(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

(Extra Musical Note: This past Wednesday was the 104th anniversary of the birth of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and avatar of this semi-regular weekly survey. Shout, Sister, Shout!)

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 you're waist-deep in the mist and it's almost like you don't exist.

We begin in Kentucky, where Tea Party Governor Matt Bevin confessed this week that, in addition to being a box of rocks, he also is a threat to public health. From the Louisville Courier-Journal:

“Every single one of my kids had the chickenpox," Bevin said in an interview with WKCT, a Bowling Green talk radio station. "They got the chickenpox on purpose because we found a neighbor that had it and I went and made sure every one of my kids was exposed to it, and they got it. They had it as children. They were miserable for a few days, and they all turned out fine.” Three medical experts called the practice unsafe and unwise. "I would never recommend or advise it," said Dr. Robert Jacobson, a pediatrician and expert in vaccines and childhood diseases at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. "It's just dangerous."

Turns out there may be in this great land of ours even bigger morons than the governor of Kentucky.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also urges against deliberately exposing kids to chicken pox, including the past practice of "chicken pox parties" held by some parents.

These are parents who enthusiastically expose their children to epidemic disease. At least they're not giving them participation trophies, I guess.

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So we don our HazMat suits and head for the border and find ourselves in South Carolina, where The State informs us that the home office of American sedition shares a problem with those miserable Yankees up in Michigan.

Exposed to lead in their home’s drinking water, the boy could not talk in sentences until after he turned 4. He tried to communicate, but his babbling was hard to understand. Today, 14 years later, Jones says her son is doing fine as a high school student, except for one problem: He struggles with his speech. It may never be known if the teenager’s speech troubles resulted from lead exposure. But lead in drinking water is an issue in more places than Jones’ neighborhood.

Small utilities across South Carolina are struggling to keep lead out of the water they pipe to customers. Many are located in small, out-of-the-way communities, serving customers who, advocates say, often are forgotten by regulators, politicians and local utility managers.

Since 2011, 41 small utilities serving South Carolinians have exceeded the federal safety standard for lead in the water at least once, according to state Department of Health and Environmental Control records. Violators include trailer parks in the Columbia area, as well as schools, small cities and businesses in other parts of the state. In contrast, only two large water systems violated the lead standard during that time. Even small amounts of lead can damage the developing brains of infants and young children and, in some cases, cause learning and speech difficulties that last into adulthood.

This is a tin drum I keep banging on every election cycle, but all this emphasis on the struggling middle class, while undoubtedly worthwhile and undeniably accurate, has removed almost completely any serious discussion of poverty in our elections. (The last person to run for president on an anti-poverty platform was John Edwards, and that didn't exactly work out.) I'm old enough to remember the War on Poverty and Bobby Kennedy's revelatory trips to Appalachia and to the Mississippi Delta.

Poverty is a hundred little tragedies on top of a thousand bigger ones. The water crisis in Flint and in South Carolina is one or the other. Take your pick.

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We move on down to Florida, where the Republican state legislature isn't going to take this whole re-enfranchisement of felons thing lying down, referenda be damned. From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

Advocates said the language goes too far, in part by requiring civil fines and court costs to be paid before felons can have their voting rights restored. "That will restrict the ability to vote for thousands of Floridians, especially people who are poor, especially people of color," said Neil Volz, political director for the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. Volz said financial obligations should be considered only if a judge specifically made that part of an offender's sentencing, such as restitution to victims. He also argued that the Legislature doesn't need a bill to spell out a process for voting rights restoration.

On April 9, 1964, newly elected United States Senator Edward M. Kennedy gave his maiden speech to that body. He spoke in support of the Civil Rights Act then pending before the Senate, and he invoked the name of his slain brother as an appeal for passage of the act. He said:

"My brother was the first President of the United States to state publicly that segregation was morally wrong. His heart and his soul are in this bill. If his life and death had a meaning, it was that we should not hate but love one another; we should use our powers not to create conditions of oppression that lead to violence, but conditions of freedom that lead to peace."

Edward Kennedy Bettmann Getty Images

Kennedy was determined to ensure that the act would rip down the artificial barriers thrown up to keep African-American citizens from voting. One of the most important of these was the poll tax. He helped spur the 24th amendment, which forbade poll taxes in federal elections. Two years later, he went to war against it again, this time in regard to state elections. He ultimately lost in the Senate but, in 1966, the Supreme Court ruled that the poll tax was unconstitutional. Writing for the majority, Justice William O. Douglas declared: “Wealth or fee paying has, in our view, no relation to voting qualifications; the right to vote is too precious, too fundamental to be so burdened or conditioned.”

What the Florida legislature is doing here, in open defiance of the will of a huge majority of Florida voters, is enacting a poll tax for the 21st Century. As we often point out, one of the signifying efforts of modern conservative Republicanism is that none of the victories won by the Civil Rights Movement should be considered permanent. Ni shagu nazad.





Sheriff Terry Barnett NBC

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Conch Trumpeter Friedman of the Plains has decamped for the Bahamas. Before he fled, however, he brought us the tale of a small-town police department that just got fed up waiting for Infrastructure Week to begin. From readfrontier.org:

Nowata County Sheriff Terry Barnett, Undersheriff Mark Kirschner and several other employees, including deputies and a canine officer, resigned on Monday. Kirschner told The Frontier on Monday that District Judge Carl Gibson had ordered inmates who had been removed from the jail earlier this month back into the facility. They were originally ordered out of the building after high levels of carbon monoxide had been detected.

A dispatcher who worked at the jail told Kirschner she “felt dizzy and sick” on Feb. 28, KFOR reported earlier this month. That’s when authorities conducted a test and found high levels of carbon monoxide, the cause of which has yet to be found. Four employees were hospitalized. At the time, 18 inmates were evacuated and four employees were taken to an emergency room.

Good for Sheriff Barnett and his staff. I mean, really. Carbon monoxide? That can ruin your whole day.

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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