Last week, Kansas state senators Dinah Sykes and Barbara Bollier and state representative Stephanie Clayton announced they were no longer going to serve as Republicans and would instead serve as Democrats; they were joined by former state rep Joy Koesten who served as a Republican until getting primaried by a far-right candidate who will take her seat in 2019. Read the rest

In 1991, Vicky Jo Metz borrowed $16,613 to pay for tuition; now she's 59, and has paid back 90% of that money -- and she still owes $67,277. Read the rest

With nativism and xenophobia on the rise, Americans are increasingly required to "prove" that they are actually Americans: whether it's at a border checkpoint (far from any border), or in a government office. Read the rest

Kansas is an Ayn Randian dystopia of voter suppression, measles epidemics, Handmaid's Tale fanfic masquerading as law, Isalmophobic terrorist cells, voting machine shenanigans, and economic collapse, all thanks to the far-right ideologues who paid for and control the state's legislature. Read the rest

Kris Kobach (previously) is a racist shitbag who engineered Red State America's voter suppression campaign; he is also (predictably enough) the Kansas Secretary of State, in which capacity he has been representing his office in a lawsuit over his unconstitutional voter ID law. Read the rest

A measles outbreak in Kansas continues to spread. Health officials warn folks who are potentially contagious to call ahead and find locations where they can safely be treated.

Vaccinate your kids.

Via the Kansas City Star:

With two doses, the measles-mumps-rubella, or MMR vaccine, is about 97 percent effective at preventing measles.

But the illness is highly contagious and can be spread several days before the telltale red rash that follows the other, more ambiguous symptoms.

That has made it difficult to keep it out of hospitals and doctors' offices during the two outbreaks that have hit the Kansas City metro area in the last two months.

In addition to St. Joseph Medical Center, the University of Kansas Hospital, Children's Mercy Hospital in Overland Park and Olathe Health clinics in La Cygne and Mound City have also been potential exposure sites.

Robyn Livingston, a Children's Mercy doctor who specializes in infectious disease, said it's particularly concerning when measles shows up in medical settings unannounced, because hospitals often serve patients who can't be vaccinated for medical reasons.

“If you think your child has measles, don’t just show up to one of our locations," Livingston said. "Which has happened.”

Livingston said it's imperative that people who suspect measles call ahead, so doctors and hospitals can arrange to segregate them from others.

Though most people who get measles fully recover, it can cause potentially fatal complications like pneumonia and, more rarely, encephalitis.

When a serial bomb-report hoaxer reported a fake hostage-taking on behalf of a gamer upset at a $1.50 wager, he set in motion a string of events that ended with a Wichita police officer murdering an innocent bystander on his own doorstep, without warning. Read the rest

Swatting is the practice of tricking police SWAT teams into storming your victim's home by phoning in fake hostage situations; it's especially prominent among cybercriminals, gamers and was a favored tactic of Gamergater trolls. Read the rest

Students from Pratt High School in Kansas didn't get their "first hand job experience" as reported, but they -- and a headline writer at The Pratt Tribune --did get a lesson in grammar. On Saturday, the local newspaper printed an inappropriate, though hilarious, headline for an otherwise benign article about Disability Mentoring Day. The hyphen-less headline was completely rewritten for the online version of the story.

image via Tigerfan56

Thanks, Tim! Read the rest

Last fall, I wrote about the strange case of Minnesota governor Mark Dayton, a left-wing billionaire heir to the Target fortune who came to power and reversed his Republican predecessors' Reagonomic idiocy, instead raising taxes on rich people, increasing public spending, and creating shared prosperity for the people of Minnesota. Read the rest

Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt is very sorry that his office cited the 1857 Dred Scott case, which established that the descendants of enslaved black people were not US citizens, in response to an ACLU brief in a case challenging a judge's ruling that Kansas's constitution doesn't guarantee the right to have an abortion. Read the rest

The Department of Justice has announced that it has arrested three Kansas men who called themselves "Crusaders" and planned "a bloodbath" in an apartment complex where many Somali people lived, which was to including bombings followed by house-to-house shootings sparing no one, "not even babies." Read the rest

The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has stripped two Kansas Highway Patrol officers of immunity for their detention of a man with Colorado plates whom they believed to be suspicious because Colorado has legal recreational marijuana -- thus any car from Colorado was a potential marijuana smuggling vehicle. Read the rest

Wichita State University's Beth Clarkson (who is also chief statistician of WSU's National Institute for Aviation Research) discovered "odd patterns" in Kansas electoral voting records, so she requested public docs to help her get to the bottom of things -- requests that state officials ignored, dodged, and stalled. Read the rest

Sedgwick County, Kansas District Judge Michael Hoelscher retained counsel to threaten Judge Eric Melgren with a subpoena for insisting that he show up in person when summoned for jury service. Read the rest

The 11-year-old son of medical marijuana advocate Shona Banda spoke out in his Kansas classroom to correct his teacher's misinformation about pot; then the state of Kansas raided his house and took him away from his mother. Read the rest

Under Kansas Senate Bill 56, which passed 26-14 this week, school teachers who give students "harmful material" can be criminally prosecuted. Read the rest