Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/02/12/calling-politicians-on-their-b.html
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These days the GOP is one step away from jailing their political opponents and turning the United States into a one party state. Sad thing is, half the country probably wouldn’t mind.
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And on tonight’s news, crazy lady disrupts hearing, removed from chamber without incident.
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She’s got a good case for lawsuit, but then again it’s West Virginia…
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“Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for directing my campaign ad.”
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I’m sure some of these same GOP politicians will gladly support the free-speech rights of Nazis and corporate “persons”.
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“Now we see the violence inherent in the system.”
Crikey, West Virginia.
Ok, well, Charleston at least:
http://wvmetronews.com/2014/02/26/west-virginias-culture-of-corruption/
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I happen to be near Charleston right now and this comes as no great surprise from what I know of WV history. 
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Does shit really pour through a goose THAT fast?
I think I have found an “Other” here…
It’s not quite so bad as all that; more so, it’s that half the country doesn’t even vote at all, out of apathy or disenfranchisement.
But standing aside with one’s mouth hanging open when the shit hits the fan is obviously no help, either…
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Unless one likes shit in the mouth. 
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Until the coal played out, the history of West Virginia was just a tale of inherited wealth rapaciously exploiting whatever underclass was handy.
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That imagery was completely intentional.
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Based on what I know from family here and what I’ve read that’s only partly true and not even most of the story. Fact is there’s a whole lot of good in this state’s history.
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Refusing to join the Confederates during the Slaver’s Revolt was pretty cool. And the Battle of Blair Mountain was epic, even though the heroes were crushed in the end.
What else were you thinking of?
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I don’t have any family there (my coal country relations are in Pennsylvania, Molly McGuire central so to speak) but I lived in Harrison County for a year.
At that time Hope Gas was capping all the methane wells and drilling new ones into the same gas pockets on the closest neighboring property, because Reagan had deregulated new holes but not old ones. I used to run the deer trails looking for 1800s oil rigs I could pull apart for real wrought iron* to sell to blacksmiths. Good times.
I had some interesting conversations with elderly coal miners** who could vacillate between condemning coal companies’ exploitation of the poor and praising their creation of dependable jobs for unskilled labor in the same sentence.
Talking to those old guys is also how I learned about the Coal Wars, which had been “dehistoried” by the time I was in US public schools, and even now are only slowly being brought back into the official narratives. Most Americans today don’t know about the armed rebellion of the West Virginia coal miners which President Harding*** put down in 1921.
* true wrought iron hasn’t been readily available to small smithies since the Bessemer process supplanted the blast furnace.
** one of whom professed to love mining, and spoke longingly of his time at the coal face, and regretfully of the accident that crushed his spine and pelvis and prevented him from working for most of his life. Which was weird to hear, really, for a kid from a small Right Coast college town.
*** regarded by many historians as the worst US president of all time, surpassing even Buchanan and George W. Bush.
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Wilson is also a serious contender.
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