Thursday, May 31, 2018

DINO Ben Betrays Kentuckians; Will Help Bevin Steal Medicaid From Tens of Thousands

When I saw the headline at the Herald-Leader - Bevin announces partnership to implement Medicaid changes - I knew who it had to be.

Shame on you, Ben Chandler.  And how fucking stupid, aligning yourself with the trumpies just as the Resistance is notching its first victories.

Do you really hate Kentuckians that much for not electing you Governor in 2003? Do you really think the repugs will reward you for this betrayal?

Are you so desperate for money that you will take 30 pieces of silver from the Yankee carpetbagger who is systematically bulldozing the state your grandfather served as governor not once but twice?

What are you getting out of this, you motherfucking piece of shit?

Kentucky's Republican governor is partnering with a former Democratic congressman to help implement the nation's first work requirements for Medicaid.
Former official yes but mostly former Democrat.
On Wednesday, Gov. Matt Bevin announced a partnership with the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky, a nonpartisan health policy research group run by Ben Chandler.

Once the new work requirements take effect later this year, state officials predict Medicaid will cover 95,000 fewer people in five years, leading critics to accuse Bevin of taking away people's health insurance. Chandler said the foundation's goal will be to help Kentuckians keep their coverage.
You don't help Kentuckians keep their coverage by partnering with Gov. I Got Mine Fuck You to force 95,000 of them off health coverage.

Shame on you, Ben.  I hope every real Democratic candidate in Kentucky stands up to condemn you, your new repug buddy and every inhuman policy the two of you now stand for.


Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/article212164799.html#storylink=cpy

Saturday, May 26, 2018

If I Believed in Miracles, This Would Be The Biggest and the Best

I was in Ireland in 1983 when the vote to legalize fucking divorce actually went down to defeat.  Women chained themselves to the iron fence around the Dail, begging for a way to escape the prison of abusive marriages, but Ireland's answer was NO.

Up until yesterday, if you had asked me which had a better chance, Ireland legalizing abortion or repugs impeaching Trump, I'd have said impeaching Trump by a mile.

Thank you, Ireland, for proving me wrong.  You did this one all by yourself, no divine assistance required, and we're going to have to get rid of the Orange Loser all by ourselves, too.

Here it is, y'all, the twitter thread the world is crying to right now.

Bevn Attacks KY AG for Saving Women's Lives

Say it with me again:  Abortion restrictions don't stop abortions.  They just kill women.

But Gov. I Got Mine Fuck You doesn't care about grown adult women dying from illegal abortions and forced childbirth.  All he cares about is feeding freakazoid bloodlust in hopes they will catapult him into the White House.

From the Bevin press release:

While Gov. Matt Bevin’s legal team is fighting an attempt by the ACLU and a Louisville abortion clinic to overturn the recently enacted House Bill 454, Kentucky’s attorney general is continuing his track record of failing to defend the Commonwealth’s unborn blastocysts.
 
Attorney General Andy Beshear has reached an agreement with the ACLU and the abortion clinic to be dismissed from the lawsuit against HB 454, which bans the brutal and grotesque practice of live dismemberment the legal, common and safe first-trimester type of abortions. In a similar action last year, Beshear asked to be removed as a defendant in the ACLU’s legal challenge of HB 2, a law requiring physicians to describe an ultrasound to patients prior to performing an abortion.
A)  No such thing as the "unborn."  Babies and children have already been born and are outside the womb breathing oxygen.  Things that are not outside the womb breathing oxygen are not human beings.

B) First-trimester abortions remove blastocysts - the biological equivalent of a tumor.  The only brutal and grotesque thing going on here is Bevin 's freakazoid determination to turn Kentucky into Gilead.

C) By requesting removal from the case, AG Beshear is refusing to defend Bevin's indefensible attacks on Kentucky's women.  Beshear is the one protecting Kentuckians.

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

The Only Issue is Corruption

Forget the ridiculous details.  Forget even the Russians.  It's the Corruption, Stupid.
 
