(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 the festival is over and the boys have finally made it through the wall.

We begin in Kentucky, and we begin with happy news. From the Louisville Courier-Journal:

City officials announced Wednesday that Louisville International Airport will be renamed after the boxer and humanitarian often called "the Greatest." The new name: Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport. "Muhammad Ali belonged to the world, but he only had one hometown, and fortunately, that is our great city of Louisville," Mayor Greg Fischer said. "Muhammad became one of the most well-known people to ever walk the Earth and has left a legacy of humanitarianism and athleticism that has inspired billions of people. "It is important that we, as a city, further champion The Champ's legacy," Fischer continued. "And the airport renaming is a wonderful next step."

I may fly to Louisville only to hear the in-flight announcements.

Bettmann Getty Images

A few degrees south, there's even more good memorializin' news in Alabama. From Smithsonian:



The Birmingham monument, a 52-foot-tall obelisk, was erected in a downtown park in 1905, according to Jay Reeves of the Associated Press. In court, the city argued that the wooden walls that had been set up around the monument did not technically constitute an alteration, and therefore did not violate the Memorial Preservation Act. The attorney general’s office disagreed, and said the state should be fined $25,000 a day for flouting the law. But the state’s argument failed to sway Jefferson County Circuit Judge Michael Graffeo, who voided the law on the grounds that it violated Birmingham residents’ right to free speech and denied them due process.

“The state has placed a thumb on the scale for a pro-confederacy message," Graffeo wrote in a 10-page ruling. “A city has a right to speak for itself, to say what it wishes, and to select the views that it wants to express,” Graffeo said. He also noted that Birmingham “has had for many years an overwhelmingly African American population,” and said it it is “undisputed that an overwhelming majority of the body politic of the city is repulsed by the monument.” Graffeo also struck down the state law because, he wrote, it did not provide Birmingham with any recourse to decide what it can and cannot do with its own property. “There is no provision in the act for the city or its citizens to be heard concerning the use … of the monument,” he explained.

Defending the law is Alabama's ambitious Attorney General, Steve Marshall, who, as John Archibald of AL.com points out, would do...

...everything in his power to make sure places like Birmingham and people like the descendants of slaves have no say in whether the monuments to the Confederate Lost Cause stand on their land and in their faces like a giant middle finger. It’s just the law of the land, he can say. That’s his plausible deniability, for it is certainly within his power to fight with all his might. But make no mistake. Steve Marshall, Alabama’s reigning Panderer in Chief, couldn’t separate his idea of law from his quest for power with a pneumatic chest spreader.

After all, how will certain Alabamians now honor those people who committed treason in defense of slavery if they don't have their sacred icons in the town square any more?



The monument in Birmingham Hal Yeager Getty Images

Things hotted up in a hurry in the ol' Unicameral in Nebraska. All kinds of people had all kinds of ideas, and some of them were really weird. From Nebraska public radio:

Meanwhile, Sen. Steve Erdman introduced a proposal to require schools to post the words “In God We Trust” in classrooms. Erdman says those words are the national motto, and putting them in front of students is important. “One of the things that’s happened over a period of time is we have taken God out of everything. And the society we live in today is not as good as when we had school prayer and we had God in things. And our Constitution is based on the Bible, and so consequently “In God we Trust” is our motto. Put it up and let people see it,” he said. Erdman’s bill also says that if anyone challenges it in court, the state attorney general will defend the school board or anyone else who is named as a defendant.

"You must waste our money on frivolous lawsuits defending blatantly unconstitutional laws because god wills it" is a very odd conservative position to take.

Up north in North Dakota, however, there's a proposal kicking around by folks who make Erdman look like Richard Dawkins. From the High Plains Reader:

“The bill calls it being an elective – not an essential studies course – which is two very different things,” Representative Aaron McWilliams, a co-signer from Hillsboro, said. “What the bill doesn’t do – some people look at it and immediately fear that what it does is say that you have to learn about the Bible in school – well, that’s not the case and that’s not what I support. “What the bill does do is if a school wants to have a historical Bible class, not a religious-based class, but historical-based literature or text that has formed the society that we are in, or at least has had, we can argue a big impact on it, right? Well, then that’s what they can learn about. Just like they did a class on Shakespeare or anything else.”

“If somebody wants to put up a bill that offers a special studies class, an elective, on the history of the Koran, go for it, put up the bill. I might even vote for it,” McWilliams, a Republican, said. [Ed. Note: No, he wouldn't.] “We could have made a bill that offered an elective class on you know, an elective class on the… the Upanishads, or a number of things. You can always look at things and say why didn’t we do this, not any particular reason other than we are Christian and you know a lot of the founding principles of the country are based on Christian principles and philosophies. “If you really want to understand the history of the United States you really need to understand the philosophy of the Bible and the Christian faith. By any means, it doesn’t mean the school needs to push it as a philosophy for your life, but it’s still our history.”

