KY Repug Senate Votes to Kill Poor Women and Their Children

Because that's what cutting Planned Parenthood funding does.

From the LRC:

The state Senate has passed legislation intended to curb the flow of non-Medicaid, state-administered tax dollars to Planned Parenthood clinics in Kentucky.

Dubbed the “Defunding Planned Parenthood Legislation,” Senate Bill 7 passed by a 33-5 vote on Tuesday. The bill now goes to the House of Representatives for consideration. 

 It's the "Killing Poor Women and Their Children Legislation," and here's why:

What terrorists like Dear and Republicans in Congress want is basically the same: to shut down Planned Parenthood and deny women access to abortions. If they got their wish, it would serve only to make poor women poorer and increase the number of unintended pregnancies.

Indeed, unintended pregnancies are already concentrated among low-income women, an imbalance that has been increasing. The rate of such pregnancies among women with incomes below the poverty line jumped 56 percent from 1994 to 2008, while for higher-income women it actually fell by 24 percent. In 2008, the unintended-pregnancy rate for poor women was more than five times that of the most well-off. All of this means that poor women have higher rates of unplanned births as well as abortions—six times and five times higher, respectively—than women at the other end of the income scale. Poor women also have fewer places to turn for affordable contraception and reproductive care—except for organizations like Planned Parenthood.

Taking away the option to seek an abortion would not just infringe on the constitutional rights of poor women; it would almost certainly make them poorer. If Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that made abortion legal throughout the country, were overturned and states were allowed to implement their own bans, poorer nonwhite women would see their abortion rates decline more significantly, according to researchers. In part, this would be due to the simple problem of having to travel long distances just to reach a clinic.

Current research already tells us what happens to women who want an abortion but can’t get one. Women who seek to terminate a pregnancy but are turned away are three times more likely to fall below the poverty line over the following two years than women who successfully get an abortion. They are also more likely to end up unemployed and to rely on government benefits to get by. Women themselves already know this: Among the main reasons they cite for seeking the procedure is that they can’t afford to have a baby, and that doing so would interfere with their ability to work or gain an education.

Shutting down Planned Parenthood wouldn’t just affect access to abortion, of course. The group provides many other services to low-income women. Poor women are more likely to have sex without birth control—and access to affordable contraception would shrink further without the existence of Planned Parenthood. Among 491 counties with Planned Parenthood clinics, 103 have no other place where low-income patients can obtain affordable contraception.

Access to reproductive healthcare is certainly about women’s right to bodily autonomy. But doing away with that right also comes with devastating economic consequences, especially for those already at the bottom. Eliminating Planned Parenthood would create a vicious cycle of impoverishment and unwanted pregnancies for the most vulnerable women among us.

Just one year ago, Kentuckians could count on our Democratic-majority house of representatives to shit-can bills like this before our Democratic governor even got a chance to veto them.  No more.

The Kentucky House now has a bare one-vote majority and has already surrendered to the conservatard freakazoid repugs by passing anti-abortion legislation that for decades it has refused to even let out of committee.

From the LRC:

The first bill the 2016 General Assembly delivered to the governor would require a an in-person or real-time video conference between a woman seeking an abortion and a health care provider at least 24 hours before the procedure.

The state Senate gave final passage of “informed consent” legislation, also known as Senate Bill 4, as amended by the House of Representatives by a 33-5 vote today. On Thursday, the House amended SB 4 to include the video conference option, known as “telehealth.” Backers of the House amendment said the telehealth provision would eliminate the burden of women having to make an extra trip to a clinic that provides abortions.

We. Are. So. Fucked.

  

Bevin Doesn't Know What the Fuck He's Doing, Part 2

Or maybe he does.  These are exactly the lies Sam Brownback spread to justify gutting Kansas' economy to further enrich the obscenely wealthy mooching people and corporations.

Tom Loftus at the Courier:

Gov.-elect Matt Bevin said Tuesday that he is inheriting a "financial crisis" from departing Gov. Steve Beshear.

"According to the Beshear administration, they are leaving Kentucky burdened with a projected biennial budget shortfall of more than $500 million," Bevin said in a news release naming John E. Chilton, of Louisville, as the new state budget director. "The appointment of a highly qualified budget director, therefore is of tremendous importance."

Asked to elaborate on Bevin's comment about a financial crisis, the Bevin transition office released an analysis of the state's 2016-18 budget outlook by the Beshear administration's budget office.

But Beshear said in a statement later Tuesday that there is no shortfall and that Bevin is simply confronting a problem he confronted repeatedly the past eight years of dealing with needs and requests that outstrip available revenues.

"I have had to balance and rebalance the state's budget 15 times," Beshear said. "We are leaving the state's finances in much better shape than what I was presented with my first year in office," Beshear said.

