Thursday, August 31, 2017

The Only People Getting Rich Off KY Pensions Are Bevin's Wall Street Buddies

How very convenient that just when the country finally starts turning to raising taxes on the rich fucks who have been stripping the nation's treasury bare for 40 years, Governor I Got Mine Fuck You should decide that the victims of Kentucky's pension fraud - state employees - should have to pay for the money stolen by legislators and Wall Street sharks.

State employees have been fucked over time and again for 35 years, since legislators started chipping away at statutory benefits.

First they did away with incremental raises. Then performance bonuses.  Then the annual raises mandated by state law.  State employees haven't received full annual raises since 2002.  That's 15 years without a raise.

By then the motherfuckers in the legislator had started stripping pension benefits from new hires. The ones hired since 2013 don't have a pension at all: just a 401K they have to pay for themselves, then watch Wall Street strip it down to nothing.

State employees did not cause the pension crisis. State employees are the victims of the pension crisis.  But trumpie Bevin and repug austerity declare that the rich fucks who did cause the pension crisis cannot be asked to contribute a penny to solving it.

From the Herald:

Robb Smith, superintendent of Bellevue Independent Schools, was getting attention on social media Wednesday for a passionate open letter he wrote Gov. Matt Bevin in response to critical comments Bevin made about teachers.

“There are no absolutes when dealing with humans, but I can confidently say 99 percent of the people with whom I have worked, and there are hundreds, are not the greed-fueled personalities you have referenced in your speeches. The professionals in our schools are altruistic in motivation and pure in practice. To characterize them as anything else is irresponsible and unjust. To say they are anything but compassionate and dedicated is to distort the truth,” Smith wrote in an open letter to Bevin that he posted on social media.

The letter can be read in full at this link.
Anybody seen Bevin's tax returns for the last decade?  I'll bet my house he's profited from the Commonwealth's pension crisis.  Made money off the very victims he's now exploiting again.


Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/education/article170197182.html#storylink=cpy

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Voting Republican

via down with tyranny

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Trumpie Bevin to Force Public Servants to Pay for Legislature's 30-Year FuckUp

Kentucky's state worker pension plan is running out of money because for decades,k the General Assembly has refused to pay its obligations into the retirement system.  Legislators used the money they are constitutionally required to invest in the retirement plan and used it to plug holes in the budget.

The legislature stole Kentucky's retirement payments so they wouldn't have to balance the budget by making rich fucks and foreign corporations pay their fair share of taxes.

Then they broke the law in 2002 by cancelling state employee's statutorily-mandated annual raises.

They they slashed benefits for new hires, making state government employment less attractive than the night shift at Wendy's.

Now Governor "I Got Mine, Fuck You" Bevin wants to make state workers and retirees pay for the legislature's crimes with the retirement benefits the state constitution mandates.

Fuck off and die, motherfucker.  Raise taxes on the rich fucks and corporations who have skated on taxes for decades.  Get the money they stole from state workers.  Restore the pension plan with that recovered money.

Then raise taxes again on the rich fucks and corporations to pay their fair share now and in the future.  Do that, and we might have an economy that supports a 21st century Commonwealth, with good schools and good jobs and a healthy, sustainable environment. 

From the Herald:

An independent consultant recommended sweeping changes Monday to the pension systems that cover most of Kentucky’s public workers, creating the possibility that lawmakers will cut payments to existing retirees and force most current and future hires into 401(k)-style retirement plans.

SNIP

The group, which was hired by Bevin, offered only recommendations. Any changes to the pension system would come during a potential special legislative session in October. 

Over. Our. Dead. Bodies.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article169821392.html#storylink=cpy



Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article169821392.html#storylink=cpy

Monday, August 28, 2017

No, Hurricane Harvey Is Not Going to Persuade Any Climate Change Deniers

Oh, D.R. Tucker, you are so cute.  

Even the most vocal of climate-change deniers in the US House and Senate have to know that in the wake of this horrific storm, denying the reality of human-caused climate change will be regarded as absurd. Harvey is the exact sort of storm that climate scientists have long predicted would come as a consequence of the unrestrained release of heat-trapping gases due to the burning of fossil fuels. Basic physics and common sense dictate that if we keep proceeding with business-as-usual energy policies, the storms will only become more devastating and more deadly.