First of all, kudos to McWilliams for bringing Hinduism into the discussion. It doesn't mitigate my suspicions that McWilliams's bill is theocracy in sheep's clothing, but it's good to know he's widely read.

However, one of his supporters in the legislature seems to be a bit less open-minded.

Senator Oley Larsen, of Minot, owner of Oley Larsen 4 Insurance Agency, LLC, is the prime sponsor of the bill. According to his Facebook Likes, he is religious, a fan of Americans for Prosperity, and supports President Donald Trump and the National Rifle Association. On Larsen’s personal Facebook page he posted a meme...of Karl Marx with the caption: “If government-run school for kids wasn’t important I wouldn’t have put it in the Communist Manifesto.”

Following the Fire Breathing Christian links through Facebook the meme author identifies himself with a family picture and by the name of “Scott,” and apparently has issues with the public school system. On the organization’s website “Scott” posted a World War II era picture of children giving the Nazi salute with the quote: “Government-run children’s education leads to government-run everything else.”

If you're like me, it may have eluded you that the United States became both communist and fascist when public education became widespread in the 1840s and 1850s.

Human composting NELSON ALMEIDA Getty Images

We move along to Washington, where a proposal is before the legislature that will redefine the concept of a "dirt-nap." From MyNorthwest:

The second proposal would make Washington State the first in the nation to legalize human composting, also known as recomposition. “That involves placing a body in a vessel along with a bunch of organic material, then applying some heat and some air to it, and that accelerates the process of breaking down the body so that within about a month the body and organic material are reduced to soil,” Pedersen explained.

“You can do whatever you want with it. You’d be allowed if you wanted to do it in the most traditional way to buy a plot in a cemetery and sort of bury the material with a marker, (you) obviously wouldn’t need as much space as you would if you were burying a coffin. On the other hand you could put it in your backyard and plant a tree if you wanted to – and anything in between,” Pedersen said.

Seriously, once you get past the "That's just...weird" argument, there's really no objection you can make to the idea. And, yes, I've seen Soylent Green. Not every slope is a slippery one.

Industrial hemp ROMAIN LAFABREGUE Getty Images

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the Great State of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Saddle Soap allergy consultants Friedman of the Plains brings us the latest in our country's evolving relationship with weed—excuse me, industrial hemp. Two tons of it. From the Tulsa World:

Ross said Tuesday that the plant material — which he described as akin to “rotten hay” with mold on it — is legal industrial hemp. As CEO of Patriot Shield Security, Ross described it as his duty to protect the cargo en route to the purchaser, a Colorado company that offers hemp-based therapeutics. So Ross, Dirksen and the two men in the truck stayed on Main Street in Pawhuska for several hours to answer questions in a failed bid to convince law enforcement officers that they were legally transporting medicine, not illicit drugs. Then they were arrested.

“If we are drug traffickers, we’re the worst drug traffickers in the world,” Ross said. “Every different law enforcement agency that came on the scene tried to get us to leave. And we refused to leave. We stuck around. “It was product we were responsible for. So we stayed around to make sure it was handled correctly and just to answer any questions and to help everybody understand that it is industrial hemp. It’s a legal product.”

We plainly haven't got all the kinks out of this whole legalization business yet.

At first, Ross told the Tulsa World from the lobby of the county jail, he thought the matter would be resolved expeditiously. But he said it became clear that officers were confused and “had no idea what they were looking at.” More law enforcement agencies — the Osage County Sheriff’s Office, Osage Nation tribal police, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol — responded after police made the traffic stop. Eventually, around 9 or 10 a.m., representatives of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency arrived, Ross said. He thought that if someone — anyone — would recognize legal industrial hemp, it would be the DEA.

To his dismay, Ross said, the two agents thought the product appeared to be marijuana. A field test would turn up purple if THC was in the plant material, he was told. That was when he knew he and the others would be handcuffed and taken to jail, because legal hemp has minuscule amounts of THC. “Clearly this is industrial hemp. I don’t know what those DEA agents are talking about when they looked at it,” Ross said. “It’s literally a giant bag of like rotten hay. It’s got mold on it. It’s sticks and stems. It’s gross. It’s not something anybody would buy.

Glad to see the DEA cleared everything up. This is a large clusterfck, but it's a good song cue for Commander Cody.

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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