(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 winds whisper to the buckeye trees of rhyme.

You may have noticed that there's a right expensive little ol' special congressional election down in Georgia next Tuesday. (Public Service Announcement: The shebeen's food truck will be on station in the Georgia 6th starting Sunday night.) Unfortunately, because of the complete ass-backwards way we conduct our elections in this country, there are some problems looming, as Tiger Beat on the Potomac explains.

When he learned that Kennesaw State University's Center for Election Systems tests and programs voting machines for the entire state of Georgia, he searched the center's website. "I was just looking for PDFs or documents," he recalls, hoping to find anything that might give him a little more sense of the center's work. But his curiosity turned to alarm when he encountered a number of files, arranged by county, that looked like they could be used to hack an election. Lamb wrote an automated script to scrape the site and see what was there, then went off to lunch while the program did its work. When he returned, he discovered that the script had downloaded 15 gigabytes of data."I was like whoa, whoa. … I did not mean to do that. … I was absolutely stunned, just the sheer quantity of files I had acquired," he tells Politico Magazine in his first interview since discovering the massive security breach.

That sounds, well, bad.

As Georgia prepares for a special runoff election this month in one of the country's most closely watched congressional races, and as new reports emerge about Russian attempts to breach American election systems, serious questions are being raised about the state's ability to safeguard the vote. Lamb's discovery, which he shared out of concern that state officials and the center ignored or brushed off serious problems highlighted by his breach, is at the heart of voting activists' fears that there's no way to be sure the upcoming race—which pits Democratic neophyte Jon Ossoff against Republican former Secretary of State Karen Handel—will be secure.

That sounds, well, worse.

The site was also using a years-old version of Drupal — content management software — that had a critical software vulnerability long known to security researchers. "Drupageddon," as researchers dubbed the vulnerability, got a lot of attention when it was first revealed in 2014. It would let attackers easily seize control of any site that used the software. A patch to fix the hole had been available for two years, but the center hadn't bothered to update the software, even though it was widely known in the security community that hackers had created automated scripts to attack the vulnerability back in 2014.

This horse departed the barn years ago, but the simple fix here involves paper ballots and No. 2 pencils. What's most disturbing is that, when this guy found these vulnerabilities, the people in charge of monitoring the balloting blew him off.

Last month, Marks and other plaintiffs filed a motion seeking an injunction to prevent the three counties casting ballots in the 6th Congressional District race—Fulton, DeKalb and Cobb—from using their touch-screen machines and use paper ballots instead. In court filings and a hearing last week, they cited Lamb's breach of the center's server as one reason the machines, and the center's oversight of them, cannot be trusted. They sought the injunction without knowing the full extent of Lamb's breach. Their concerns were validated last week with the publication of a classified National Security Agency report, which stated that hackers associated with Russian military intelligence had been behind the previously reported targeting of voter registration systems as well as an extensive phishing scheme to hack election officials.

If we start to believe that the results of every election are no more unpredictable than the card at SummerSlam, then that's really the end. That there is a constituency within our politics that actually is in favor of this situation is even worse. Paper ballots may be the last real weapon we have.

Moving north to Wisconsin, we discover that things have gotten complicated now that Republican lawmakers have decided they're done with Governor Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage that particular Midwest subsidiary. In response, Walker has leaned on his only real constituency: the flock of sugar daddies without whom he'd be running a bait shop outside Ashland. From The Capital Times:

In recent days, funding for K-12 schools has become another point of intraparty discord. Despite all conspiring together to enact the largest cuts to public education in state history, Walker and the legislative Republicans are now fighting among themselves over who will save our schools from the politicians' mutual actions. Not only have Speaker Robin Vos and his fellow Assembly Republicans rolled out their own education budget, they're criss-crossing the state holding media events to promote their repudiation of their fellow Republican, the governor. On top of it, it was reported in the news that Vos was a no-show to a backroom negotiating session with Walker and Senate GOP leader Scott Fitzgerald due to a "previous commitment."

Walker himself has become an insult in the war of words among legislative Republicans. (Ed Note: I love this. I truly do.) As if their education budget press conference was not provocative enough, Republican Assembly Speaker Vos attacked the Republican leader of the Senate by referring to him being a "rubber-stamp" for Governor Walker, and not in the good way.

What's a warped hunk of presidential timber to do? Unleash the fat cats!

He has instead issued a weak, gimmicky threat to "veto the entire budget" and holds lonely roadside press conferences at which he touts his doomed transportation plan. In perhaps the most stark indication of how low Scott Walker has sunk with his fellow Republicans, he's even had to resort to deploying longtime special interest allies to run paid advertising to convince fellow Republicans to … support a tax cut?!?!

Alas, all is not schadenfreude along the banks of Lake Monona. According to WUWM, this same state assembly signed the state up for a "convention of the states" designed to exchange James Madison and George Mason for Mark Levin and Jim DeMint.

Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos supports a balanced budget amendment. He says a constitutional change is necessary and blames former President Obama for increasing the national debt to $20 trillion. Vos wants people to visualize the huge number. "What is $20 trillion? It is 20 million million. It's a two followed by 13 zeros. Laying down dollar bills end to end, you can circle the Earth 76,000 times. It would take 634,000 years to count to one trillion," Vos says.

Ostensibly, the convention would be convened only to hamstring the federal government with The Worst Idea In American Politics. However, once called, there is nothing that guarantees it would not be used to rewrite the entire Constitution to follow the Gospel According To Koch. And, despite their demurrals, the snake-oil peddlers who are perilously close to achieving their goal know good and well this is the case. There never has been a more lethal Trojan horse than this one.

So we move to Colorado and we find that a local Republican poobah wasted no time in capitalizing on the shooting in Alexandria. The New York Daily News busted the guy, who apparently didn't wait until Steve Scalise was out of surgery.

"The left is out of control. Their violent actions are un-American, and it needs to stop!" reads an email signed by Colorado House Minority Leader Patrick Neville. The fundraising note went out just hours after gunman James Hodgkinson opened fire on a baseball field in Alexandria, Va., where congressional lawmakers were practicing for Thursday's Congressional Baseball Game.

This is where our politics have left us. We now have political fundraisers who legitimately can be referred to as ambulance chasers.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Sandstone Whisperer Friedman of the Plains brings us the tale of first-responders who are baffled by modern technology. From Fox23 News:

Tulsa police confirmed that they do have additional footage and that the officer who opened fire on Barré was wearing a body camera, but they say they are working to download the video from their system.

Hey, it's hard when you're using a food processor on the video.

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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