“It is worth the risk to see if we can protect our state from this far-reaching federal legislation”

From the home of John Calhoun and Fort Sumter:

A proposed bill, on special order in the state Senate, would allow the state attorney general to take businesses, including health insurers, to court if he “has reasonable cause to believe” they are harming people by implementing the law. The bill already has passed the House.

If it passes, the bill could push South Carolina to the forefront of Obamacare resistance, giving the state’s Republican leaders a national stage. It also could push South Carolina into yet another costly legal battle in the federal courts that, critics say, is unnecessary and avoidable.

It’s even more delicious:

What is troubling about the bill, [Sen. Larry] Martin said, is a provision that effectively would wipe out federal tax penalties for not complying with the law. For example, if someone refuses to buy health insurance, that person would have to pay more in federal taxes. But if South Carolina passes the proposal, that person would get a state tax deduction to offset their increased federal taxes

“West, Texas, wouldn’t have happened if they had a fire code in place.”

A bridge collapsed a couple days ago. In West, Texas, a fertilizer plant combusts yet the state prohibits most of its counties from keeping fire codes. The Dallas Morning News has the story:

Yet for 173 of Texas’ 254 counties, adopting rules based on that experience is illegal. They are either below 250,000 in population or don’t touch a county of that size.

Having fewer people doesn’t mean less risk. Those counties contain some of the most dangerous chemicals and industrial processes in Texas, The Dallas Morning News found.

“It’s not 1956 anymore,” said Jasper County Judge Mark Allen, whose county, while mostly rural, has multiple potential sources of industrial risks.

“It’s not 1964 or ’65,” Allen said. “We’re not Mayberry. We have life-threatening events every day.”

But 85 percent of the code-prohibited counties have no full-time professional fire department anywhere in the county, The News found. Only a few bigger industries have their own specially trained and equipped in-house fire brigades.

Training and gear for chemical emergencies are beyond the reach of most volunteer fire departments. In the 173 counties that cannot adopt a fire code, 21 have established local emergency-services districts, but few of those provide enough money even to cover the basics.

With a state-mandated tax cap of 10 cents per $100 in assessed property value, a $100,000 home provides an emergency-services district with no more than $100 a year.

Standard turnout gear for a volunteer firefighter can cost thousands. Many departments rely on fish-fry fundraisers and coin jars on local store counters just for essentials.

Chris Barron, executive director of the State Firemen’s and Fire Marshals’ Association of Texas, said he’s seen local volunteers thrilled to be able to buy an aging water tank truck, paint it red and put a flashing light on top.

The association, based in Austin, advocates for better fire-service funding, including for volunteers.

I suppose this is the spirit of volunteerism to which Republicans allude. County officials lack the comprehension to even ask for state aid:

McLennan County could have implemented a fire code that some experts say may have prevented the fatal explosions at the West Fertilizer Co.

Although Texas law prohibits many small counties from adopting such codes, McLennan is not among them. The county became eligible, according to the State Fire Marshal’s Office, after the 2010 census when the population of an adjacent county, Bell, exceeded 250,000.

But McLennan County didn’t act, perhaps because officials didn’t know they had the option.

On April 17, a fire at West Fertilizer led to two explosions of ammonium nitrate that killed 15, injured 200 and caused an estimated $100 million in property damage. Twelve of the dead were first responders.

Investigators said they have not pinpointed the cause of the fire, which burned for at least 22 minutes. But they have said there are three possible sources: a 120-volt electrical system, a battery-operated golf cart that may have overheated, or arson.

A properly enforced code requiring fire detection and automatic sprinkler systems might have stopped the blaze from triggering the explosions, said Scott Harris, who worked in Texas for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as an emergency response manager.

“If you can stop a fire in the beginning stage, then you don’t have an outcome like West. A small fire or electrical short or any kind of malfunction like that, the earlier you can catch it, the less the damage and hazard to the population,” said Harris, a senior adviser for a safety science firm, UL Workplace Health and Safety.

Loyd Dittfurth, a former volunteer firefighter in the Panhandle who has urged legislators to allow all Texas counties to adopt fire codes in their unincorporated areas, said he agreed.

