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Onion Talks: Your Brain-Gun: Turn the Safety Off

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Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus1/06/2013 4:47:09 am PST

The GOP now totally controls Tennessee politics, and they are determined to keep it in the dark:

Tenn. GOP supermajority looks to year ahead

With a new GOP supermajority in place for the dawn of the 108th General Assembly this week, Democrats find themselves facing irrelevancy except in cases where the ruling Republicans are divided.

[…]

The session formally convenes at noon on Tuesday. Republicans have 70 seats in the 99-member House and 26 in the 33-member Senate, marking the first time since the Reconstruction era of the late 1860s when the GOP had such ironclad control.

[…]

[P]ropose a substantial reform of the state’s workers compensation system. He has not revealed details of the latter, though it is widely expected to end most of the court system’s involvement in deciding payments due to workers injured on the job.

The governor determinedly avoided taking a stance on some of the more controversial issues to be considered by the General Assembly, including two hot topics in education — creating a school voucher system in Tennessee and making it easier for the state to override local boards of education that reject a charter school’s application.

[…]

The first bill pre-filed for the legislative session — by Sen. Brian Kelsey, R-Germantown — would block Haslam from implementing an expansion of Medicare coverage to more Tennesseans, as authorized but not required under the federal Affordable Care Act and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Haslam is officially undecided on whether to seek an expansion, saying he sees the benefits but worries about the potential costs.

[…]

The failure in 2012 of a bill to allow a company’s employees to keep their firearms in locked cars, even if the company prohibits guns on its premises, will be revisited. In the session’s opening week, a task force appointed by Harwell will be looking at a proposal by Sen. Stacey Campfield as a possible compromise.

[…]


n After the horrific mass murders at a Connecticut elementary school, legislators including Sen. Frank Niceley, R-Strawberry Plains, and Campfield proposed legislation with the goal of having more people with guns watching over school children. The proposals differ somewhat in details, with Niceley focusing on training school employees in law enforcement and Campfield on allowing handgun permit holders to be the armed overseers.

[…] Comptroller Justin Wilson is pushing for repeal of a property tax break for the solar equipment industry.

[…]

Quite the agenda:

- eliminate the right of workers to have compensation decided in a court of law;
- school vouchers;
- centralize control of schools from local school boards who object to vouchers;
- block expansion of Medicare;
- target exclusively green energy companies (but not say coal companies);
- and of course, MOAR GUNZ!!, everywhere.

That is the contemporary Republican party, encapsulated so well in one state.