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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 government' gets done, and where, if you go down in the flood, it's gonna be your fault.

We begin this week behind, as Top Commenter Roy Webb calls it, the Zion Curtain, where a federal judge got fed right up to his eyebrows with our litigious society, and with the Utah legislature, not necessarily in that order. From Fox13 in SLC:

"While the effect of attorneys’ fee awards on the public treasury is something that the State may properly consider in enacting, enforcing, and defending legislation, that effect has nothing to do with the reasonableness of Brewvies’ attorneys’ fees. The political judgment of the State that it will enact a statute contrary to existing law and risk payment of legal fees is a legitimate choice, but it has consequences," Judge Nuffer wrote, adding:"As long as the legislature passes laws which the attorney general is obligated to defend, the financial risks to the State and taxpayers will continue. Legislative enactment of constitutional legislation – and abandonment or non-enforcement of unconstitutional legislation – is a better way to avoid this type of fee award."

I've often wondered why there isn't more political salience and more political consequences for state legislatures that waste their taxpayers' money defending laws they know—or ought to know—are unconstitutional, and cases that they know—or ought to know—are hopeless. People should lose their jobs behind some of this stuff.

This particular cause of action was not only hopeless, but embarrassingly trivial.

The ruling effectively ends a lawsuit that centered around the Salt Lake City movie theater, which faced revocation of its liquor license last year for showing the movie "Deadpool." Utah liquor laws forbade licensees from showing anything with full nudity or sexually explicit conduct. Brewvies had previously faced trouble for showing "The Hangover Part II," "Ted 2" and "Magic Mike XXL."

Get over yourselves, people. Ted 2 is not worth spending half-a-million dollars over. I'm not entirely sure it made that much at the box office. It certainly shouldn't have.

Marvel Studios

We move on up to West Virginia, where there is a pipeline project, which means that there are rich people lying and cheating all over the place. From TruthDig, ProPublica, and The Charleston Gazette-Mail:

On Tuesday, a federal appeals court blocked a key permit for Mountain Valley Pipeline, a 300-mile natural gas project that’s known as MVP. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wrongly approved a permit that allowed MVP to temporarily dam four of West Virginia’s rivers so the pipeline can be buried beneath the streambeds.

But rather than pausing or rethinking the project, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection has already been rewriting the state construction standards for pipeline river crossings that prompted the appeals court to block the plan. Once that happens, MVP will apply for a new Clean Water Act permit, which it expects to secure in early 2019, said Natalie Cox, a spokeswoman for the pipeline’s developers. Developers still expect the pipeline to be in service by the fourth quarter of 2019, she said.

“MVP is committed to the safety of its communities, to the preservation and protection of the environment, and to the continued responsible construction of this important natural gas infrastructure project that will serve homes and business in the mid-Atlantic and Southeast United States,” Cox said in a statement.

Lose by the rules? Then change the rules. Simple as that. It's how autocracies operate. This pipeline will leak—or, perhaps, explode—because pipelines leak, and the company will lie about the circumstances and consequences of the leak. West Virginia deserves so much better than being a vassal state for the extraction industries and an opioid dumping ground for Big Pharma.

Steve Helber/AP/REX/Shutterstock

(And, not for nothing, but Ken Ward, Jr., whose byline is on this pipeline piece, was just chosen to receive a MacArthur "genius grant," the only journalist to receive one this time around. Of course, the Gazette-Mail went bankrupt and was sold to HD Media, which promptly laid everybody off, including Ward. Support your local newspaper, dammit.)

We now move along to Tennessee, where, in keeping with the news generally, and in the tradition of Tennessee Congressman Scott DeJarlais, a truly despicable human, we find a state legislator named David Byrd, who is looking to Kavanaugh for his way to re-election despite some serious trouble with the law. (He's even a former girls basketball coach!) From The Tennesseean:

Byrd, R-Waynesboro, told reporters his intentions to run again after his bill to arm certain teachers in Tennessee died in a House committee and a week after the WSMV report in which the women made the allegations. “I’ve actually announced for re-election. I did that over the weekend on my Facebook page, and I had probably over 1,200 positive comments and shares and likes and when you get 1,200 comments on one Facebook post, you’ve got quite a bit of support," Byrd said...The allegations date back to when Byrd served as head coach of the Wayne County High School girls basketball team, the Lady Cats. Two of the women were 15 and one was 16 at the time they say their then-28-year-old coach sexually assaulted them.

I'm sure he's finishing up his Wall Street Journal op-ed over the weekend.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Sand Dabber Friedman of the Plains brings us...good news! From the Tulsa World:

The city will begin with Oaklawn Cemetery, which has been searched before for unmarked graves, before moving on to Rolling Oaks Memorial Gardens, formerly Booker T. Washington Cemetery, and property near Newblock Park. No time table has been set.

Getty Images

“What we are looking at doing is really three phases,” Bynum said. “First, identifying if there are mass graves at all. And if there are, identifying what kind of mass grave it is. Is it a pauper’s grave, or is it a true mass grave from the massacre? And third, if it is a mass grave from the massacre, then we want to do forensic examination on the bodies that are there to hopefully identify them and their causes of death. “I think all of that will help inform a greater understanding around what happened in 1921.”

Bynum said he reached out to Brooks after becoming mayor to restart the discussion about possible mass grave sites. His discussions with Brooks, both old and new, have informed the city’s approach to the examination. It was through Brooks, Bynum said, that he learned that the Oaklawn Cemetery would be the best place to begin the investigation.

The 1921 pogrom and massacre of African-Americans in Tulsa was one of the worst racial conflagrations in the country's history. That it was called a "race riot" for decades was a crime against history. For god's sake, the local white government called in fcking air power. From Smithsonian:

“I could see planes circling in mid-air. They grew in number and hummed, darted and dipped low. I could hear something like hail falling upon the top of my office building. Down East Archer, I saw the old Mid-Way hotel on fire, burning from its top, and then another and another and another building began to burn from their top,” wrote (1879-1960). The Oklahoma lawyer, father of famed African-American historian John Hope Franklin (1915-2009), was describing the attack by hundreds of whites on the thriving black neighborhood known as Greenwood in the booming oil town. “Lurid flames roared and belched and licked their forked tongues into the air. Smoke ascended the sky in thick, black volumes and amid it all, the planes—now a dozen or more in number—still hummed and darted here and there with the agility of natural birds of the air.”

“The side-walks were literally covered with burning turpentine balls. I knew all too well where they came from, and I knew all too well why every burning building first caught from the top,” he continues. “I paused and waited for an opportune time to escape. ‘Where oh where is our splendid fire department with its half dozen stations?’ I asked myself. ‘Is the city in conspiracy with the mob?’”

It is only now climbing out of that conspiracy.

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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