“West, Texas, wouldn’t have happened if they had a fire code in place. If someone would have walked in there and said, ‘You don’t have a sprinkler system,’ there wouldn’t have been this tragedy,” said Dittfurth. He recently was hired as a code inspector for the state Department of Aging and Disability Services.

A sprinkler system. That’s it.

“It’s healthcare all over again!”

I’m not shattered like a few people I know are because Patrick Leahy’s amendment had as much chance of passing as a bill to elect Richard Cheney to life, but let’s remind people what kind of “politics” Lindsey Graham and the GOP practiced when removing protections for gay immigrant spouses:

One Democrat after another caved, entirely because they knew that if they supported LGBT rights, pathological deal-destroyer Lindsey Graham would destroy the deal. (He basically promised as much.) This is the micro form of the problem Democrats have been having since Obama took office: They want their legislation to pass, because they support the goals of their legislation. Republicans are indifferent, usually, to the goals of legislation and more concerned with how supporting or opposing bills makes them appear.

Democrats want immigration reform to pass because they want immigrants to have a chance to become citizens. Senate Republicans want to be seen as in favor of reform but they also wouldn’t mind (and in many cases would prefer) being seen as having been forced to regretfully withdraw their support from the reform proposal, because Democrats “overreached.”

So yesterday was a game where Republicans try to see how bad they can get away with making the bill, in order to try to get Democrats to jump ship, while Democrats tried to see how bad they had to allow the bill to be in order to retain Republican support. It’s healthcare all over again! In that fight, Republicans knew they had a strategic advantage, because Democrats desperately wanted to extend healthcare coverage to all Americans, and Republicans did not give a shit about that goal. So Republicans (and Lieberman) could just screw with the bill as much as they wanted and then not support it at all, confident that Democrats were too attached to the broader goal to give up on the bill just because there was no public option or Medicare buy-in.

Obama: “simply and utterly evil”

Ambinder:

One of the reasons why Americans aren’t outraged about Benghazi is that the event is a series of tragedies in search of a unifying explanation, and one that “Obama is evil” doesn’t cover. Because really, to suggest that the Pentagon or the White House would deliberately — and yes, this is EXACTLY what Republicans are suggesting — prevent special operations forces from rescuing American diplomats BECAUSE they worried about the potential political blowback because they KNEW exactly who was behind it (al Qaeda) is —well, it is to suggest that Barack Obama is simply and utterly evil.

The umbrage that State Department officials who were in Libya take at the response of the bureaucracy is well-grounded. But I wonder what it feels like to have their understandable ire, their mourning and grief and anger, be harnessed to a partisan political gladiator fight that’s aimed at a person who isn’t even running for president yet.

So here’s another absurdity. There is no way on God’s warming earth that the White House could have possibly “covered up” the fact of al Qaeda involvement had it been established early on and presented as a fact by the intelligence community. Republicans got briefings, classified briefings, attesting to the evidence that al Qeada-linked militants were ready to strike. The sources for that intelligence were sensitive at the time. But no matter: The briefings were accurate. Republicans knew. And indeed, they began to speak out almost immediately. And the White House, whatever it did and didn’t do, was forced to clarify very quickly what it was able to say about the incident. Where is the means and opportunity for a cover-up?

Or: if the GOP functioned like a legitimate opposition it would join force with liberal critics of the administration over drone warfare, War Powers expansion, and the assault on whistleblowers.

Expanding executive power — mellifluously

Noam Chomsky:

Q: On Obama’s 2012 election campaign web site, it clearly states that Obama has prosecuted six whistleblowers under the Espionage Act. Does he think he’s appealing to some constituency with that affirmation?

A: I don’t know what base he’s appealing to. If he thinks he’s appealing to the nationalist base, well, they’re not going to vote for him anyway. That’s why I don’t understand it. I don’t think he’s doing anything besides alienating his own natural base. So it’s something else.

What it is is the same kind of commitment to expanding executive power that Cheney and Rumsfeld had. He kind of puts it in mellifluous terms and there’s a little difference in his tone. It’s not as crude and brutal as they were, but it’s pretty hard to see much of a difference.

