Tales from the States as they try to outdo one another toward retrogression.
Vote, and vote Ed Markey!
We don’t need another Republican thug in the United States Senate.
In case ANYONE in Massachusetts mistakes Gabriel Gomez for a decent human being.
It does not have a state fire code, and it prohibits smaller counties from having such codes. Some Texas counties even cite the lack of local fire codes as a reason for companies to move there. But Texas has also had the nation’s highest number of workplace fatalities — more than 400 annually — for much of the past decade. Fires and explosions at Texas’ more than 1,300 chemical and industrial plants have cost as much in property damage as those in all the other states combined for the five years ending in May 2012. Compared with Illinois, which has the nation’s second-largest number of high-risk sites, more than 950, but tighter fire and safety rules, Texas had more than three times the number of accidents, four times the number of injuries and deaths, and 300 times the property damage costs….
It is impossible to know whether tougher regulations would have prevented the disaster near West, especially since investigators remain unsure what sparked the fire that caused the fertilizer to explode. McLennan is among the counties without a fire code.
But federal officials and fire safety experts contend that fire codes and other requirements would probably have made a difference. A fire code would have required frequent inspections by fire marshals who might have prohibited the plant’s owner from storing the fertilizer just hundreds of feet from a school, a hospital, a railroad and other public buildings, they say. A fire code also would probably have mandated sprinklers and forbidden the storage of ammonium nitrate near combustible materials. (Investigators say the fertilizer was stored in a largely wooden building near piles of seed, one possible factor in the fire.)
“It’s tough to overstate the importance fire codes would have made,” said Scott Harris, a former emergency management coordinator in Texas for the Environmental Protection Agency, who is now with UL Workplace Health and Safety, a safety science company. “Texas just hasn’t wrapped its brain around this fact yet.”
— After Explosion, Texas Remains Wary of Regulation - NYTimes.com (via dendroica)(via fortheloveofgop)
The first poll of the June special election for the open U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts is not encouraging:
Ed Markey (D): 44
Gabriel Gomez (R): 40
Undecided: 16
Now, even though it’s Massachusetts, it’s not surprising this is a close race. Witness Scott Brown. And like Scott Brown, Republican Gabriel Gomez is selling himself as a guy who’s above the political fray, who says he sees “‘a lot of unproductive noise and bickering’ in Washington and thinks he can help fix problems.”
Gomez is anything but that.He’s nothing more than a swift boater, the spokesman for a right-wing, secretly funded group called the Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund. That’s the group that spent nearly $500,000 attacking President Obama in the 2012 election over supposed leaks about the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. That’s apparently not “unproductive noise” in Gomez’s world.
Which perhaps makes Gomez less like Scott Brown than, say, Alan West. Whatever the comparison, that’s not what the Senate needs.…..
Keep fighting,
Joan McCarter, Daily Kos
Ed Markey is a much stronger candidate by all accounts than Martha Coakley was, though. Not saying Massachusetts Democrats should be overconfident, or shouldn’t have a sense of urgency, but this isn’t quite comparable to the conditions that let Brown Noser get into office.
(via recall-all-republicans)
North Carolina bill requiring teens to get notarized parental permission for medical and mental health care including STD testing heads to house floor
Raleigh, N.C. (WRAL) — North Carolina could be on the verge of implementing the nation’s strictest law on medical care for teenagers.
House Bill 693 would require notarized written approval from a parent before a doctor or other provider could diagnose, treat or even counsel anyone under 18 for mental health or substance abuse. Parental approval would also be required for contraception, pregnancy care and testing for sexually transmitted diseases.
North Carolina would be the only state in the nation to require parental consent for STD testing.
Sponsor Rep. Chris Whitmire, R-Transylvania, says the bill “strengthens parental rights in their determination of what’s appropriate in terms of their child’s medical needs.”
Whitmire said that, if a minor needs mental health, substance abuse, STD or contraceptive care, “it reflects a risky behavior that goes down a primrose path that yields these outcomes. It’s very behavioral related.”
So, now teens who are at risk of or think they may have an STD won’t get tested, are these fucksticks TRYING to make North Carolina the STD capital of the US?
Because that’s what’s going to happen if this bill passes.
Children with abusive parents will have no safe way of seeking help with mental health issues related to that abuse.
This is so fucked up on so many levels, way to go North Carolina GOP, small government, huh?
(via stfuconservatives)
My issue with him is not that he had an affair. I don’t presume to know what arrangements married folks might have.
