KY Supreme Court to Bevin: Stop Strip-Mining State Economy

Really, the best part of all of these court decisions stomping on Gov. Lying Coward's balls is how his propaganda shop responds exactly the way any democratically-elected five-year-old would.

Marty Finley at Louisville Business Journal:

Kentucky's highest court has ruled against a recent round of higher education budget cuts made by Gov. Matt Bevin, which touched off an increasingly hostile legal battle with Attorney General Andy Beshear.

The Kentucky Supreme Court ruled 5-2 Thursday to reverse a Franklin Circuit Court decision to uphold the cuts, which Beshear has repeatedly argued are illegal.

The Supreme Court's conclusion states that "the Governor's reduction of the allotments of the Universities in this case exceeded his statutory authority to revise allotments under KRS 48.620(1) and his authority to withhold allotments under KRS 45.253(4)."

"Whatever authority he might otherwise have to require a budget unit not to spend appropriated funds does not extend to the Universities, which the legislature has made independent bodies politic with control over their own expenditures," the ruling continued. "We therefore do not reach the question of whether his actions were constitutional, as the statutes do not give him the authority to act as he proposed. For these reasons, the Franklin Circuit Court's order upholding the Governor's actions is reversed, and this matter is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion."

SNIP

Beshear released the following statement in response to the Supreme Court's ruling.

"Today, the Supreme Court enforced Kentucky law, reminding us that 'the governor, like everyone, is bound by the law.' Based on today’s ruling, I am calling on Gov. Bevin to immediately release the $18 million he wrongfully withheld from our public colleges and universities. As the court stated, it is my job as Attorney General 'to vindicate the public rights of the people of the Commonwealth, and I will continue to do so. I am also calling on the governor’s office to use today's ruling as a turning point. It is time for him to stop attacking, and to instead join me in building a better Kentucky. We live in a state where far too many of our children are abused. Our seniors face daily scams that seek to rob them of their hard-earned savings. Thousands of victims of sexual assault have been denied justice based on our rape kit backlog. And our communities face the most deadly drug epidemic imaginable. These are the problems Kentuckians expect us to address, and they are problems that all of us — Democrats, Republicans or independents — can address together. So I would hope that after today, the nasty press releases and name-calling stop, and the governor joins us for the real work that needs to be done to help Kentucky families."

In March, Bevin made an immediate 4.5 percent cut in state spending for colleges and universities in order to ease the burden of the state's $30 billion pension debt at the time.

In April, Bevin lowered the cuts to $18 million— about 2 percent — and restored funding to Kentucky State University. But although Bevin reduced the cuts, Beshear said they were still illegal.

From the trumpist toddler's press release:

"We are disappointed in the Court’s decision today and strongly disagree with its reasoning. The Attorney General clearly does not understand the severity of the pension problem which became the nation's worst funded plan under the watch of his father's administration. 

You already know every word of it is lies. 

Yes, Kentucky's state pension system is a mess.  It's a mess because for more than 20 years - including four years under repug governor Ernie Fletcher and more than a decade with a repug-run state senate - Kentucky has failed to properly fund the pension system as required by law.

The general assembly failed to fund the pension system because it was way easier to steal money from impoverished retirees than to address the Commonwealth's third-world tax system that strips workers of hard-earned income to let millionaires and billionaires - like Matt Bevin - skate.

When is Terrorism Not Terrorism? When It's White and christian.

Zandar:

But because Cary Lee Ogborn is a 50-year-old white guy who plotted to blow up a building, he gets a few paragraphs in the Houston Chronicle and nobody cares to ask "Where was he radicalized?" or questions about his religion or his international travel or if Houston police should be racially profiling middle-aged white men.  Nobody is on CNN or FOX or MSNBC asking if Christianity is really just a terrorist ideology masquerading as religion and if it should actually receive any First Amendment protections as a result, or whether we should just accepting Christians at all in this country, and maybe deport all the Christians we already have here just to be safe.

Everything We've Accomplished Is On the Ballot

Turnout, Turnout, Turnout.  And this will do it.  Show it to everyone.

Opinion vs. Theory

Every time I hear some repug or freakazoid say she doesn't "believe" in a scientific fact like global warming or evolution - or even the non-existence of biological "race" - because it's just a theory, I want to ask if she "believes" in the theory of gravity. 

 

Juanita Jean:

I have a theory, too.  My theory is that creationists are people who did not do well at science in school and want the answer to every question on the science test to be, “You know, God.”

