(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 gravity fails and negativity won't pull you through.

We begin in Georgia, where the last gubernatorial election was very close, and the winning candidate was the guy supervising the election, and everybody woke up one fine Wednesday morning to discover that they'd all moved to Ukraine. Naturally, the Georgia legislature acted swiftly to make sure such a laughable semi-bagjob never embarrassed the state again.

No, I'm kidding. They found a way to turn a buck. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Democrats said the switch to ballot-marking devices is a costly waste of taxpayer money that will benefit well-connected voting companies at the expense of voters. They repeatedly pointed out that Kemp hired a lobbyist for voting company ES&S, former state Rep. Chuck Harper, as his deputy chief of staff. And they said it was suspicious that voting companies’ estimates for the cost of ballot-marking devices, roughly $150 million to $200 million plus annual fees and additional equipment costs, didn’t come to light from the Secretary of State’s Office until Tuesday. When Kemp was secretary of state last year, his office refused to release the companies’ pricing information.

The aroma around this arrangement is not improved the more you look into it.

When Gov. Brian Kemp hired an election company’s lobbyist this month, the move raised alarm bells about one company’s influence on Georgia’s upcoming purchase of a new statewide voting system.Concerns from government accountability advocates only grew days later, when a commission created by Kemp recommended that the state buy the type of voting machines sold by the lobbyist’s company, Election Systems & Software. Several other vendors also offer similar voting machines. Then Kemp proposed spending $150 million on a new statewide voting system, an amount that matches estimates for the cost of the system promoted by ES&S, called ballot-marking devices, which use a combination of touchscreens and ballot printers.

The latest moves fueled suspicions that cozy connections between lobbyists, Kemp and other elected officials will lead to ES&S winning a rich contract to sell its computerized voting products to the state government, even though 55 percent of Georgia voters said in a poll by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution this month that they prefer a cheaper system where paper ballots are filled in by voters.

At this point, I'd take any system where paper ballots are filled in by actual voters.

wafb.com

We move on to New Orleans, where it's always infrastructure week. From the Times-Picayune:

Tucked away in the town of Jackson, the Eastern Louisiana Mental Health System is one of only two state-run mental health hospitals left in Louisiana after years of closures and budget cuts. Nearly all its patients arrive through the criminal justice system, after being deemed incompetent to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity. That leaves virtually no beds for people who are not charged with crimes and need long-term treatment. That shortage has become more acute in recent years, as courts have ordered more inmates transferred from jails to the mental hospital, growing the number of patients held in Jackson from 555 in 2014 to more than 640 last year.

Eastern Louisiana Mental Health System, which includes a main campus and a maximum-security satellite location, must operate in some ways as a prison. Patients spend months or years in a health care facility that the Department of Health itself is condemning. “Physical condition of buildings, roadways, utilities and supporting infrastructure is deplorable, antiquated and deteriorating quickly,” the department wrote in its request for funding. “Buildings and facilities are becoming unsafe and are not conducive to a therapeutic environment.”

When NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune reporters visited the hospital campus recently, Department of Health officials allowed access only to areas where no patients were present and the administration building. The latter still bears the remnants of its torturous past, including basement areas where patients were once chained to the walls. Other buildings currently used for treatment resemble deteriorating, 1970s-era public school buildings. An on-campus Secure Forensic Facility called a “group home” is the size of a hotel. The separate maximum security unit with four wings was designed by corrections officials and is more prison-like in appearance.

And, of course, there are the stories.

Bailey was accused of breaking into a house in the 7th Ward in May 2015 and stabbing two roommates before stealing a car...Police arrested him there on two counts of attempted murder and burglary. In jail without bail, a New Orleans judge declared Darnell Bailey incompetent to stand trial based on a mental examination in December 2015, and he was transferred to Eastern Louisiana Mental Health System.

