The Orlando Sentinel reports:

The Republican governor sided with Walt Disney World, Darden Restaurants, the Florida Chamber of Commerce and a broad array of powerful business interests that argued the ban was needed to avoid a patchwork of local employment rules for companies.

"This bill fosters statewide uniformity, consistency and predictability in Florida's employer-employee relationships," Scott said in a statement. "These fundamental elements are essential to ensuring a business-friendly environment that supports job creation."

As ThinkProgress has pointed out, the original sponsor of the legislation, state Rep. Steve Precourt, a Republican, is a member of the shady lobbying group ALEC, which writes model legislation for state legislatures, and has been pushing similar bills to gut labor standards in other states as well.

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When the slaughterhouse manager came outside and told her to stop, she replied that she was on the public easement and had the right to film. When police arrived, she said told them the same thing. According to the police report, the manager said she was trespassing and crossed over the barbed-wire fence, but the officer noted “there was no damage to the fence in my observation.”

Meyer was allowed to leave. She later found out she was being prosecuted under the state’s new “ag-gag” law. This is the first prosecution in the country under one of these laws, which are designed to silence undercover investigators who expose animal welfare abuses on factory farms. The legislation is a direct response to a series of shocking investigations by groups like the Humane Society, Mercy for Animals, and Compassion Over Killing that have led to plant closures, public outrage, and criminal charges against workers.

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From the Aberdeen News:

The Republican-dominated board decided the state treasury should pay for the $100, two-year memberships for all 105 South Dakota lawmakers and for unlimited out-of-state trips to ALEC meetings by legislators who are members of ALEC committees.

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The efforts of ALEC’s AIDS policy working group were published that year in a 169-page book containing 13 HIV-specific legislative recommendations. Some of those model laws would, after becoming real state laws, go on to effectively criminalize the behavior of people living with HIV and perpetuate a lasting stigma against HIV-positive people. Today, a majority of states have laws on the books that criminalize HIV exposure regardless of whether the virus was transmitted or there was an intention to infect another person with HIV.

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Before Thursday, City Council speaker Christine Quinn (generally an ally of Mayor Michael Bloomberg) hemmed and hawed for three years over whether to put forth a paid sick leave bill, despite the fact that eight in 10 New Yorkers support it. The issue placed her in an uncomfortable bind, trapped between Bloomberg and the business community (all of whom oppose it) -- and workers and unions on the other side.

But after previously using her power to block the bill (despite the majority of the City Council supporting it), Quinn realized her situation had become  politically untenable. And on Thursday, a compromise was reached that requires companies with 15 or more workers to offer employees at least five paid sick days. As the New York Times noted, the deal represents a "raw display of political muscle by a coalition of labor unions and liberal activists.

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On Friday, following a two-year campaign by watchdog groups, ALEC published hundreds of its model bills online. The coalition of organizations pushing for greater transparency included the Center for Media and Democracy, ColorOfChange, Common Cause, Greenpeace, People for the American Way, Progress Now and a variety of labor organizations.

The full list of model bills is available here. It includes template bills pertaining to charter schools, climate (mis)education, union-busting right to work bills, workplace drug testing laws and more.

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As Grist noted last month, "in 2011 and 2012, Iowa, Utah, and Missouri all enacted some version of an anti-whistleblower ag-gag law, while similar proposals were struck down in Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, and Tennessee. These laws are specifically designed to stop whistleblowers providing evidence of animal abuse or other poor practices from reaching the media or animal rights groups. As TP noted:

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Not long after the shooting, young people, of all races took to the streets, to show their solidarity with Trayvon, in Million Hoodie Marches, saying, “We are all Trayvon.” In the ensuing year, the response to the case often shook out under two camps: those who identify with the young man, versus those who reflexively, insistently, perniciously identify with George Zimmerman. (“We are all George Zimmerman," they inherently believe, the potential victims of a nasty mugging.)

Also not long after the shooting, I appeared on The O’Reilly Factor to insist that Trayvon had been “shot in cold blood.”  The show’s host took great exception to my claim.  Bill O’Reilly vented surprise and outrage that I would be unwilling to shoot an armed assailant attempting to mug me.  “I would shoot a four-year old!” O’Reilly shouted at me.

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From CPI:

A $4.5 million grant to the George Mason University Foundation makes up nearly 15 percent of the university foundation’s revenue for 2011. The school is the largest recipient of Koch foundation money since 1985, and it houses several free-market and libertarian research centers including the Institute for Humane Studies, which received $3.7 million from the Koch foundations.

The D.C.-based American Legislative Exchange Council received $150,000 to help finance its activities, including meetings where corporate representatives draft model legislation with state legislators. The Koch brothers have decades-long connections with ALEC, which gave the brothers the Adam Smith Free Enterprise Award in 1994.

