If it were possible for Congress to place a state into some kind of democratic receivership, Kansas would be a really good candidate. Governor Sam Brownback—excuse me, twice-elected, god help us, Governor Sam Brownback—turned the state into a lab rat for all the worst policy ideas produced by the modern conservative Republican party. The legislature went gleefully along for the ride. The state has cratered and, as it cratered, it sank deeper and deeper into madness. The latest chapter in this sad saga came when the state's Supreme Court began to rule that, all Randian wet-dreams aside, Kansas had an obligation to fund its public schools at a decent level. If you think that the legislature response was to carefully consider what it's been doing over the past few years and pull itself back from a course of action that is so obviously harming so many of the people that put it into office, then you probably live in a state not presided over by the likes of Sam Brownback....

Don't like what the Court's been doing? Don't abide by its rulings, just 86 its justices....

They recognize no limits to their power, no curbs to their desire. There are few frontiers in democratic government that they will not work to violate, or to twist to their own purposes. And they absolutely will not stop. Ni shagu nazad, as Stalin said to his army. Not one step backwards....

The experiment in Kansas is nearly complete. Government has been refashioned to work splendidly for the wealthy and connected, and not at all for the people who need it most, who then develop within their hearts and minds contempt for it at the ballot box, and contempt that perpetuates itself with every new atrocity, which has been the plan all along. As we point out often here at the shebeen, the problem with lab rats is that most of them die.