PZ Myers:

I sure wish more people understood the meaning of theory in science, but at least Piers Sellers does a good job of explaining the concept. I try to hammer into my students (as my teachers hammered into me) the primacy of evidence — observation and measurement — but evidence always has to be for or against something, and that something is theory. You can’t have a theory without evidence, and you can’t have evidence without a theory to give it meaning. So I’m always happy to see another explanation of this core concept of science.

Fundamentally, a theory in science is not just a whim or an opinion; it is a logical construct of how we think something works, generally agreed upon by scientists and always in agreement with the available observations. A good example is Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation, which says that every physical object in the universe exerts a gravity force field around itself, with the strength of that field depending on its mass. The theory—one simple equation—does a superb job of explaining our observations of how planets orbit around the sun, and was more than good enough to make the calculations we needed to send spacecraft to the moon and elsewhere. Einstein improved on Newton’s theory when it comes to large-scale astronomical phenomena, but, for everyday engineering use, Newton’s physics works perfectly well, even though it is more than three hundred years old.

One danger of the public misunderstanding of this idea is that they do equate theory and opinion; they tear down successful theories with rhetoric and ignorance, and they also elevate nonsense by labeling it, without comprehension, a theory. And I could piss in the snow and call it a book, too.

But theories are abstract, after all, so it’s easy for people to get tricked into thinking that because something is based on theory, it could very likely be wrong or is debatable in the same way that a social issue is debatable. This is incorrect. Almost all the accepted theories that we use in the physical and biological sciences are not open to different interpretations depending on someone’s opinion, internal beliefs, gut feelings, or lobbying. In the science world, two and two make four. To change or modify a theory, as Einstein’s theories modified Newton’s, takes tremendous effort and a huge weight of experimental evidence.

This is something that should be explained to everyone visiting Answers in Genesis and their horrible dishonest “museum” and “ark park”. The central argument Ken Ham always makes is a demolition of the whole concept of theory — he claims that any alternative explanation, no matter how much it ignores the evidence, is a theory, and all theories are equal, and therefore, his bizarre, highly subjective and ideologically driven interpretation of the words of his holy book are just as much deserving of the title of “theory” as the hard-earned, constantly tested, well-supported by evidence theory of evolution.

And that’s dangerous. Ken Ham uses the degradation of theory to peddle nonsense to the rubes and make money and promote his narrow religion, but as the article explains, it’s also being used to corrupt decision-making about climate that endangers every human being on the planet.

1,500 Years Ahead

Divine Irony:

reblogged from diverseatheism

RFK Shredded Trump's Economic Plan 50 Years Ago

Yeah, the Orange Menace is going to create 25 million jobs (sic) by eliminating the food and work safety regulations that keep us alive and turning the Treasury over to his billionaire friends so we can beat Somalia on the Galtian Paradise scale.

Think Progress:

Donald Trump is running on the erroneous belief that ending regulations, particularly environmental ones, is the key to faster economic growth. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY), who was assassinated June 6, 1968, explained just how misguided that view was just weeks before he was killed.

U.S. economic growth has emerged as a major issue in the presidential campaign. Donald Trump has many untenable ideas, as the Washington Post explained in an April piece headlined, “There is math, there is fantasy math, and then there’s Donald Trump’s economic math.”

That article quoted an economist at the Tax Foundation (who helped model Trump’s tax plan) saying, “It’s not consistent with historical experience. It’s more consistent with a world where we’re hiring butlers for our vacation homes on Ganymede” [Jupiter’s largest moon].”

I wanted to zero in on one of Donald Trump’s fictional strategies for boosting economic growth: As he explained last month to CNBC, “we’re going to be getting rid of a tremendous amount of regulations.”

In particular, when Fox News’ Chris Wallace pressed Trump in March on how he’d cut the federal budget, Trump answered “Department of Environmental Protection [sic]. We are going to get rid of it in almost every form.”

In reality, slashing regulations, particularly regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency, would be very counterproductive, as a 2015 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) report to Congress made clear. The OMB found that ten years’ worth of major Federal regulations provided annual benefits to the nation (in 2001 dollars) of between $216 billion and $812 billion, while the estimated annual costs were only between $57 billion and $85 billion.

Of that, EPA regulations delivered the majority of benefits ($132.5 to $652 billion) but only about half the costs ($31 to $37.5 billion).

Of course, lots of those benefits were things like reduced health care costs because the air got cleaner — and those benefits don’t show up in our primary measure of economic growth, GDP. Indeed, reducing sickness and death actually lowers GDP.