Among the other groups the Koch brothers donated to were the Heartland Institute, the climate change-skeptical think tank, which received $25,000; the Federalist Society, which got $260,000; and the Ayn Rand Institute, which took in $100,000.

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Horn notes:

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When the federal law was passed, House Republicans initially wanted to let states have all 7.5 million people collecting unemployment compensation pee in a cup. A compromise was reached, which authorizes states to test applicants for benefits in two circumstances: if they were fired for using drugs, or if the only occupation they’re suited for is one the Department of Labor lists as commonly requiring drug testing. Which jobs the department might include in the provision is not yet determined (Democrats say a small number of professions, Republicans say most), but in the meantime GOP state legislators are pushing forward with drug-testing proposals.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has asked lawmakers to push through legislation requiring not only unemployment beneficiaries to be drug tested, but also individuals applying for food stamps -- a particularly draconian move on the governor's part, especially since in the few states where where drug testing of welfare beneficiaries has been attempted, like Florida, there has been no evidence of reduced drug use.

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It began earlier this month in Tucson, Ariz., when city officials organized a gun buyback to mark the two-year anniversary of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. Locals turned over their guns to law enforcement, and got a $50 Safeway gift card for each gun in return. Officials wound up destroying a total of 212 guns.

Before the guns were destroyed, Todd Rathner, an Arizona lobbyist and NRA national board member, threatened to file a lawsuit. "We do believe that it is illegal for them to destroy those guns," he told NPR. "If property has been abandoned to the police, then they are required by ARS 12-945 to sell it to a federally licensed firearms dealer, and that's exactly what they should do."

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But there’s another group working hand-in-glove with the NRA that deserves scrutiny: the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC, the Koch Brothers-backed group that is funded by big corporate interests, first attracted attention in the wake of the Trayvon Martin killing. The group, which brings together corporate interests, right-wing lobbyist groups and conservative politicians, passes model legislation that politicians take back ready-made to their state. The NRA has funded ALEC and co-chaired ALEC’s “Public Safety and Election Task Force,” which passes model bills on guns.

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The American Legislative Exchange Council, of course, is the corporate-backed, conservative-leaning organization that has become a bugaboo for liberals by pushing legislation to do everything from roll back environmental regulation to weaken gun control laws, as brought to the fore this year by the murder of Trayvon Martin. ALEC, like lots of groups that work in state capitols, creates “model legislation” that friendly lawmakers can introduce in whole or as a basis for their own bills.

Both Michigan’s HB 4003, which affects public sector unions, and HB 4054, which affects private sector unions, appears to pull language directly from ALEC’s model right-to-work bill. The Center for Media and Democracy, a liberal watchdog group which has been working for years to expose ALEC’s activities, created these chart comparing the language:

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Change for Trayvon, the name of the Martins' political action committee, aims to raise money to fund candidates and efforts around the country dedicated to challenging the stand-your-ground, or "Castle" law -- legislation that permits the use of lethal force by a party who feels threatened. As the Martins note on the Change for Trayvon website:

Stand your ground laws exist in 32 states across our nation, and have allowed people to escape responsibility. Although these laws have good intentions, their result has allowed shooters to avoid justice, and for families to not have an opportunity for closure in these tragic deaths.

Stand your ground is a solution in search of a problem, and it’s a terrible solution, with tragic results; like the death of our son. These laws need to be revised to require prosecutorial or judicial review.

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Common Cause and the Center for Media and Democracy sued five lawmakers, Reps. Tyler August, Dan Knodl, Tom Larson, Pat Strachota and Jeremy Thiesfeldt, in county circuit court over their failure to provide private emails after a public records request by CMD.

From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

"An email included in the court filing shows Thiesfeldt is involved with ALEC but tries to keep it out of his state email account.

'Please send ALL ALEC material to the Representative's PERSONAL e-mail . . . from now on,' says a June email to ALEC sent from Thiesfeldt's state account. 'Please do not send his state account (@legis.wi.gov) any more updates. He will keep up through his personal account.'"

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The damning report, "Breaking All the Rules: The Crisis in Oil and Gas Regulatory Enforcement," found that every state studied failed to adequately enforce regulations, with thousands of oil and gas wells uninspected every year. Earthworks highlight understaffing and underfunding as key factors in unenforcement.

The report notes:

The U.S. faces a crisis in the enforcement of rules governing the oil and gas industry. The shale gas and shale oil boom has brought an expansion of oil and gas activity unseen in many parts the country since the 19th century. Unfortunately, as this report shows, states are dangerously unprepared to oversee current levels of extraction, let alone increased drilling activity from the shale boom.

Earthworks argues that, for most major energy companies, the cost penalties over unenforced regulations are factored into budgets as "the cost of doing business" -- serving as little deterrence to improve inspection records.

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