Here’s today’s open line and video headlines. Also:
* DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR LEGISLATOR IS? If yours is a right-wing Republican from Arkansas, there’s a good chance he or she is down in Dallas getting spoonfed big mugs of Koch. It’s the American Legislative Exchange Council session at which legislators are provided with cookie-cutter legislation to take home to advance the Koch/corporate agenda. Here’s a pretty good summary of the Dallas confab, which legislators from Arkansas are enjoying:
Speakers at ALEC’s annual meeting will include Texas Governor Rick Perry, former Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore, and Newt Gingrich. “Policy workshops” include instructions on “How to Think and Talk About Climate and Energy Issues,” “Energy Exports: A Free Market Economic Stimulus to Create Jobs and Grow the Economy,” “EPA’s Proposed Carbon Emissions Rulemaking — What Does it Mean to States?” and more of the increasingly frequent attempts to spin efforts to limit the anti-democratic effects of unlimited political spending by billionaires and corporations as “Silencing Opposing Views: Attacks on Free Speech and Private Charitable Giving.”
ALEC’s “Justice Performance Project,” which appears to have taken on many of the roles of the “Public Safety and Elections Task Force” that ALEC shuttered in the wake of the controversy following the death of Trayvon Martin, will discuss “efficiently engaging the public-private partnership with the surety bail industry.” In other words, how to enrich bounty hunters.
Also at this year’s meeting, ALEC’s task forces will consider bills to make it virtually impossible to enroll in Medicaid, expand charter schools to further bankrupt traditional public schools, expand exports of “natural gas” from fracking, and undermine the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Air and Clean Water Act regulations.
Bend over.