"I will not sign another shortsighted, short-term spending bill like the one Congress sent me this week."

You're getting into serious no-fucks-left-to-give territory here, Mr. President. You can't executive-order a budget. Do you really think a Boehner-less Congress is less likely to allow a government shutdown?



Full transcript here.

"We just have to make the right choices."

Congress hasn't passed a "responsible budget" since the New Deal, Mr. President, and it's not going to do so anytime soon.  But keep calling out the motherfucking repugs who are responsible for unresponsible budgets.



Full transcript here.

Talking About Budget

Borrow $10 trillion while interest rates are in negative territory, and get this country rebuilt, Mr. President. Diddle-fucking around the edges while austerity is killing us is a crime.



Full transcript here.

QOTD: Paying the Bills

S&P just downgraded Kentucky's bonds because we're refusing to tax the filthy rich and use the money to create a working economy instead of a feudal one.

Undercover Blue at Hullabaloo:

We seem prepared to strip America to the walls looking for places to cut pennies before we'll own up to our responsibility and tax ourselves for what we get and to maintain it. Highways, water systems, good schools, endless wars. We expect them. We demand them. We just refuse to pay for them, and then blame the deficits on the poor. Or else on waste, fraud, and abuse, the inexhaustible zero-point energy of conservative pseudo-economics.

Or to clean up after ourselves. Barack Obama is in Alaska this week talking about climate change and the need to do just that:

I have come here today, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and its second-largest emitter, to say that the United States recognizes our role in creating the problem, and we embrace our responsibility to help solve it.

Don't hold your breath waiting for the personal responsibility crowd to accept any.

"It's time for Congress to pass a responsible budget"

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh, Mr. President, you are the funniest! Congress has never, in the history of all the Congresses, passed a "responsible" budget. The next one will be "responsible" only in the sense that it fulfills repug ambitions to poke you in the eye with a stick.



Full transcript here.

Repugs Pass an Austerity Budget That Would Make Greece Look Prosperous

Five Trillion dollars cut from every domestic spending program that does not engorge the already obscenely rich, fossil fuel companies and military contractors.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has the details.

Fortunately, it's dead on arrival, thanks to the Kenyan Usurper.  Unfortunately, the budget that would actually rescue the country from Greece's fate will never make it to the president's desk.

But it's amazing what you can do with a budget when your goal is to make the economy work for the non-rich.

Crooks and Liars:

Once again, I've yet to hear our corporate media talking about this progressive budget, which includes things that voters actually want. I wonder why! Via Vox:

Every year, the Congressional Progressive Caucus releases a budget proposal, and every year it gets roundly ignored. As the big budget plans — the White House's, the House Budget Committee's, the Senate Budget Committee's — are vigorously covered in the press (including by me!), nary a word is said about the CPC's offering.

This makes sense, of course. The CPC represents a little more than a third of the minority party in the House and has one member in the Senate; its plans are objectively less important, and less likely to shape policy, than ones coming from the president or the majority parties in the House and Senate.
But its budget — or "the People's Budget," as CPC likes to call it — deserves your attention. It's a far better contrast to the aggressive spending cuts of the House and Senate GOP budgets than President Obama's much more timid offering. Like the congressional GOP, and unlike Obama, the CPC isn't trying to lay out a realistic spending course or create a starting point for negotiations. It's trying to lay out a comprehensive vision for transforming the federal government, to give grassroots activists something to rally around and to pressure presidential contenders. It sets out a clear theory for where the Democratic Party should head next that Hillary Clinton and others need to reckon with.

House and Senate Republicans would cut trillions from the budget, mostly from health and social welfare programs. So naturally the CPC budget adds trillions to the budget. While the Congressional Budget Office projects the federal government will spend about $49 trillion between 2016 and 2025, the progressive budget envisions $52.4 trillion in spending — a net increase of about $3.4 trillion.

And with those trillions, it does just about everything a progressive could ask for, short of fully implementing Swedish social democracy in America:
$745 billion goes to an infrastructure program, meant to both create jobs and repair deteriorating roads, bridges, and the like.

$128 billion goes to a new tax credit for low- and middle-income workers.
The debt limit deal of 2011 — including the budget sequestration — is repealed in full, and more spending on non-defense discretionary programs is added on top of that, for a total discretionary spending hike of nearly $1.9 trillion.

A bevy of new education programs are introduced, including universal pre-K and a matching fund to help public universities "increase aid to students to help them cover the total cost of college attendance without taking on debt."

While the budget declines to change Social Security (believing that to be an issue best addressed outside of the budget process), it calls for the program to be significantly expanded.

Go read the rest, and share with your friends. The media continues to turn this into the Invisible Budget -- don't let them!