This Week in the Laboratories of Democracy
(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)
Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin' gets done and where we're gonna shake them all down like the early Roman kings.
We begin in Ground Zero Ohio. I have to confess that the Cincinnati Bengals largely have been off my radar since, in my previous incarnation, I saw them get Joe Montana-ed in the 1989 Super Bowl. But I rise today in tribute to the current crop of Bengals, who displayed rare good taste this week. From Yahoo! Sports:
In a video that has since gone viral, Vance can be seen standing near a walkway as Bengals players file past him. And almost none of them appeared to even acknowledge him standing there. Vance stopped by the Bengals' facility after giving a speech in Ohio on Wednesday. He toured the locker room with a large entourage and shook hands with head coach Zac Taylor as players returned for practice.
Now, I am perfectly aware that football players are rather single-minded, especially during the playing season, and that it's possible the Bengals didn't recognize who Vance was. (Lucky Bengals!). But I prefer to believe that they snubbed him because he is America's most unlikable human, and because he was in Ohio stanning for Vivek Ramaswamy, America's second-most unlikable human. They are a couple of practice-squad ratfckers.
It is that time in the election cycle in which we look around the country for the strange and wonderful about representative democracy. For example, there is the election in California's 22nd state senate district. From the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin:
First, there’s the incumbent, Democrat Susan Rubio, who ignored multiple requests for an interview. Elected to the California Senate in 2018, Rubio was the subject of some controversy two years ago. Though she’s never been accused of wrongdoing by prosecutors, according to CalMatters Rubio is the only person who matched the description of a person referred to in federal court documents as “Person 20.”
“Person 20,” as CalMatters described it, is someone who “asked for $240,000 in bribes from a cannabis company and accepted $30,000 in illegal campaign contributions.” The allegations date back to when Rubio was on the Baldwin Park City Council. Asked about the matter by CBS News in 2025, Rubio denied ever taking bribes, while a spokesperson added that “there is no case against Senator Rubio, and there is no violation being investigated by the Senate or Assembly.”
Rubio claimed she is no longer a target of the investigation but one never wants to be identified as a Number in federal court documents. Very bad look for an incumbent. Of course, then there's the Republican challenger and whoooo, doggies.
On the other hand, we have the challenger, Republican Mike Netter. Netter gained notoriety for leading the 2020 recall attempt against Governor Gavin Newsom but he’s also a small business owner, and a radio host at KABC Talk Radio AM 790 where he talks politics. Netter is a unique cat. He’s a source of endless gripes and grievances with the establishment, criticizing Democrats and Republicans alike, all expressed with the liveliness you would expect from a radio host...
...Netter’s reasonable points were often nested within many bizarre claims. When I asked him to expand on why he thought politicians should “walk away from the academias,” his claims got stranger, including claiming that he is in academia and that he spent a lot of time studying physics. As was often the case during our interview, when Netter allowed himself to wander, it provided too many false or absurd claims to unpack. Netter is not associated with any academic institution and does not have a degree in physics or any other four-year degree, so I’m not sure why he said that.
Neither am I, but it's fun to speculate.
I got the impression that he entered “radio mode” where defensible ideas were mixed with factually dubious storytelling. The upshot is that we’re left to wonder whether his eccentric (but entertaining) trains of thought would translate to good advocacy and leadership in the Senate. The radio talk wasn’t all bad. Netter did sneak in a good joke when he complained about high costs in California, specifically about Taco Bell’s Burrito Supreme costing $7. “Which, by the way, they need to change the name on. It’s a ‘burrito formerly known as Supreme’ because it’s about that big.”
Thank you, Rafael Perez for adding "Radio Mode" to the Blog's lexicon.
There are something like 6,000 state legislature seats up for grabs in a couple of weeks.
Meanwhile, Chaz Nuttycombe—Real name? Who the fck knows?—of State Navigate introduces us to incumbent Jeff Shipley, the former sauerkraut salesman who is the Republican incumbent representing House District 87 in Iowa.
His first session was a wild one for sure. He filed bills to let hospital workers refuse immunizations, to take psilocybin off Schedule I and to require every high schooler to read Solzhenitsyn to graduate.
