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Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of government' gets done, and where people who are supposed to know better are standing 'round like furniture.

It's less than a week before Beggar's Day all over the country, so that means that there are a lot of interesting things being done by the interesting lifeforms seeking our votes next Tuesday. We begin our tour in the Commonwealth (God save it!) where we will vote on Question 3, which would keep our fellow citizens who are LGBTQ covered under our state anti-discrimination statutes. How this got on the ballot is anybody's guess, and I suspect those protections will be upheld pretty soundly next Tuesday.

That said, nobody's taking anything for granted, which is how we got this masterpiece from the people supporting equal rights.

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It's the authenticity that makes this thing art. First of all, he calls the bartender, who's clearly at least 15 years older than he is, "kid." That's the all-purpose signifier up here. It doesn't matter how old you are, or the other person is. He's still "that kid" who joined the Corps, or "that kid" who used to work at Stop and Shop. I will bet cash money that, somewhere in Brookline, you can find someone who refers to Michael Dukakis as "that kid" who ran for president. (Hell, you can probably find an old-timer who refers to John F. Kennedy the same way.) Second, the server chimes in from across the room with the correct number of recent champions. And, finally, there's the reference to "banging' U'e's." Wicked pissah, is all it is.

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We head across the continent to Washington state, where The Spokane Spokesman-Review finds a Republican state representative who is seeking re-election on a platform of imminent armageddon.

The document is organized in 14 sections with multiple tiers of bullet points and a smattering of biblical citations. Under one heading, “Rules of War,” it makes a chilling prescription for enemies who flout “biblical law.” It states, “If they do not yield – kill all males.” After the document was leaked online Tuesday, the Spokane Valley Republican insisted he was not promoting violence and that the message had been taken out of context. “First of all, it was a summary of a series of sermons on biblical war in the Old Testament as part of a larger discussion on the history of warfare,” Shea said in a Facebook Live video on Wednesday. “This document in and of itself, was not a secret. I’ve actually talked about portions of this document publicly.”

You're not helping yourself. Trust me.

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And, besides, nobody in Spokane is fooled. They know better. So does Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich, with whom I talked for the story linked above. He's seen this movie before, and it doesn't end well.

“The document Mr. Shea wrote is not a Sunday school project or an academic study,” Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich wrote in an email. “It is a ‘how to’ manual consistent with the ideology and operating philosophy of the Christian Identity/Aryan Nations movement and the Redoubt movement of the 1990s.”

This area has been ground zero for American conservative nutballery for decades. (Consult the work of David Neiwert for further details. TV bookers amaze me. 900 times in the past two weeks.) Maybe if more people read Dave's work, we wouldn't have stories like this one from The Louisville Courier-Journal.

He said the memorabilia — which included a white tank top with two red horizontal stripes and a patch on the chest featuring a black swastika; an authentic KKK robe used by the notorious white supremacy group; and even holiday ornaments adorned with glittery swastikas — was unacceptable. "Kentucky Venues finds any items representing racist ideology to be despicable," Patterson said. Walter Kanzler, of Key Largo, Florida, told the Courier Journal on Tuesday that he sold the Nazi Christmas ornaments at the show. Kanzler also sells them on his website, kanzlermilitaria.com, for $50 to $750. “I don’t want to suppress history,” Kanzler said Tuesday. “They are original, I have no interest in political statements. I’m not into hate or anything like that. These things are a part of history.”

Now, of course, state officials are shocked—Shocked!—to learn that Nazi-themed Christmas ornaments are being peddled at a state facility and are considering a ban on the sale of such items, a law that almost certainly will be challenged successfully on First Amendment grounds, much to the delight of Hitlerian fanboys everywhere. Here's the online catalog for the store run by Mr. Kanzler, who is an idiot, just so you know what we're dealing with here. I found the SS toilet-paper particularly charming. (The authentic yellow star is a hot item, I'm sure.) That he continues to stay in business is less a fault in the law than it is a fault in this country's citizens, many of whom also are idiots. An online shopping catalogue for wannabe Nazis? Jesus, these people.

We move on up to Tennessee, which is going to kill a guy in the electric chair for the second time since 1960. This is because the state couldn't get people to sell it drugs with which it could kill people, a problem that many states are wrestling with, since pharmaceutical companies would rather not be complicit in state-sponsored killings. The problem is that the guy who designed the electric chair in question doesn't think it's going to work. From The Tennessean:

"What I'm worried about now is Tennessee's got an electric chair that's going to hurt someone or cause problems. And it's got my name on it," Leuchter said. "I don't think it's going to be humane." Gov. Bill Haslam said he is confident the execution can be carried out without problems."I have a great deal of confidence in our Department of Correction folks. ... We've spoken with them regularly and they've assured us" the chair is ready.

If Fred Leuchter's name sounds familiar, it's because Errol Morris made him famous in a film as one of the foremost designers of state killing machines, but also because his business and reputation went south because, on the subject of the Holocaust, Fred began to sound like one of Mr. Kanzler's steady customers.

Fred Leuchter had a successful career in the execution business before his reputation was tainted by his claim that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. Tennessee's chair, which hasn't been used since 2007, is just one of many execution devices Leuchter worked on between 1979 and 1990, according to an article by Fordham University professor Deborah Denno in the William and Mary Law Review. In addition to electric chairs, Leuchter built, refurbished and consulted on gas chambers, lethal injection machines and a gallows for at least 27 states. After his comments about the Holocaust, it came to light that he had neither an engineering degree nor a license, even though he promoted himself as an engineer.

So the charlatan who designed the electric chair doesn't think it's going to work right, but the governor of Tennessee is confident that it will. The death penalty makes for some very strange stories, it does.

J Pat Carter Getty Images

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Dust Devil Dancer Friedman of the Plains takes us to Quinton, where the owner of a gas drilling company learned that you get what you pay for—and so, alas, did five people who worked for him. From the Tulsa World:

The operator is accused of ignoring six expert consultant engineers’ recommendations on the weight of drilling fluid to be used to drill the well. A lighter mixture was chosen at greater risk to save money and market the project to investors through a drone “hype” video capturing flares of escaping gas, the lawsuits allege.

Drilling fluid, called “mud” in industry jargon, is the primary defense against well blowouts. Lighter muds allow for faster drilling and less expensive operations. But the mud must be dense enough to keep underground fluids from entering the well bore — which happened in January in the well in Pittsburg County...

Red Mountain and Crescent Consulting, an engineering firm which was contracted to oversee the drilling operation, denied the allegations in court filings last week. Patterson-UTI, contracted to perform the drilling, also denied wrongdoing in court filings. The accusations were filed earlier this month in two amended wrongful death lawsuits after depositions were taken of a Red Mountain executive, Crescent drilling engineer and several Patterson-UTI rig workers, according to the plaintiffs’ law firm.

In its own court filing, the company that supplied the mud for the well site stipulated that Red Mountain and Crescent chose to deviate from its recommendations “while drilling critical sections of the well.”

The Mud People are distancing themselves from you. That's gotta hurt.

This is your democracy, kid. 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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