Over the next few months in the hospital, Bailey declared that if he had to return to jail, he would consider suicide, according to the lawsuit filed after his death, and he began hurting himself by banging his head against the wall. At one point, a doctor noted that the hospital staff expressed frustration with Bailey for coming to them “with every little thing and telling them about every little complaint and anxiety,” the suit alleges. On the morning of his death, at 9:22 a.m., security cameras recorded Bailey covering the window of the door to his room with toilet paper, according to court records. No guard appeared for a scheduled security check at 9:30 a.m. It wasn’t until 28 minutes later, at 9:58 a.m., that a guard found Bailey hanging by a sheet from the ceiling. Nurses couldn’t revive him.

Curtis Mayfield was right. If there's a hell below, we're all going to go.

kcur.org

And now, it's up to Kansas, where they have hospital problems of their own, as the Topeka Capital-Journal reports.

Lentz, who was mayor of the small northeast Kansas town for more than a decade, said Jorge Perez should be locked in jail for the failure to pay employees who continued to show up while Perez offered “smoke and mirrors.” Perez, whose business empire includes the LLC that owns the Horton hospital and the management company EmpowerHMS, has been the subject of scrutiny for the financial failings of multiple hospitals and a federal lawsuit alleging an illegal billing scheme.

Lentz predicted the lives of state officials will go on like normal while the Horton community erodes. “I think it’s a crock of (expletive) that our state officials stand around with their hands in their pants and do nothing,” Lentz said.C.J. Grover, spokesman for the attorney general’s office, said the office has an ongoing investigation into the hospital. “We have no further comment at this time,” Grover said.

Monetize everything, say the market fundamentalists. Don't worry about places like Horton, or the people who are sick and who live there. They can take the ambulance to Hiawatha, or to hell, what difference does it make?

And now, let's go up to Missouri, where things got a little frisky in the local saloon, and a political aide nearly started a gunfight by accident. From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

As Missouri lawmakers debated a plan last week to allow people to carry firearms in more public places, Jefferson City police arrested the top aide to a Phelps County state senator after the man told police his gun fell to the floor during a fight at a capital city watering hole.

Now this is bad staff work.

That same night, in a separate incident at another bar, two members of the House were in an altercation that left one of them with a black eye.

Mixed-martial legislatin' is really catching on.

In the case of the senator's aide, police responded to Spectator's Bar and Grill in downtown Jefferson City shortly before 12:30 a.m. on Thursday morning. Police said that during a barroom altercation, a 9 mm Ruger pistol loaded with five rounds fell to the floor. A patron, the police chief of the western Missouri town of Ferrelview, retrieved the gun, the report said. Police arrested Jared Brown, who serves as chief of staff to freshman Sen. Justin Brown, R-Rolla. Cole County officials confirmed Jared Brown, 45, of Malden, was booked into jail after the incident. He has been charged with unlawful use of a weapon and use of a loaded weapon while intoxicated.

The sockless aide proceeded to not help himself.

Police said Brown was "visibly intoxicated" and admitted to bringing the gun into the bar. Police told Brown it was "not a good choice" to bring a gun into a bar, and Brown eventually agreed, the report said.

OK, so far.

Brown then said, according to the report, "I wish my gun was closer I woulda used it." Brown never told police he was in fear for his safety or his life, the report said.

No, drunk guy, no. You have a right to remain silent. Use it.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Scrub Oak Whisperer Friedman of the Plains brings us the latest threat to the public order. From KTUL:

"It was definitely shocking," said Savannah Bannon. She says a bailiff came out into the hallway and noticed the woman sitting next to her breastfeeding and said, "You need to go to the bathroom to do that." "Me and her were both just really shocked and appalled; it was sad," she said.

A man with a badge and some authority and no idea what to do with either one.

Back at the courthouse, Savannah filed a complaint. "I explained what happened on my complaint, and I said that as an officer of the court, I feel like he should be upheld to higher standards to respect the law. It's a federal law that women can breastfeed in public," she said. "You are allowed to breastfeed anywhere you are allowed to be, plain and simple," said Jensen. To drive home the point, a Nurse-In has been planned for this Friday at 9 a.m. at the municipal building.

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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