[Ed. Note: I would have to ingest beaucoup psilocybin to read Solzhenitsyn again]
In December 2019 he told California state Senator Richard Pan, a pediatrician who wrote that state's vaccine law, that he was "a medical rapist," then apologized for the phrase by suggesting "pharma fascist" or "corporate vaccine whore" would have been more accurate. Then came the pandemic. In April 2020 he tweeted that young people had "a greater chance of being killed by the HPV vaccine than COVID-19," admitted to a student reporter he had no data, and earned a Pants on Fire from PolitiFact. On June 3rd that year, the Legislature's first day back, he told an anti-mandate rally on the Capitol steps that "this virus isn't even killing anybody". He called his masked colleagues' face coverings "virtue signaling," said a safe vaccine was "probably impossible to develop," and then returned to the microphone to call Bill Gates "a monster," concede that "no one is dying" was "not technically true," and announce that he identifies "as an eternal spirit which will live on long after my body passes." Iowa Starting Line counted 249 tweets from him over the 12 session days, including calling a state epidemiologist "a sniveling coward" and a gay legislative candidate "a walking public health crisis." Back in Fairfield, his former mentor called him "an exceptionally dangerous person.”
It will probably shock you to realize that Shipley is a big fan of ivermectin. And that his people skills need a bit of a tune-up. From Little Village:
On March 3, state representative Jeff Shipley posted a photo from the Iowa House floor holding up a box of ivermectin. Specifically, the Republican from Fairfield was holding a box of apple-flavored IverCare paste. The label showed a horse silhouette and a feeding syringe.
Wait, what? Apple-flavored horse paste? There are flavors? Who knew?
“OTC ivermectin now being debated in the Iowa House,” Shipley captioned the photo on Facebook. Thirty minutes later, he updated: “Bill passes 64-30!! Parasites are very upset!”...The pandemic saw the University of Iowa grad from Naperville, Illinois emerge as an outspoken anti-mask and anti-vax voice in the State Capitol, with a special disdain for margarine, chemtrails and LGBTQ people. A longtime admirer of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Shipley was made for this MAHA moment—even if he’s far from its most effective communicator.
I think this is a fairly accurate statement.
Like many of Shipley’s social media posts, the horse paste photo on March 3 drew both supportive and mocking comments. But the harshest words allegedly came from Shipley himself, after a member of the public from Cedar Falls called the District 87 representative to talk ivermectin. “During the course of our phone call,” they recounted on Reddit, and later confirmed for Iowa Starting Line, “he [Shipley] asked if I think oncology works better, and I said yes, and he immediately said well ‘you sound like a r*tar*ed f*gg*t.’ I told him he shouldn’t refer to citizens that way, and he said nobody would care.”
This meathead copped to the slurs in the most Trumpian of ways.
Shipley confirmed the incident in an email to Little Village. “I never called him a name, I merely asked a rhetorical question [‘are you a…’],” Shipley said. “This person then became unglued, so I apologized.” The state rep provided LV with a bulleted list of “Various examples of someone who is a retarded faggot (or fagtard for short).” On the list is, “A person who spends way too much time on reddit and publicly cries about being called a name by someone they were harassing.”
Lovely. This is the future of the Republican party.
And we conclude, as is out custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Oyster Shucker Friedman of the Algarve brings us a tale of what happens when you Leave It To The States. From Oklahoma Voice:
Oklahoma has had at least 222 criminal cases related to women’s pregnancies or births since the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allowed the state to end abortion access, according to new data released Tuesday by a nonprofit that advocates for pregnant women. Nationwide, there have been over 900 such cases but this number is likely an underrepresentation of pregnancy-related prosecutions, according to the report released by Pregnancy Justice, which works to “defend the rights of pregnant people.”
Of the 23 states reviewed in the report, Oklahoma had the second highest number of pregnancy-related prosecutions, trailing only South Carolina. That state had 381 cases filed. The organization attributes Oklahoma’s high number of cases to a 2020 Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals ruling that found an unborn fetus was protected as a child under the state’s child neglect statute.
Mr. Orwell, white courtesy phone, please.
Researchers found 13 cases nationwide where pregnant women faced allegations related to “obtaining, attempting or researching an abortion,” according to the report. While the charging documents noted those allegations, the women were charged with other offenses, the report found. Three of those were in Oklahoma, Bach said. “Criminalization does not create care,” she said. “It does not create health. It does not create safe families. In fact, we strongly believe that it deters women from precisely the care they desperately need.”
The basic problem with Leaving It To The States is...The States.
This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.