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Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what’s going down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin’ gets done, and where blackness is a virtue and the road is full of mud.

We begin in Indiana, where the legacy of Vice-President* Mike Pence and his family business remains alive in the soil and the water, even if certain other things do not. Pence’s father got rich by helping to develop a chain of gas stations all over the Midwest. In 2004, the business went bust, but it’s still costing the taxpayers. From the AP:

The collapse of Kiel Bros. Oil Co. in 2004 was widely publicized. Less known is that the state of Indiana—and, to a smaller extent, Kentucky and Illinois—are still on the hook for millions of dollars to clean up more than 85 contaminated sites across the three states, including underground tanks that leaked toxic chemicals into soil, streams and wells.



Indiana alone has spent at least $21 million on the cleanup thus far, or an average of about $500,000 per site, according to an analysis of records by The Associated Press. And the work is nowhere near complete.

It is a classic Midwestern family saga, complete with the quaint and lovely hometown, where people love Jesus, home-made pies, and the recently concluded Bartholomew County 4-H Fair, and where everyone is welcome to sample the local poisons.

The federal government, meanwhile, plans to clean up a plume of cancer-causing solvent discovered beneath a former Kiel Bros. station that threatens drinking water near the Pence family’s hometown.



...



For some families living near Columbus, the Kiel Bros. business left behind more than debt. They smelled oil in water drawn from private wells. Nearly three decades later, the unincorporated area known as Garden City is a federal Superfund site, a designation reserved for the nation’s most heavily polluted locations.



Investigators initially determined Kiel Bros. was the source of the oil, along with a plume of trichloroethylene detected decades ago under a gas station. The chemical called TCE is a solvent used to degrease metal parts. The EPA says the plume is drifting toward the aquifer that is Columbus’ primary source of drinking water.

State officials seesawed over whether the company was responsible for the TCE before concluding in 2002 that it was not.



“Why did we absolve the company that we think the problem started with?” said Kevin Butler, a former teacher whose father was one of the first to smell the oil. “It just doesn’t seem very logical that this problem would be centered to this area, and confined to this area, if it wasn’t the responsibility of that company.”



Indiana has since spent more than $860,000 cleaning up the petroleum. The EPA estimates it could cost $320,000 to $1.6 million to take care of the TCE, which taxpayers will likely foot the bill for.

Mike Pence will never leave Indiana. He will live in dead fish forever.

We move along to Arizona, where a guy named Bobby Wilson is running for the state legislature and, dammit, I can’t do better than the job done by Alison Steinbach of the Arizona Republic.

All was going more or less as expected. Then, it was Bobby Wilson's turn to speak.



Wilson, one of two Republican candidates who attended the July 9 meeting, took the mic and told a story of how he shot and killed a crazed attacker in an act of self-defense while a teenager.



That attacker, it turned out, was his mother.



He said his life story illustrates the importance of having "a good guy there with a gun" rather than gun-control legislation.



"You can pass all the laws you want to in this world, and when you've got somebody out there that wants to harm somebody, they're going to do it if you don't stop them," Wilson told the crowd.



The audience was shocked, as video posted online showed. The crowd, brought together by Moms Demand Action, a nationwide movement against gun violence, burst into boos and heckles.

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Republican Bobby Wilson tells the audience that there is no need for more gun control legislation, but sometimes circumstances require a “good guy with a gun.” pic.twitter.com/u92Bf86xIg — Joe Ferguson (@joeferguson) July 10, 2018

His mom? As Steinbach puts it with admirable understatement:

But there is more to Wilson's story — a lot more.

The tale begins in Hugo, Oklahoma, in 1963, when Wilson was 18 years old. It includes charges of familial murder, a home destroyed by fire, years of amnesia and the start of a winding path that led a young man to a legal career and, now, ambitions to serve in the Arizona Legislature.



The candidate told only part of this story to the Tucson audience.



"(She) was hell-bent on killing me in my sleep one night. At three o'clock in the morning, I woke up to find a rifle in my face—a semiautomatic rifle at that—and the bullets started to fly, and I started diving for cover," Wilson said.



...



Court records and newspaper articles from the time suggest there may be more to the story than Wilson's account.

You think?

Those records show he was charged with the murder of his mother and sister, and soon after his arrest he confessed to those charges. He later recanted his confession and claimed he had amnesia about the events of the night in question. The charges against him ultimately were dismissed by an Oklahoma judge.

Read the whole thing. The spin on this campaign is going to be awesome.



Staying in Arizona, a while back, justice caught up with a state legislator named Don Shooter—Yes, I know. Try to restrain yourselves.—who got the boot for engaging in a grotesque campaign of sexual harassment. From Phoenix New Times:

The report bears that out: Shooter's colleagues describe him as a "pervy old man," "a character," "flirtatious," and "the class clown," and point out that he was known for making off-color comments.

...

Amy Love, deputy director of government affairs for the Arizona Supreme Court, said that Shooter grabbed and shook his crotch in front of her after telling her that he was "a sucker for the pretty ladies."

The report notes that when Shooter was asked about the incident, he "stated that he did not remember the incident in question, noted that it could have happened, but probably did not happen, because 'Amy Love's not that cute.'"

So, anyway, the ol’ crotch-shaker gets 86’ed and decides that the world needs to hear his side of things, so he goes on the electric teevee machine and goes full Victim. Never go full Victim.

He attributed the investigative report and the House censure that followed to people who felt "offended" by his behavior—behavior which, according to the report, included Shooter repeatedly directing lewd comments and sexual advances toward Ugenti-Rita and other women, and one instance where Shooter grabbed and shook his crotch at a lobbyist for the Arizona Supreme Court.



“I told a joke to somebody, they overheard it. ‘Oh, I’m offended. I’m offended,'" Shooter said in a high-pitched, mocking tone, raising his hands to his face. "So in America, the reason you ruin somebody’s livelihood and reputation and everything is, you’re offended?...Liberals offend me every day," he added. "Every day, when they open their mouth. I’m offended, but I don’t get crazy about it.”

No, I suspect he got there all on his own.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Sodbuster Friedman of the Plains brings us the saga of a woman who threatened her own life…over weed! From the Tulsa World:

Court records filed Tuesday afternoon allege that Ezell used a fictitious account created on ProtonMail, an end-to-end encrypted email service, on July 8 to send emails to herself. She is also accused of making a fraudulent report the next day about receiving harassing electronic communications over SQ 788 and providing false evidence to the OSBI throughout its inquiry into the matter.

...

Shortly after reaching the signup page, investigators from the OSBI reported they were able to determine that Ezell’s cellphone browser had accessed the inbox for the ProtonMail account maryjame@protonmail.com.



Less than a half hour after reviewing the inbox, Ezell reportedly sent a text message saying, “F---, text me when you are up. I just got a pretty threatening email about medical marijuana.” She had deleted her internet search history relating to her access of ProtonMail at that time and did so again after sending herself another threatening email, subsequently sending another text message to apparently the same undisclosed recipient, saying, “Another one.”



One of the emails sent to Ezell’s Health Department address on July 8 said, “We will stop YOU and your greed. Any way it takes to end your evil and protect what is ours. We will watch you.”



The same day there was an email stating, “We will expose your corruption and evil. We would hate to hurt a pretty lady. You will hear us. We are just beginning.”

This is the kind of thing that happens in…no, this kind of thing doesn’t happen anywhere else.

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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