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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 governmentin' gets done and where the heat of the night hits you like a freight train.

We begin this week in Kentucky, where Tea Party incumbent Governor Matt Bevin went crackers and took to anti-social media to warn the rubes among his supporters that they'd better watch out, better not cry, and better not pout, he's telling them why, because Santa Soros is coming to town—or, perhaps as barely concealed subtext, Hannukah Harry.

Well, I'll tell you who Pro Publica is. It was started by Herb and Marian Sandler, who made billions of dollars doing subprime lending...destroying thousands of lives, destroying Wachovia Bank in the process. They profited off people who had nothing and have even less now. These people made billions and are now funneling that ill-gained money into left-leaning organizations like Pro Publica.

Now, Pro Publica is partnering up with the [Louisville] Courier-Journal to pay the salaries of the [Misapplied Irony Finger Wave] Courier-Journal's investigation of some organization in Kentucky. Now, they're not going to be transparent about what that is. They're not going to be transparent about their partner. They're not going to be transparent about the fact that these same Sandlers are big supporters of the ACLU, another bastion of conservative thinking...This is also an organization, Pro Publica, supported by George (I Hate America) Soros."

And so on. Bevin helpfully provides links to a couple of the conservative websites he moves his lips to read on a somewhat daily basis. Needless to say, the folks at Pro Publica moved the four Pulitzer certificates to one side of the desk, and provided a reply to Bevin's gubba-gubba-gubba.

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First, we’re thrilled to be partnering w/ the fine folks at the @courierjournal. They’re just one of 14 newsrooms we’ll be supporting.



The paper’s reporting project is v promising. We won’t say more b/c we believe in gathering facts first. https://t.co/ZbtsXxd7oy — ProPublica (@propublica) December 13, 2018

If I'm Governor Matt, I'm pricing legal help right now, before the rush starts.

(In related news, Pro Publica is also opening up operations in Mississippi, where its first hire was the redoubtable Jerry Mitchell, the man who cracked open the files of Mississippi's white-supremacist Sovereignty Commission, a development that, among other things, helped Mississippi finally convict the late Byron de La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers.)

From there, we skip on down to South Carolina, where a local legislator is taking a firm stand on something that is unbelievably still an issue there in 2018. From the Post-Courier:

Sen. Katrina Shealy, a Lexington Republican, told The Post and Courier earlier this year that she intended to fix the law. The newspaper published an investigation in June showing nearly 7,000 underage girls — some as young as 12 and 13 — have wed older males in South Carolina over the past 20 years. While state law technically sets the minimum age for marriage at 18, South Carolina also allows 16- and 17-year-olds to wed with their parents’ permission, and sets no minimum age if the bride is pregnant or has given birth.

That there has been an average of 350 of these marriages a year in S.C. going back to 1998 is appalling enough, but that it's still a matter of debate is even worse.

That exception does not require the groom’s parents to consent to the marriage, but at least one of the bride’s parents must sign off. “To me, that’s statutory rape,” Shealy said at the time. “I don’t care who signs (the marriage license).” The bill Shealy filed in the Senate on Wednesday would repeal the section of the code “relating to the issuance of a license to an unmarried female and male under eighteen years of age when the female is pregnant or has borne a child.”

The handmaid's tale, the child's balloon/Eclipses both the sun and moon...

Katrina Shealy C. Aluka Berry/Newscom

Continuing southbound, we end up in Florida, where it appears that Democratic candidate Andrew Gillum was successfully ratfcked on a number of levels, including under the putative color of law. From the Miami Herald:

But despite attacks from political rivals painting him as corrupt and an FBI target, former Mayor Andrew Gillum was not mentioned in the grand jury indictment released Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Justice. Instead it was another former Tallahassee mayor and the former head of the state’s Democratic Party, Scott Charles Maddox, whom the federal government has accused of masterminding a racketeering enterprise that extorted clients with business before the city and accepted bribes...

FBI documents made public in February, which outlined the case against Maddox, did not identify Gillum as a target of the probe, but the political fallout of being associated with the investigation would ensnare the popular liberal and ultimately doom his run for governor. The investigation is still ongoing, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Kunz. It also exposed Gillum’s ties to a friend-turned-lobbyist, who organized trips for Gillum and his family, and made public that Gillum had attended a showing of the Broadway play “Hamilton."

This was almost Comey-esque in both the vagueness of its allegations and its overall political effect. The FBI needs a housecleaning top to bottom, with a special emphasis on ideological meddling in elections, and it's got to happen soon.

Andrew Gillum Joe Raedle Getty Images

Remaining in Florida, we discover that the state is preparing to hand its public schoolchildren over to the education "reform" movement lock, stock, and juicebox. The St. Augustine Record is dubious about the prospect.

Let’s not beat around the political bush: Putting former House Speaker Richard Corcoran in charge of Florida education is like hiring Genghis Kahn to head the state Department of Corrections. The charter school fox is heading for the Department of Education hen house and, for public schooling, that’s finger-lickin’ bad. Corcoran is a coercer, a brawler and politician who rewards fealty while marking opponents for payback. Those who know him would say he’d be flattered by the description.

