Last Call For We Don't Need No Education

The failure of the Democrats at the local and state government level during the Obama years in America has given us a unique breed of lawmaker: the embarrassingly unqualified Republican nutjob in a state legislature leadership position. Today's example is in Arizona.

An Arizona lawmaker who believes the earth is only 6,000 years old and that the U.S. government regularly sprays its citizens with mind-controlling chemtrails has been selected to lead an Arizona legislative committee overseeing education.

Sen. Sylvia Allen (R-Snowflake), was selected by fellow Republican and Senate president Andy Biggs to chair of the Arizona Senate Education Committee, according to 12News. The committee acts as a gatekeeper for education-related laws, including Common Core and spending.

“She understands what Arizona students and parents need in our education system,” Biggs told reporters in a prepared statement. “She is a very experienced legislator and I know she will do a wonderful job.”

According to AZCentral, Allen attended high school but did not go to college. She helped found a charter school in her home town of Snowflake.

In March, Allen made national news when she derailed a discussion about gun legislation to suggest a law that forces Americans to go to church on Sundays.

In March 2013, she wrote an addled Facebook post about her belief the government was purposely poisoning its citizens with chemicals sprayed by airplanes, confusing white contrails left by aircraft with chemical trails.

“Ok, I do not want to get into a debate about weather. However, I know what I see weekly up here on the flat where I live outside of Snowflake. The planes usely (sic), three or four, fly a grid across the sky and leave long white trails streaming behind them. I have watched the chem-trails move out until the entire sky is covered with flimsy, thin cloud cover,” she wrote. “Things are happening all around us that we see everyday and just don’t get what it is. I think we throw the ‘conspiracy theory’ at people when we don’t understand or have the information they have so we try and explain it that way.”

This woman should not only be disqualified from this committee, but public office as well and should probably seek a mental health professional. Yet, a Young Earth Creationist who believes the government is poisoning its citizens has been elected and re-elected by people who clearly have no problem with that, and is now in charge of Arizona's educational legislation.

It used to be people this staggeringly ignorant were relegated to a trailer out in the middle of nowhere and ignored at family holiday gatherings.  Now they make state laws for schools.

We have to get more Democrats running for local and state government in all 50 states, or we're going to lose the place to these assholes.

Dead To Rights In Missouri

You know what they say, "Guns don't kill people..."

Of course, making it much easier to obtain a gun as Missouri did in 2007 means that the state now has a significantly higher rate of people using guns to kill people, so there's that.

In the past decade, Missouri has been a natural experiment in what happens when a state relaxes its gun control laws. For decades, it had one of the nation’s strongest measures to keep guns from dangerous people: a requirement that all handgun buyers get a gun permit by undergoing a background check in person at a sheriff’s office.

But the legislature repealed that in 2007 and approved a flurry of other changes, including, last year, lowering the legal age to carry a concealed gun to 19. What has followed may help answer a central question of the gun control debate: Does allowing people to more easily obtain guns make society safer or more dangerous?

We now have a pretty clear and tragic answer in Missouri.

Research by Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, found that in the first six years after the state repealed the requirement for comprehensive background checks and purchase permits, the gun homicide rate was 16 percent higher than it was the six years before. During the same period, the national rate declined by 11 percent. After Professor Webster controlled for poverty and other factors that could influence the homicide rate, and took into account homicide rates in other states, the result was slightly higher, rising by 18 percent in Missouri. 

Federal death data released this month for 2014 showed a continuation of the trend, he said. Before the repeal, from 1999 to 2006, Missouri’s gun homicide rate was 13.8 percent higher than the national rate. From 2008 to 2014, it was 47 percent higher. (The new data also showed that the national death rate from guns was equal to that from motor vehicle crashes for the first time since the government began systematically tracking it.) 

Other measures suggested that criminals had easier access to guns after the permit law was repealed. Professor Webster analyzed data from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and found that the share of guns that were linked to crimes soon after they were bought doubled in the state from 2006 to 2010. The portion of guns confiscated by the police in Missouri that had been originally bought in the state — ordinarily a very stable statistic — rose to 74 percent last year, from 56 percent before the law changed.

The firearms industry would like you to believe that this is a case where correlation has nothing to do with causation, but the statistics are difficult to reconcile otherwise.

Missouri made it much easier to get a gun.  As a result, more people used them for their intended purpose.  There's now several years of data backing this up...but remember, according to Republicans, science is all a lie, so why bother?

This Week In Dispatches From Bevinstan, Con't

Somehow, I think I'm going to be writing a Stupid Shit My Governor Does column enough so that I should just make it a weekly "all in one place" kinda thing.

Anyway. now that ol' Matt has had a few weeks in house, he's starting to warm up to this whole "executive order" thing when it comes to those pesky same-sex mariage licenses that cause trouble over the fall.

To ensure that the sincerely held religious beliefs of all Kentuckians are honored, Executive Order 2015-048 directs the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives to issue a revised marriage license form to the offices of all Kentucky County Clerks. The name of the County Clerk is no longer required to appear on the form.

So a win for Kim Davis.  Who else can Bevin make happy?  You remember Steve Beshear signing an order to restore voting rights to felons?

GONE.

While Governor Bevin has been a strong advocate for the reinstatement of non-violent felony offenders’ voting and civil rights, Executive Order 2015-052 suspends the provisions of Executive Order 2015-871 as that order is contrary to the Kentucky Constitution and undermines the very right it seeks to restore by circumventing elected representatives in the state legislature and the voice of the people at the ballot box. The Office of the Governor will continue to utilize the processes and procedures under current law in the same manner as the previous administration pending further study and consideration by the Kentucky General Assembly. This Executive Order does not affect anyone whose rights have already been restored by the previous Executive Order.

Also gone, higher minimum wages for state employees and vendors

Executive Order 2015-049 relieves executive branch agencies and vendors of the obligation to comply with the higher minimum wage established by Executive Order 2015-370, except as to classified employees with status who have already received increases as a result of the Executive Order. Their remuneration will not be affected.

...and a new permanent hiring freeze on state positions.

Executive Order 2015-050 prioritizes effective and efficient management of state government operations by implementing a new moratorium on hiring. This order removes all oversight of the merit system hiring from the Governor’s Office. Unlike Gov. Beshear’s Executive Order, which had the Secretary of the Governor’s Executive Cabinet approve all personnel actions regarding merit employees, this Executive Order transfers that responsibility to the Personnel Secretary. Approval of non-merit employees will remain the duty of the Secretary of the Governor’s Executive Cabinet. Furthermore, effective immediately, all vacant positions in any agency will be reviewed to determine if they are necessary to the maintenance of essential government services.

Going to be real fun when Bevin determines that current employees are no longer essential to government services and fires tens of thousands of state workers.

The fun's just beginning here in Bevinstan, folks!

StupidiNews!

• NASA is sending a faulty instrument discovered in its upcoming InSight Mars mission back to Lockheed Martin for repairs, meaning a scheduled March launch is suspended until 2018.
• Greece's parliament has passes a same-sex civil union bill, but critics say the bill still denies several rights to same-sex couples and could lead to more EU legal action.
• Iraqi Army forces say they expect routed Islamic State forces to be removed from the captured city of Ramadi within days, but that still leaves a third of Iraq under ISIS control.
• Low oil prices continue to take a toll on Alberta's economy as provincial unemployment is on the rise above Canada's national average for the first time in more than a decade.
• A New Zealand judge has ordered Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom to be extradited to the US to face criminal copyright infringement charges.