Republicans have no excuses left, not when the consequences of carbon pollution are affecting their own voters. Sooner or later, they’re going to have to come to the table.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, stop you're killing me.

Physics? Common sense?  These are repugs we're talking about.  They know their voters don't care about physics or common sense.  Their voters care about making liberals cry. And nothing makes liberals cry harder than climate change denial. 

The trump voters in Houston are sitting on their roofs waiting for rescue and singing "liberal tears are soooo delicious!" as their lives wash into the ocean.

No, hurricanes are sent by babby jeebus' daddy. That's what they're saying. It's "god's will."  Just like it's god's will that we burn every iota of carbon on the planet so babby jeebus can come back and kill all the homos and feminists and abortion doctors.

There are a bunch of liberals in Houston.  Rescue them first. Then we can watch the trump voters drown in the floods their denial caused.

Bevin Lies About Treason Statues; Gets Schooled by Girl

If you lived your life by one maxim, you could do worse than: Do I want Robyn Pennacchia of Wonkette to rip me a new one on this?

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin said he “absolutely” disagrees with removing Confederate symbols and monuments from government property, calling it the “sanitization of history.”
 
The actual sanitization, of course, is the statues themselves.  They were erected to erase the real history of Treason in Defense of Slavery, turn Slavery Promoters into heroes and reverse Emancipation with Jim Crow.

Bevin - and the Nazi-living apologists who pretend the Civil War Participation Tropies are historic landmarks - has it exactly backwards, as Wonkette explains.
There is a very big difference between the way people see Auschwitz and the way many White Southerners, at least, see Confederate Generals posed triumphantly on horses. Auschwitz serves as a reminder of those who suffered, while the Confederate statues glorify those who fought for continued suffering. You will notice that there are no triumphant looking statues of Hitler in Germany.

There is, however, a far more accurate analogy to be made here. Imagine if, in Germany, 50 years after WWII, groups of Holocaust deniers did put up statues of Adolph Hitler looking triumphant? And then got mad that people wanted to tear them down, because how dare they not remember history?

Well, that is exactly what happened in the United States after the Civil War. The Lost Cause of the Confederacy is revisionist history just like Holocaust Denial is. It is also about as accurate.
 
Germany, as you may know, bans people from promoting Holocaust Denialism. After the Civil War, America did the exact opposite. It allowed the Lost Cause bullshit to proliferate, believing that it would help the nation to heal. Lost Causers were allowed to pretend that not only was the war about more than just slavery (it was not), that t was noble in some way, but also that slavery wasn’t really all that bad anyway. This was taught in schools and even promoted in Hollywood, with movies like Gone With The Wind and The Birth of A Nation. My mother grew up living in Florida for half the year because of her father’s job, and she was taught in school that it was not the Civil War, but The War of Northern Aggression. That the real villains in this story were the carpetbaggers. If slavery was ever mentioned, she says she does not remember it.

To this day, many textbooks in the South teach that slavery was but a “side issue” to the Civil War, rather than the reason it was fought in the first place.
A fake history was created to make the South feel better about losing, to help us heal as a nation. That was a bad idea. It did not help, it hurt. Rather than dealing, as a nation, with the devastating horror of slavery and the evil that produced it, we allowed the South to whitewash the whole thing and still think of themselves and their generals as heroes. Who want to believe they were good, because they don’t want to confront a “heritage” that was wrong. We did the wrong thing.

Because now we have people who have been taught, and who truly believe in, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, freaking out because they can’t understand why anyone thinks they shouldn’t celebrate their glorious heritage. All of this should have been dealt with over 100 years ago, and it wasn’t, because America would rather ignore pain than deal with it. The Germans dealt with their atrocities responsibly, and we simply refused to. Because it was easier this way, because it preserved everyone’s idea that America is and was always basically good. Because if we lost that, then who would ever fight our wars for us?

These statues are not about remembering history, they are about misremembering history. And this war is being fought between those who want to remember history correctly, and those who want to protect their made-up history, because actually confronting the real history feels bad.

Auschwitz is ugly. It’s harrowing. It makes you sick to look at it. It makes you say “NEVER AGAIN.” Keeping it up is necessary for that reason. It is not there to provide comfort to Nazis. These statues, however, are meant to provide comfort to those who wish to celebrate the South and fondly misremember what it stood for. And they don’t deserve that.

Sunday, August 27, 2017

Stop Squirming

Via Down with Tyranny.