the 2018 governor's race. Kobach successfully pushed for some of the nation's toughest voter ID laws, including a now-on-hold proof-of-citizenship requirement for new voters, making Kansas a magnet for lawsuits.

Schwab said he's being careful about allowing counties to move away from traditional polling sites, each for only a limited number of voters in a given area. He said his office is drafting “a book” of regulations required by the 2019 law to make sure that electronic lists of voters are secure and that computer systems don't crash on Election Day, adding “I'm not going to slap something together.”

He's had 10 months. I've watched faster comas.

Remember this one? Handout Getty Images

Continuing south, we find ourselves in Louisiana, where a new twist has emerged on an old story. From NOLA.com:

Oil from the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster may have spread much farther than initially thought, possibly reaching as far as Texas and the Florida Keys, a new study suggests. “The impact of the oil’s toxicity is larger than previously assumed,” said Igal Berenshtein, a University of Miami marine scientist and the study’s lead author. "It's important to account for the toxicity that's invisible and also the three-dimensional nature of the (oil) plume, and our study does that."

He estimates the extent may be 30% larger than 2010 satellite imagery indicated. The imagery was widely accepted by the public and scientists as showing the spill’s reach, but a growing body of field data collected just after the spill indicates the oil had a much larger footprint. Berenshtein and the study’s other scientists combined data from water, seafloor and beach sampling, fish toxicity studies and oil transport models to track oil invisible to satellites.

And, as proof that stories never end, they just find new victims, up in Minnesota, there's some serious controversy regarding mining in the northern part of the state by a Swiss-based conglomerate called Glencore. Hired at one point for Glencore as a...wait for it...environmental expert was Tony Hayward, the guy who was the head of BP when it wrecked the Gulf and, apparently, the Florida Keys.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Bull Ridin' Caddy Friedman of the Plains brings us a tale of legal theorizing among the Tumbleweed Jesus legal community. From the Tulsa World:

Olsen’s bill does not go that far, but he and others indicated they are headed in that direction. “We are told the (U.S.) Supreme Court is the supreme law of the land, that we cannot protest its decision,” Olsen said in debate. “There is a court even higher than the Supreme Court. There is the court of God. Abortion is a violation of the law of God.”

You have to admire a guy willing to chase ambulances all the way up to the Pearly Gates.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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