It also extends to other developments, most of which we don’t really know about, like the surveillance state that’s being built and the capacity to pick up electronic communication. It’s an enormous attack on personal space and privacy. There’s essentially nothing left. And that will get worse with the new drone technologies that are being developed and given to local police forces.

As for Citizens United, Chomsky may think it’s a “rotten” decision but “it does have some justifications” if you’re a free speech libertarian.

A certain level of violence so inherent that it’s shielded by the Constitution

Charles Pierce on why the gun control bill failed:

I wish I believed it was just all about money. Then Gabrielle Giffords, Michael Bloomberg and the other millionnaires lining up on the other side would have a fighting chance. I wish I believed that it was just all about power, and the threat of losing elections, because then the money now lining up on the other side could even the odds. But I don’t believe it is. There is a strong, coherent bloc in this building that believes that a certain level of violence is so inherent in this country that it is shielded absolutely by the Constitution, and that it is so essential to who we are as a people that to try to control it — let alone eliminate it — weakens our national institutions and blights our national character. There is nothing Machiavellian about this. It is what people believe is part of what makes America what it is. It is an essential article of faith. It is unshakable. It is implacable. And it is triumphant.

The hard work continues…

I hate to quote the Daily Kos but:

Okay, so the White House is now facing imminent defeat in the Democratically controlled Senate on legislation the president has staked a huge amount of his political capital. This is the first time I’ve seen a 90 percent approval issue fail. Combine that with no movement on important judicial and executive branch nominations. So far we’ve seen a stupid $1 trillion dollar discretionary spending cut we were told was never going to happen, happen. And of course we’ve witnessed the political mess of the White House winning the worst kind of friends by attacking Social Security and making enemies of damn near everyone else. We’re seeing stagnant workforce numbers, with still record numbers leaving the labor force, even more with some of the crappiest jobs imaginable, and even more stuck in the mud with few upside prospects. Not to mention austerity economics coming from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. And as a result, the president’s popularity is falling underwater and people still feel the country is careening.

If there’s at least one possible glimmer of win on the horizon, perhaps it is on immigration reform, but I’m not hopeful. The House is already talking about breaking up the bill. Considering this White House will always fight for any sort of line they can sign no matter how miniscule, I suspect by the time we get to the end of that process we will have possibly some watered down Dream Act and some extra money for border drones. That’s bout it. (h/t Digby)

Look, I had no hope this would pass, but that it came this close with an overwhelming majority of Americans supporting it means that the hard, awful, boring work of grassroots organizing must go on. They gotta keep at it. I agree with Michael Bloomberg of all people that the NRA’s power is vastly overrated yet the perception that the NRA is the NKVD frightens legislators. There will be a change.

Watch out, lawbreakers

“Amnesty” eh.

Though bashed as “amnesty” by hardliners, the congressional plans to legalize the status of undocumented immigrants treat them like law breakers who need to watch their step for more than a dozen years.

They’ll have to pay fines, get fingerprinted, show they’re crime-free taxpayers and — little reported until now — check in periodically with a probation-like immigration system to make sure they’re in good standing with the law, according to Democrats and Republicans familiar with the Senate’s proposed legislation, which will be released Tuesday.

Those who miss a scheduled payment of their fines, upwards of $2,000, could lose the right to stay in the United States.

The earliest that most of the currently undocumented immigrants could become citizens: 13 years from the date of passage of the act.

That timeline becomes longer if the federal government doesn’t meet timelines to make good on creating a new visa-tracking system, ensuring employers don’t knowingly hire the undocumented and securing the border — at a cost of at least $5 billion, according to one version of the Senate bill.

I suppose “amnesty” means “not returning eleven million illegal immigrants by force of bayonet.”

A zealot, a friend to mass murderers, and her children hated her

“As with Nixon, every year seems to bring new revelations of the viciousness of her government,” Alex Pareene writes in his obit to Thatcher:

Margaret Thatcher was a zealot, a friend to the worst mass murderers of the 1980s, a force for antisocial cruelty, and her violent means of ending the great British experiment in social democracy made the country a more brutal, less equal county. One of the most telling, and disturbing, of Thatcher’s catchphrases was “there is no alternative,” which was always invoked specifically to close off the possibility of considering the many extant alternatives to her top-down class warfare. At this point, the alternatives that might’ve produced a more equitable future are indeed long since gone, and the future — for England’s indebted, jobless youth and people the world over ground down by her philosophical comrades — looks about as grim as those horrid 1970s must’ve looked to the people who originally voted Thatcher into office. The world is better off without her, and it would’ve been much better off had she never existed in the first place.

