Jennifer Pace wins the Indiana Republican primary despite being dead

(Constant musical accompaniment to this post)

We present our semi-annual weekly survey of what’s happening in the various states where we know the real work of government is done, where the post office is stolen and the mailbox is locked.

We begin in Indiana, where a woman named Jennifer Pace won a Republican primary and ran against incumbent Rep. Andre Carson in the state’s seventh congressional district. And that was a remarkable victory, because two months before she won the primary, Ms. Pace was not just dead, but really dead. From Fox59 in Indianapolis:

The front-runner in the Republican race for Indiana’s seventh district seat in the U.S. House of Representatives has been dead since March. According to results from Tuesday’s primary, Jennifer Pace is leading the race with 31.2% of the vote, or 7,704 votes as of Wednesday morning. Pace reportedly died of a heart attack in March after qualifying for the election.

Of course, Ms. Pace’s victory raises a number of questions. The biggest one is how the hell did this happen two damn months after she died. Was every GOP voter in the district just not paying attention? Didn’t anyone notice that the Republican front-runner mysteriously suspended his campaign in March, or did we? Weekend at Bernie’s is something going on here? Not that any of this matters; Carson will win re-election right now, but it seems to indicate that someone in the Indiana Republican Party needs to start noticing whether its candidates have invisibly joined the choir.

We move further north to Wisconsin, where the president made a very smart move on Wednesday. He appeared in Racine to announce that Microsoft would invest $3.3 billion to develop an AI data center there. The really clever political move was to announce that the new plant would be built on the proposed site of the Foxconn debacle, the site of the monumental bait-and-switch operation against suckers like former President* and former Wisconsin Governor Scott hosted Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to run its Midwestern subsidiary, formerly known as the State of Wisconsin. Out of The New York Times:

The Microsoft data center will be built on the site where Mr. Trump, as president, announced in 2017 that Taiwanese electronics maker Foxconn would build a $10 billion factory to make LCD panels. Mr Trump promised it would be the “eighth wonder of the world” and visited the site with elected officials and golden shovels. But the project never materialized as expected. On Wednesday, Mr. Biden took direct aim at the failed promise. “Look what happened — they dug a hole with these golden shovels and then fell in,” Mr. Biden told the crowd. “During the previous administration, my predecessor made promises that he more often broke than kept, leaving many people in communities like Racine behind,” Mr. Biden said. “On my watch we make promises and we keep promises.”

It’s always nice when you can feed yourself a layup.

We move on to West Virginia, where enormous costs are looming for the rehabilitation of abandoned coal mines. The state has a fund to finance this monumental task, but as Ken Ward Jr. of the Mountain State Spotlight This fund is reportedly just one corporate bankruptcy away from being exhausted – and the people of West Virginia are just one corporate bankruptcy away from being left holding the bag.

The bankruptcy of just one major mining company could devastate the fund, according to the state’s top regulator. And auditors in the Republican-controlled Legislature said at least five major companies were “at risk” of passing cleanup costs on to the state. At $15 million, the state’s land restoration fund is at its lowest level in more than 20 years. The program’s last published actuarial report in 2022 warned that an associated water treatment trust fund will lose half of its balance over the next 10 years. These are costs that the coal mining industry should actually bear. Unrehabilitated mine sites can not only harm the environment, but also endanger the coalfield residents living nearby. Sometimes coal waste dams leak or burst, flooding downstream communities. Rock cliffs and boulders left behind after mining can collapse. Runoff that is not contained or treated often poisons fish or water supplies.

Working with the good people at ProPublica—And good job, Pulitzer Committee—Ward points out that this isn’t a problem that suddenly arose.

State and federal officials have been warned repeatedly over the past 40 years that this reckoning was coming, but have failed to prepare for it. The review found that auditors consistently questioned whether West Virginia’s reclamation program would have sufficient resources. But neither state lawmakers nor state regulators required coal companies to have enough reclamation bonds to protect themselves in the event of bankruptcy. The legislature also did not increase the tax on coal production enough to make up the difference. Federal officials in both Republican and Democratic administrations, who are supposed to oversee the state program, warned that there were problems but did not take action.

Just two years ago, West Virginia lawmakers ignored their own auditors’ recommendations to increase the fund. Instead, they demanded an $8 billion rescue package from the federal government. And last month, Gov. Jim Justice’s administration removed a key critic from an advisory panel that oversees the fund, just as the group was in the midst of reviewing a new study on the fund’s future health. The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

It is undeniably part of the government’s job to look after the public’s money. But decades of anti-tax nihilism have led governments to act out of knee-jerk fear rather than reasoned caution. Problems remain unresolved until they develop into crises. Then the public will be annoyed about the emergency renovation costs anyway.

And we close, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where the official Gully Caver of the blog Friedman of the Plains tells us a story of local dogs hungry for homework. From KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City:

According to US News and World Report, the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE) did not give them access to schools’ AP testing data, which caused numerous Oklahoma schools to fall in US News rankings over the past two years. OSDE claims to have sent the data, but it must have been lost in the mail.

There is nothing worse than resourceful bureaucrats, and Oklahoma appears to be plagued by a number of them. I mean, seriously-lost in the mail??? This kind of obvious crap requires polysyllabic words in subordinate clauses in insanely complicated sentences, a kind of government speak halfway between Harvard Business School and Finnegan’s Wake. Of course, you can still say it got lost in the mail, but the point is to say it in a way that your superiors are so exhausted that they are too exhausted to notice that your uncle, the county commissioner, She put you in a job that you are too stupid or too lazy for. That’s the American way.

This is your democracy, America. Appreciate it.

Charles P. Pierce is the author of four books Idiot Americaand has been working as a journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.