Via Digby.
This piece by Adam Serwer clarifies the big question about how to think about this gusher of Trump scandals:
The sheer volume of Trump scandals can seem difficult to keep track of.

SNIP
 There are not many Trump scandals. There is one Trump scandal. Singular: the corruption of the American government by the president and his associates, who are using their official power for personal and financial gain rather than for the welfare of the American people, and their attempts to shield that corruption from political consequences, public scrutiny, or legal accountability.
SNIP
In each of these cases, the president or one of his associates was seeking to profit, personally or financially, from their official duties and powers. When that conduct has potentially run afoul of the law, Trump has sought to bend federal law enforcement to his whim, the better to protect himself and his associates from legal accountability. The president’s ongoing chastising of his own Justice Department, and his war of words with current and former FBI officials, stem less from any coherent ideological principle than from Trump’s desperate need to protect himself. An authoritarian model of law enforcement,where the president personally decides who is prosecuted and who is not based on his own political agenda, is simply the best way for Trump to shield himself and his inner circle from legal consequences.
Also via Digby, Michael Tomasky  Michael Tomasky predicting dem losses in November unless they attack the Orange Menace directly.  He concludes:
The president is lawless. His lawyer is lawless. Both of his lawyers. All they know is to lie, deny, distort, extort, and bully. The country is being governed by Mafiosi values. If the Democrats are unwilling to say that, they’ll let down millions of Americans who are counting on them to defend the law, and they’ll lose, and deserve to. History sometimes presents moments when caution is called for. This isn’t one of them.

Saturday, May 19, 2018

Demand Respect You Have Earned

Democratic candidates have a long, ugly record of ignoring their base to pander to repugs who will never, never NEVER vote for them.

This year, when trumpies are demanding we respect them for their racist, sexist, islamophobic, xenophobic, science-denying, reality-defying stupidity, is past time for Democratic candidates to pay attention to the only ones who can get them elected: Democratic voter

Right now the most important thing Democratic candidates can do is show respect to their own voters and let them know they hear them and will fight for them.

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

A Soulless Monster is What They Want

Keep this for the 7 million times between now and November when some DCCC concern troll says Democratic candidates can't win unless they reach out to trump voters.
First, Steve M on modern Conservatism:
How do right-wingers decide which policies to support? It's simple: They support whatever infuriates or actively harms their political enemies -- and they don't care what happens to society as a whole. They support President Trump's saber-rattling in the Middle East because it enrages their domestic enemies and inflames the region -- but they assume no harm will personally come to themselves as a result of the policies. They like loose gun laws that result in increased American bloodshed, because they know they won't die in the high-crime cities they never visit, and they assume their kids will never die in a school shooting or a gun suicide. They like voter ID laws because they can easily obtain birth certificates and driver's licenses, so who cares what the laws do to democracy in America? They're fine with police brutality against non-whites because they're white and so they don't have to worry about it. They want Obamacare repealed because most of them have employer-paid insurance or Medicare, and who cares what happens to America when other people can't afford to stay well?

Pre-millennial dispensationism is the ultimate right-wing religious belief: Let's do what we can to make the end of the world arrive sooner, even though other people will go to hell, because we won't. We don't care about the majority of our fellow humans -- all we care about is ourselves and our tribe. We'll happily make things catastrophic for everyone else if it means we can get what we want.

That's really the definition of modern conservatism.
Refusing to see that Trump got elected precisely because he’s a soulless monster is just another iteration of American exceptionalism, in all its endlessly parochial stupidity and pride.

Governors' Policies Matter

Keep this for the next time somebody tells you there is no difference between the parties.

Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal:

Way back in early 2015, I suggested that a great way to demonstrate the outcomes of Republican vs Democratic policies is to compare what has happened in Wisconsin and Minnesota since 2010. The Economic Policy Institute just updated the numbers.
Since the 2010 election of Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Governor Mark Dayton in Minnesota, lawmakers in these two neighboring states have enacted vastly different policy agendas. Governor Walker and the Wisconsin state legislature have pursued a highly conservative agenda centered on cutting taxes, shrinking government, and weakening unions. In contrast, Minnesota under Governor Dayton has enacted a slate of progressive priorities: raising the minimum wage, strengthening safety net programs and labor standards, and boosting public investments in infrastructure and education, financed through higher taxes (largely on the wealthy).
Because of the proximity and many similarities of these two states, comparing economic performance in the Badger State (WI) versus the Gopher State (MN) provides a compelling case study for assessing which agenda leads to better outcomes for working people and their families. Now, seven years removed from when each governor took office, there is ample data to assess which state’s economy—and by extension, which set of policies—delivered more for the welfare of its residents. The results could not be more clear: by virtually every available measure, Minnesota’s recovery has outperformed Wisconsin’s.
This is precisely why I’ll be paying a lot of attention to governors races this November.

Sunday, May 13, 2018

A Giant Mirror

Noah at Down with Tyranny:



Very very rarely, a church sign gets it right, and without pleas to invisible sky wizards.

Send This Candidate ALL THE MONEY

Do it now.

Whether Pat Davis wins or loses, he's causing a bit of a stir in New Mexico with his rather blunt message for the NRA.

And from a quirk of election law, stations are not allowed to censor political ads, so his 15-second spot airs as is, without any bleeps.

Source: KRQE, Albuquerque

ALBUQUERQUE, NM (KRQE) - People see a lot of outrageous political ads, but it's not usually the language that's controversial.
Albuquerque City Councilor Pat Davis wants people to see his congressional campaign spot in which the Democrat uses profanity to get the viewers' attention.
"F*** the NRA," Davis says to start off his 15-second ad. "Their program policies have resulted in dead children, dead mothers and dead fathers. I'm Pat Davis and I approve this message because if Congress won't change our gun laws, we're changing Congress."
"I think the only people who are going to be offended are the NRA," Davis argued when asked about the ad Thursday.
Oh, please let this start a rude ads arms race among Democratic candidates.


Mitch Landrieu, You Are Full of Shit.

And you owe me 25.00 for the copy of your book that I bought based on your interview with Trevor Noah on the Daily Show, in which you strongly indicated that the book was all about the fight to take down Confederate statues in New Orleans.

It is not.  It is all about why Trump voters who may, deep down, feel a little guilty about being motherfucking racists, should vote for Mitch Landrieu for president in 2020.

The very first page and the last chapter are about the statues, and even those are more about you and the statues, and you and the modern confederacy, and you and your internal struggle with your white privilege.

Chapter after chapter about you and your house in a mixed neighborhood, you and all your many black friends down the block and in school, you and the insults you took from racist whites for having black friends.

And the biggest section about Katrina - well, not so much about the actual flooding and massive damage to lives and property, but about how you personally brought the city back to life.  That is, if you can call a corporatized, disaster capitalismed, privatized sinkhole of for-profit destruction a "city." Or "life."

And jesusfuckingchocolatecoveredchristonapogostick, one story that should keep you from getting within 100 miles of the Democratic nomination for dog catcher, much less president: the time in a pickup basketball game with two black guys when one of them knocked you down and glared at you, saying "blond-haired, blue-eyed devil!"

You called it a revelation, and for a moment I thought you were going to realize how deeply embedded in the lives of black people is the understanding that white people are and always have been the enemy.

But no. Your "revelation", I swear to dog, was: "Black people are racist, too."

If the 2020 primary comes down to you and Andrew Cuomo, we'll know that Trumpism has triumphed.

Kill yourself now, Mitch, before every real Democratic voter in the country has to explain why we're not going to try to explain you, much less apologize for you.

And one more thing. Your book, which I have not named for obvious reasons, has Not. One. Fucking. Word. about Black Lives Matter, which fought the statue battle long before you came along (except for mentioning those three words on the back of a church sign, jesus.)


Saturday, May 12, 2018

Molon Labe

I think the morons really imagine that the Orange Loser won't turn the 101st Airborne on their asses if they dare to deviate an inch from perfect worship of Dear Leader.

From Wonkette:

Bevin Determined to Lose Re-Election

You don't piss off the people who cook/serve your food or who cut your hair.  And you don't deliver public, deadly insults to the judge who handles all the lawsuits against your maladministration.