Selling off large portions of England and tea with Pinochet. Offering no employment alternatives to the millions made redundant. Shouting for a phony war with Argentina over the Falklands. I wish my country were the sort to throw massive street parties upon the death of a political figure — I’d even accept one from the right should Bill Clinton keel over soon. Russell Brand, of all people put it best:

It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. They’re happy to share big windfall bonuses with their cronies, they’ll stick up for deposed dictator chums when they’re down on their luck, they’ll find opportunities in business for people they care about. I hope I’m not being reductive but it seems Thatcher’s time in power was solely spent diminishing the resources of those who had least for the advancement of those who had most. I know from my own indulgence in selfish behaviour that it’s much easier to get what you want if you remove from consideration the effect your actions will have on others.

Whatever the vacillations and compromises the left makes, it doesn’t treat this primary school twaddle as worth exposure on a website.

Margaret Thatcher

Germaine Greer’s 2009 assessment:

Thatcher’s strength derived directly from her limitations. If she had been better read, if she had been afflicted with imagination, if she had had a sense of humour, if she had had anywhere near as much insight into the lives of ordinary people as she claimed to have, she would have been unable to pursue her headlong career, riding roughshod over the consensus towards the property-owning debtor economy in which we now struggle. If socialism had been in better shape, she would not have been able to turn it into a dirty word or confuse it with totalitarianism and state monopoly capitalism. If the trade unions had not betrayed their own class, if they had understood the importance of organising all workers, including women, including those in the service sector, if they had not institutionalised inequality, the people might have defended the cause of labour.

The New Yorker disinterred Julian Barnes’ hilarious 1993 review of her memoir The Downing Street Years. “Top politicians generally have an arm’s-length acquaintance with their own language: they truly mean what others help them say,” he notes dryly.

Go ahead and try

I wasn’t surprised by the announcement yesterday that Barack Obama endorsed cuts to Social Security in the form of fiddling with a grotesquely named fiscal legerdemain called “chained CPI.” It didn’t surprise me because Barack Obama has governed like a boy who bought “I Like Ike” posters at thrift stores and because Democrats are stupid. Should House and Senate Democrats allow the president to get away with this flimflam, they will pay for it in 2014, a vengeance that will be exacted by moderate and conservative Democrats, not by liberals. As Digby notes:

A primary challenger doesn’t have to be an “ultra-lib” (whatever that is) to run against a Democrat who voted against Social Security. They could be a moderate or conservative, especially if there is a large elderly or veteran population. And it certainly doesn’t have to be in a swing district where a Republican might win the General. In fact, this will most likely happen in liberal districts if a progressive Democrat is foolish enough to vote with the president instead of her constituents. That’s where the activists have the most clout.

Of course, it won’t be confined to liberal districts because Social Security and medicare are so popular that even someone who is running from the right can use it to beat up a Democrat. I could see it happening in any Democratic district in the country. And certainly any Republican challenger will have no compunction about doing it: their only growing demographic is the elderly.

It has become a habit for newscasters to accept balderdash about Social Security from troglodytes. No one questions them. But don’t take my word for it. Let their suntanned demigod explain, in an obviously unscripited moment of exasperation:

The state with the prettiest name #487

Why my state rocks:

The House K-12 Education Subcommittee voted 10-3 in support of a controversial bill that would give principals the power to choose certain teachers and school employees who would carry concealed weapons on campus. The schools would have a choice of either arming a school employee or hiring a separate safety officer, who would also carry a firearm.

What dangers would this prevent?

Rep. Elizabeth Porter, R-Lake City, said she, too, “embraced” the bill.

“I would hope that if a madman were to walk on a campus where my children were and his goal was to die and to take as many children [as possible] with him, there would be somebody there to stop that man from murdering my children, and that somebody would take him out before he could do that,” she said.