Who can doubt that our wildly unsustainable global economic system is now the biggest of Ponzi schemes — where the economy appears to grow faster the more we burn fossil fuels and destroy a livable climate?

Robert F. Kennedy explained why GDP is a useless measure of economic well-being back in the 1960s.

Robert Kennedy was one of the few national politicians ever to challenge our monomaniacal pursuit of GDP to the exclusion of true economic well-being. In Detroit on May 5, 1967 he pointed out: “Let us be clear at the outset that we will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods.”

 

Weeks before he was killed, he spoke on this subject at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968 — in what President Obama called “one of the most beautiful of his speeches.”

Here are the key lines:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product — if we judge the United States of America by that — that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.

It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.

It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.

It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

When you take this view of economic well-being, a President Trump could well bring this country greatest depression we have ever known.

Now We Have Proof That Charter Schools Are Worse Than You Thought

Any day now, some trumpist repug in the Kentucky General Assembly is going to file a bill to mandate that Kentucky public schools turn over all their funding to corporations and freakazoid creationist outfits to run charter schools.

Let's get our fact ducks in a row now to abort this abomination before it passes second trimester.

First, Charlie Pierce:

The evidence is now abundantly clear in a number of states: As it is presently constituted, the charter school movement is far better as an entry vehicle for fraud and corruption than it is for educating children. The fact that the charter industry is fighting to maintain its independent control over taxpayer funds is proof that the industry knows it, too.

The Nation:

Geetha Nambissan, a professor of sociology in education at Jawaharlal Nehru University, calls these PPPs “a ‘creeping’ form of privatisation where private organisations are given easy access to public institutions and resources while not subjecting them to public scrutiny.”

Are charter school operators motherfucking racists? Is the Orange Menace a psychopathic liar?  Erik Loomis:

Glad to see the NAACP come out against charter schools and the fraud that they offer African-Americans a better education.

With charter schools educating as many as half the students in some American cities, they have been championed as a lifeline for poor black children stuck in failing traditional public schools.

But now the nation’s oldest and newest black civil rights organizations are calling for a moratorium on charter schools.

Their demands, and the outcry that has ensued, expose a divide among blacks that goes well beyond the now-familiar complaints about charters’ diverting money and attention from traditional public schools.

In separate conventions over the past month, the N.A.A.C.P. and the Movement for Black Lives, a group of 50 organizations assembled by Black Lives Matter, passed resolutions declaring that charter schools have exacerbated segregation, especially in the way they select and discipline students.

They portray charters as the pet project of foundations financed by white billionaires, and argue that the closing of traditional schools as students migrate to charters has disproportionately disrupted black communities.

There’s also the many problems with how charter schools operate:

Although charters are supposed to admit students by lottery, some effectively skim the best students from the pool, with enrollment procedures that discourage all but the most motivated parents to apply. Some charters have been known to nudge out their most troubled students.

That, the groups supporting a moratorium say, concentrates the poorest students in public schools that are struggling for resources.

Charter schools “are allowed to get away with a lot more,” said Hiram Rivera, an author of the Black Lives platform and the executive director of the Philadelphia Student Union.

Charters are slightly more likely to suspend students than traditional public schools, according to an analysis of federal data this year. And black students in charter schools are four times as likely to be suspended as their white peers, according to the data analysis, putting them in what Mr. Brooks calls the “preschool to prison pipeline.”

Another platform author, Jonathan Stith, the national coordinator for the Alliance for Educational Justice, chose a charter school in Washington for one of his children because it promised an Afrocentric curriculum. But he began to see the school driving out students. It was difficult, he said, for parents to push back against the private boards that run the schools.

“Where you see the charters providing an avenue of escape for some, it hasn’t been for the majority,” he said.

Mr. Stith came to think the money would be better spent on fixing the traditional public school system.

Once again, the problem of education is the problems of poverty and inequality. If you want to improve public education, you don’t give over public monies and responsibility to private entities. You work to fix poverty. But where’s the money for that? Plus if you fixed poverty there might be room for teachers’ unions and we couldn’t have that now, could we. After all, who is more concerned about a child’s education, a Silicon Valley investor or a teacher trying to reach out to a children and pay her mortgage at the same time?

After Gun Wounds One Child in House, Gun Kills Another Child in Same House

Because letting a four-year-old get and fire a gun is no reason to be forced to lock your guns up, much less forced to give up your guns along with your seriously endangered children.

Like the three-year-old who got and fired a gun that killed him.