Gov. Matt Bevin went after a Kentucky judge Tuesday, the day after that judge ruled against Bevin's procedural motion in a lawsuit over Kentucky's new pension law.

"I now have the most incompetent hack of a judge — I don't know if in Kentucky, but certainly one of the worst — who happens to be in Franklin Circuit Court," Bevin said in a radio interview on 55KRC, a talk radio station in Cincinnati.

On Monday, Franklin Circuit Court Judge Phillip Shepherd ruled in a 30-minute hearing that Bevin's attorneys could not depose representatives of Attorney General Andy Beshear's office, the Kentucky Education Association and the Kentucky Fraternal Order of Police.

The three parties filed a lawsuit April 11 against the state's new public pension law.
Because anyone and everyone who disagrees with Dear Leader is an idiot and a traitor.

Maybe it's just a giant, long-term piece of performance art.

Friday, May 4, 2018

Your Tax Dollars in the Greedy Mitts of Super-Rich Fckwads

Just remember that when Republicans tell you that we can't afford roads, bridges, schools, clean water, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and health care, just remember they had no problem giving Apple $47 billion a year to buy their own stock.

Electeds Snub Student Gun Forum

Really, morons? You're sacrificing decades of future voters, who will not forget this snub, in order to pander to the old racists who probably aren't enough to get you over the finish line this year anyway.

For a group of Lexington high school students too young to cast ballots, desire for change led to a forum Wednesday night organized with the hope of bridging the political divide to discuss possible solutions to what they called a “gun epidemic.”

“We saw this issue as being an issue important to us, and many of us aren’t old enough to vote,” said McKayla Weaver, one of the student organizers. “So we saw this as an opportunity to still participate in the legislative process.”

To that end, the students invited more than 20 politicians at the local, state and federal levels to serve on a panel Wednesday night at The Lyric Theatre. Of those invited, four accepted. Some didn't respond.

Among the no-shows were Lexington state Reps. Robert J. Benvenuti and Susan Westrom along with U.S. Reps. Andy Barr, Thomas Massie, Harold Rogers and John Yarmuth. More than 100 communities members came out to ask questions and hear the panel members' positions on gun-related issues.

State Sen. Reggie Thomas, state Reps. Kelly Flood and Ruth Ann Palumbo, and congressional candidate Chuck Eddy fielded questions from activists, students and families of gun violence victims. Thomas, Flood and Palumbo are Democrats, while Eddy describes himself as a moderate Republican. Thomas and Eddy are running for Barr's 6th Congressional District seat.

The four were largely in agreement on the general need for gun regulations, but they voiced different ideas and plans to implement them. Other options discussed included a waiting period for gun purchases, getting military style weapons off the street, curbing gun theft and mental health treatment.

As the only Republican on the panel, Eddy mentioned several times that people trying to start discussions on gun regulations should stress that they don’t want to take guns from people who already legally own them.

SNIP

Thomas said gun regulations and solutions to gun violence would not come overnight. Changes would require an extreme amount of funding and work by activists and politicians.

Expanding research on the causes and effects of gun violence would play a key role in learning how to fix the problem, Flood said.

Several in the crowd had experienced the effects of gun violence first hand.

Anita Franklin, whose 21-year-old son Antonio Franklin was killed in April 2014, was among the family members of gun violence victims who spoke Wednesday night.

“Since that day of that tragedy, me, my family and my city have decided we’re going to turn his death into a triumph,” Anita Franklin said. She went on to say that while focus is on mass shootings in places like Parkland, Fla., people cannot forget the toll local violence has taken on places like Lexington.

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

On Calling Out the Smokey-Eyed Motherfckers

Think of how things have slid from the days when William Lloyd Garrison published his first issue of The Liberator in Boston in which Garrison wrote what I consider the essential statement of purpose for any country with a First Amendment.
I AM aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as Truth, and as uncompromising as Justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the resurrection of the dead.
Horribly uncivil, that. But vigorous, for sure, and proudly free.