It’s that he and the people who voted for him today — independents, Republicans, spineless Democrats — are such fucking hypocrites. When he was in Congress the first time, he voted to impeach Clinton for his extramarital activities. As Governor of South Carolina, he (like virtually every Republican politician here) wanted to be Mr Family Values. Small government! But big enough to be all up people’s uteruses to make sure abortion is difficult to access! And big enough to legislate people’s emotional, sexual and legal lives! I mean, a fucking amendment to the state constitution passed under his watch to ban marriage equality, to actively discriminate against a population of South Carolina taxpayers and citizens.
And the circumstances surrounding the infamous Appalachian Trail moment are particularly appalling: it’s not just that he visited his lover in Argentina. IT”S THAT HE ACTUALLY DISAPPEARED, WAS UNREACHABLE FOR DAYS. HE ABANDONED HIS CONSTITUTIONAL OBLIGATIONS AS GOVERNOR OF THIS STATE. His own staff had no idea where he was. Is there a gubernatorial equivalent of Dereliction of Duty? Because that’s what happened: no one knew that for several days, we had no acting head of state.
But hey! He’s a good guy, right?! I mean, he’s a Republican; he must be OK! I know the 1st SC congressional district hasn’t sent a Democrat to Congress in 30 years, but REALLY? You lot think this is the guy to represent you? That any Republican is better than no Republican?
I’ve raged myself into a headache. I just cannot with this state. It is geologically beautiful — beaches, mountains, all that jazz. But it is being socially and politically destroyed by the ultra-conservative Republicans who now own the Governor’s mansion and both houses of the State Assembly.
(via letfreedomlulz)
#Breaking: CNN projects Mark Sanford has defeated Elizabeth Colbert Busch in the SC 1st District special Congressional election.
- South Carolina’s 1st District House seat Special Election: 59% Reporting, Republican Sanford leads Democrat Colbert Busch 54.5% - 45.1%
- That was quick. @Redistrict says “It’s over”. Sanford has won the special election in South Carolina. May it not be so. #Sanford
- “PPP’s final poll of special election in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional Sanford leading Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch 47-46”
- If @MarkSanford wins this election, I’ve lost all faith in #SouthCarolina
- AP: 172 of 317 Precincts Reporting — @MarkSanford 55% and @ColbertBuschSC 45% http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/files/elections/2013/by_county/SC_US_House_0507.html?SITE=CSPANELN&SECTION=POLITICS …
- Sanford 54.5%, Colbert Busch 45.1%, 59.0% Reporting http://politi.co/12eM8l2
- South Carolina, you’re not allowed to vote again. Ever. Really??!!! RT @UnitedLiberals: Mark Sanford will win the SC-1 special election
- Mark Sanford, former Governor of South Carolina, defeats Elizabeth Colbert-Busch, sister of comedian Stephen Colbert in the SC1 by-election.
- Seriously, Sanford effing won the House election? Major #facepalm to South Carolina voters. Seriously!
- BREAKING: Mark Sanford will fill the vacant U.S. House seat in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, @CNN projects (@cnnbrk)
My reaction to Sanford’s win:
“I was not intending to offend anyone,” he said. “I’m sorry if they took it that way. That’s not what the metaphor means.”The top Democratic Party official in North Carolina compared Republican actions in the state to rape Thursday. Randy Voller, the North Carolina Democratic Party chairman and mayor of Pittsboro reportedly said, “the GOP that’s leading us – we don’t know where they’re taking us, but they’re raping us along the way.”
Voller was speaking to the Democratic Women of Guilford County at their annual President’s Spring Banquet according to the News-Record.
The quote came out in a tweet from the Guliford County Democrats, who were live tweeting the event. Voller said the tweet, which was quickly deleted, was being taken out of context.
“I think it’s a complete misquote, or a redaction,” Voller told WRAL in North Carolina. “I did use the term contextually.”
“It’s as if barbarians are pillaging and plundering. I’m talking about the destruction that’s going on,” he said referring to Republican-controlled North Carolina legislature. “It’s no different than saying that fracking is raping the land.Voller said he was “sorry” if people were offended.
“I was not intending to offend anyone,” he said. “I’m sorry if they took it that way. That’s not what the metaphor means.”
When a News-Record reporter told Voller there was a likely chance a woman at the event had been a victim of rape, Voller said he could have been a victim as well.
“I don’t know that,” Voller said. “Women and men are both victims of abusive power and violence. I personally could have been raped.”
Dude. Stop. Digging.
A Kentucky boy accidentally shot and killed his 2-year-old sister with the .22-caliber rifle he got for his birthday, state officials said.“‘It was God’s will. It was her time to go, I guess,’ [the grandmother] told WLEX. ‘I just know she’s in heaven right now and I know she’s in good hands with the Lord.’”
are you fucking serious
This is my state. Save me.
(via t0love1self)