He came into politics through the back door. He ran for the House in 1998 in a district outside his own. He was dubbed a “carpetbagger” by the hometown newspaper. He lost. But he became a rising star in the party machinery, and eventually became what many describe as a political “hitman” for Marco Rubio’s bid to gain House leadership in 2006. He was rewarded by being hired as Rubio’s chief of staff at $175,000 yearly salary — considerably more than his boss, who made $29,697 a year. The governor that year was paid around $130,000.

Well, the immediate area surrounding that bush certainly remains unbeaten.

(The discrepancy in salaries between Rubio and his COS can be explained by the possibility that the COS actually inhabits his suit.)

For his part, Corcoran spearheaded the state’s ongoing effort at funding charter schools with taxpayer money. And, where that was not possible, bankrolling public schools with various funding schemes, including paying for any child who deems himself “bullied” in public school to attend a private school tuition-free — and where, we must assume, bullies do not exist. Corcoran was also the weight behind efforts this year to dismantle elected school boards and put the oversight of schools under direct legislative control.

Richard Corcoran Wilfredo Lee AP

In a twist of irony, Corcoran included this line is his speech after being named Speaker: “The enemy is us. ... Left to our own devices, all too often, we’ll choose self-interest.” His wife ran a charter school at the time and has since sought to expand to other areas. But his dark political history aside, might we not expect to have a person with some history in education — whether public or charter school — to lead an agency tasked with educating 3 million kids.

Surely, you jest.

And with one swift move, the Legislature accomplishes Job No. 1. That’s putting Florida’s $20.4 billion education budget out to bid in the private sector. That’s a frightening amount of political capital to be spread around to those who decide who gets charter school contracts and where those schools will be.

It's a frightening amount of actual capital, too. Turning education into a business, and students into commodities, is bad enough if it's left to college athletics programs. It's worse when applied to the fingerpainting sector of the system.

We skip along the Gulf coast until we get to Galveston, in Texas, which has become even more of a bullseye for hurricanes since the climate crisis began. The city and the state are in the middle of the process of trying to develop a plan that will keep entire cities and towns from regularly being blown off in the general direction of Belize. The Texas Tribune dropped by a hearing to see how the folks are reacting to the early stages of the plan.

The couple was among a few hundred people — residents, business owners, members of conservation and environmental groups, local and state elected officials — who showed up Wednesday night at the convention center on this perpetually storm-battered barrier island to weigh in on a multi-billion-dollar government proposal to build a so-called "coastal barrier system." The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Texas General Land Office want to construct a sweeping complex of levees, flood walls, gates and pump stations along dozens of miles of Texas coastline.

Galveston, Texas BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI Getty Images

The overwhelming sentiment was that the barrier system — intended to protect the low-lying Houston-Galveston region and the nation’s largest petrochemical complex from deadly hurricane storm surge — was a miss. But the level of concern varied. Some, especially Bolivar residents, said they didn’t want anything to be built at all. Some said they accepted the risk when they chose to live there and didn’t need the government to bail them out. Others said they liked the general concept and that some form of protection is needed – but that the placement was all wrong. Mayes Middleton, a Galveston Republican elected to the Texas House last month, garnered applause with his vocal criticism of the proposal, which was unveiled in late October. “This is a really bad, bad plan right now,” he told a row of Army Corps and Land Office officials seated at the front of a large convention ballroom.

In 2008, Hurricane Ike virtually obliterated Bolivar. Houses and bodies blew across a bay and onto the mainland. I don't understand the people above who want to avoid the gummint at all costs in general, but I'll never understand people who have been so heavily propagandized that watching their town go airborne isn't enough to convince them to give further thought to the notion that national problems have national solutions. These people also represent another supporting element behind my contention that neither the institutions of American government, nor the benumbed American people, are prepared for the massive collective effort it's going to take to respond to the ongoing climate crisis. There are a number of questions that have to be answered before enacting this plan, but I don't get those questions at all.

James Gallogly Sue Ogrocki/AP/REX/Shutterstock

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Yule Log Accessorizer Friedman of the Plains brings us the tale of two men who both served as president of the University of Oklahoma, a football franchise with an education component on the side. James Gallogly has the job now. David Boren used to have it. Now, the two of them disagree on Boren's stewardship. From the Norman Transcript:

Before he took office, Gallogly was critical of the university's financial status in a June 19 OU board of regents meeting. Boren countered with a letter on June 20 to the Transcript, defending OU's finances and stating a significant part of the university's debt was bonded debt with scheduled payments. Following the publication of that letter on June 20, Gallogly told a senior OU administrator to deliver a message to Boren: “You tell him that I am the meanest son of a bitch he has ever seen, and if he ever crosses me again, I will destroy him.” The statement was confirmed by multiple sources who spoke to the Transcript on a condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from Gallogly.

Me? I think Kyler Murray is the only person at that school who can be trusted to open a can of tuna right now.

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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