You may remember the white Republicans who run Mississippi stole nearly $100 million of federal TANF funds intended for the state’s poor, many of whom are black. Two million dollars was paid to retired NFL player Brett Favre as “speaking fees” for talks he never gave, which he refu[...]
Posts Tagged ‘Bad States’
Black lives don’t matter in Florida
That’s the message Gov. Ron DeSantis, who wants to be president, sent when he banned African-American studies from Florida schools. One of his explicit objections to the course was inclusion of “Black Lives Matter” materials. According to him, “Black Lives Matter” has n[...]
Could Democrats flip Mississippi?
It’s an intriguing possibility. They have a great candidate, with unbeatable name recognition, and Republicans are mired in a welfare corruption scandal. Brandon Presley (who’s related to Elvis), “knows who to connect with voters, … listen to voters,” a strategist says.[...]
Don’t raise kids in Arizona
The importance of education doesn’t need to be explained or defended here. Arizona is known as a retirement haven. Low cost of living is part of what attracts older folks on fixed incomes. They don’t like paying school taxes, and don’t have school-age children, so they don’[...]
Why did Covid-19 kill more Republicans than Democrats?
Multiple academic studies have indicated that Republican were statistically more likely to die of Covid-19 than Democrats. The latest, a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, concludes, “Average excess death rates in Florida and Ohio were 76% higher among Republicans than [...]
September 20th, 2022 - 12:21 pm § in Politics, Republicans
Louisiana Republicans go Taliban on abortions
A GOP bill is moving through the Louisiana legislature that defines abortion as “murder” and will send women to prison for life, with no exceptions for rape or even saving the life of the mother. It also would imprison doctors for destroying in-vitro fertilization embryos, and ban Plan B[...]
September 1st, 2022 - 12:24 am § in Politics
How GOP Texas governor spends taxpayer money
Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) has spent $12.7 million busing border jumpers to Washington D.C., New York City, and Chicago (see story here). The Daily Mail says this dough paid for transporting more than 7,400 migrants out of Texas, which by my rough calculation comes out to about $1,700 per nose. The ben[...]
August 26th, 2022 - 10:52 pm § in Law and Courts, Racism
Does a law’s provenance matter?
I never thought I’d defend a Jim Crow law, but here goes. In a ruling on Wednesday, August 24, 2022, the federal 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a section of Mississippi’s state constitution that bars people convicted of certain felonies from voting (read story here). The 5th Circuit han[...]
Ban abortions or the sewer gets it!
No abortion enforcement, no flood control money. That’s the position of Louisiana attorney general Jeff Landry, a sanctimonious Republican anti-abortion zealot who’s flipping the (mostly black) citizens of New Orleans a big bird because their city government asked local law enforcers to [...]
GOP governors deny federal rent aid to working poor because it’s “socialism”
Republican governors in at least three states — Mississippi, Arkansas, and Nebraska — have turned away hundreds of millions of federal pandemic relief dollars allocated to preventing evictions because they don’t want their residents to receive those funds. In March 2022, Nebraska G[...]