Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what’s going down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin’ gets done, and where people are crazy and times are strange.

First, an update on our favorite candidate in Tuesday’s primary elections: Judge KP George of Fort Bend, Texas. He’s the guy who flipped parties and became a Republican shortly after he was indicted for financial crimes, thereby reversing the usual trajectory of GOP crimes in office. Evidently, it didn’t help much. From Houston Public Radio:George, elected as a Democrat in both 2018 and 2022, switched political parties and joined the GOP last summer in the wake of multiple criminal indictments. County prosecutors have accused him of money laundering and working with a former staffer to fake racist attacks against his own campaign. George received 8.4% of the vote Tuesday to place last in the five-candidate Republican primary. Former Sugar Land City Council member Daniel Wong won the race outright with 54.1% of the vote.

Oh dear. Didn’t even make it into double digits. Good luck in court, KP. You sit over there now, though.

Let us move on to California, where we are meeting a new disease just in time for Secretary Roadkill to tell us that the cure can be found in certain mushrooms native to the Marquesas. From the Los Angeles Times:A respiratory virus that doesn’t have a vaccine or a specific treatment regimen is spreading in some parts of California—but there’s no need to sound the alarm just yet, public health officials say.Except for the ever-constant alarm over the fact that our national public-health infrastructure is in the hands of crackpots and lunatics.A majority of Northern California communities have seen high concentrations of human metapneumovirus, or HMPV, detected in their wastewater, according to data from the WastewaterScan Dashboard, a public database that monitors sewage to track the presence of infectious diseases.According to Stanford University’s WastewaterSCAN, new data shows the spread of human metapneumovirus throughout New England. WastewaterSCAN analyzes wastewater samples from sewage treatment plants to detect infectious diseases and inform public health responses at the local, regional, and national levels. … HMPV symptoms include cough, fever, nasal congestion, and shortness of breath. Infected people can spread the virus for up to a week after symptoms first appear, according to the Mayo Clinic.The virus can also lead to severe but less-common conditions, such as Asthma attacks, middle ear infections, and bronchiolitis—infection in the small airways. It also can trigger croup, the “barking” cough. The CDC says HMPV virus can also lead to mild illness in healthy children. The first human case of the HMPV was confirmed in 2001 in Holland, according to the Mayo Clinic. It has since spread all over the globe.

So has ignorance. Is that a cause or a symptom?

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Gum Rockrose Cultivator Friedman of the Algarve brings us a tale of Oklahoma and the Commonwealth (God save it!) joining hands in a very bizarre news story. From NonDoc:The Massachusetts man indicted in Oklahoma County with sending a letter that impersonated then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters sent a letter to Attorney General Gentner Drummond and media members today promising to plead guilty and asking for the attorney general of Tennessee to charge him for a 2024 arson where a trailer full of Bibles was burned outside a controversial pastor’s church. Owen Thomas Cunningham emailed his letter to Drummond’s communications team, nine media outlets and two members of the Wilson County Sheriff’s Office in Tennessee where Cunningham took credit for the burning of a trailer filled with “about 200 Bibles” outside of Global Vision Church in Mt. Juliet on Easter morning. “As a left-wing political activist who fears prison less than he fears false Christians and/or white supremacists, I am happy to learn that there continue to be American law enforcement officials who are still interested in prosecuting white native-English-speakers, like me, for their crimes,” Cunningham wrote to Drummond on Sunday.“Is there any chance you could reach out to your counterpart in the state of Tennessee, A.G. Jonathan Skrmetti, and urge him to follow your lead, and get him to issue an indictment for the religiously motivated anti-Christian hate crime, of arson, which I committed in Mt. Juliet TN in March 2024?” Cunningham wrote to Drummond. “I allege that I am the person who perpetrated this act of anti-Christian arson, and I could have substantiated this to the Sheriff’s Office of Wilson County TN, by sharing details of the crime that were not released to the public. The law enforcement officials of Wilson County TN seemed more interested in holding the investigation in permanent limbo, neither interviewing any persons of interest, nor declaring the charges dropped. It seems, alas, law enforcement officials in Tennessee are not as competent and dedicated as their colleagues are in Oklahoma.”

Mr. Cunningham is from the Commonwealth (God save it), so understandably he might believe this kind of finagling is how politics and law enforcement are supposed to work. I’d like to personally welcome politicians from Tennessee and Oklahoma to Kerry Corner.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.