No, those parents are pure patriots who need their guns to be in reach at all times to fight tyranny. Children be damned.

From the AP:

Authorities have released the identity of a 3-year-old boy who died after suffering a gunshot wound inside a Louisville home.

Jefferson County Deputy Coroner Rita Taylor said the boy was Anthony Blake Wells. Taylor said in an email that the boy died at 4:25 a.m. Monday at Kosair Children's Hospital of an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Louisville Metro Police Department spokeswoman Alicia Smiley told media the shooting occurred shortly before 11 p.m. Sunday in a residence in the Algonquin neighborhood.

Smiley says other people were home at the time of the shooting but no one else was hurt.

The address where the shooting occurred is the same street where police said a 4-year-old girl accidentally wounded herself with firearm a month ago.

If that is not felony child endangerment at the very least, and reckless homicide in a sensible country, I don't know what is.

Rep. John Lewis speaks:

Bevin Calls for Bloodshed If Trump Loses

Really, motherfucker? Thanks for revealing your true authoritarian colors.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.  Not to mention illegal, unconstitutional, un-democratic and un-American.

But it's the way of the tyrant.

In December 2000, when it was crystal clear to everyone that Al Gore had won the election - popular vote AND electoral college - and that the repug Supreme Court had committed treason by unconstitutionally appointing the election loser to the presidency, Democratic voters did not respond with violence.

Smirky/Darth had perpetrated an actual coup, one that genuinely merited a rebellious response, but Democrats shed no blood, because we cherish the Constitution and the rule of law above all.

Bevin just made clear that he and the other Trumpists shit on the Constitution. They shit on the rule of law. They shit on our Democratic republic.

They demand a tyrant, and to get him they will destroy everything we have built over 400 years.

Josh Marshall at TPM:

I'm not sure how I missed this. At the Family Research Council Action convention last week, where Trump spoke, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin (R) both lamented and called for revolution and bloodshed to "redeem" what will be lost if Hillary is victorious.

AA Doesn't Work; So Blame the Addicts

It's been a well-kept secret in the recovery community that 12-step programs don't work.  There are always a million excuses why not: teens think they're immortal, some addicts haven't hit bottom, the others aren't holding their mouths just right .... 

It's bullshit, all of it.  Anything and everything that depends on the goodwill of your invisible wizard friend in the sky, from prayer to life after death, is bullshit.  Always has been and always will be.

 

But admitting that means destroying the multi-billion-dollar 12-step industry, and failing addicts just mean more tax dollars for the Great Freakazoid Machine.

Yes, you can recover from addiction.  But it's a lot more likely to be permanent if you depend on medical science, yourself, your friends, your family, your community, your public services and other things that are real.

 

PZ Myers:

Here’s another case of a ‘higher power’ inflating it’s potency: 12 step programs. They don’t work.

There is a large body of evidence now looking at AA success rate, and the success rate of AA is between 5 and 10 percent. Most people don’t seem to know that because it’s not widely publicized. … There are some studies that have claimed to show scientifically that AA is useful. These studies are riddled with scientific errors and they say no more than what we knew to begin with, which is that AA has probably the worst success rate in all of medicine.

It’s not only that AA has a 5 to 10 percent success rate; if it was successful and was neutral the rest of the time, we’d say OK. But it’s harmful to the 90 percent who don’t do well. And it’s harmful for several important reasons. One of them is that everyone believes that AA is the right treatment. AA is never wrong, according to AA. If you fail in AA, it’s you that’s failed.

It’s always the victim’s fault when it comes to faith-based treatments. The very first comment there is a perfect example of religious apologetics.

I’m a recovering addict/alcoholic with over 5 years of continuous sobriety. I attend AA meetings regularly, and I take exception to Dr. Dodes statement, “AA is never wrong, according to AA. If you fail in AA, it’s you that’s failed.” I have never attended a meeting where this sentiment was expressed. The AA Big Book says, “Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.”

Exactly. It doesn’t work, the stats show it doesn’t work, but according to AA, it always works, except when it’s the subject’s fault, which is 95% of the time.

Using Nonsense

Divine Irony:

Pretty spot on

(Source: fuckyeahreligionpigeon)

The Only Way to Commemorate 9/11

Reading the whole painful, devastating thing is the most patriotic thing you will ever do in your life, just after voting and just before military service.

Charlie Pierce:

Getting someone to talk on the record is the eternal jackpot of investigative reporting, and, in today's Guardian, Ackerman hits the Comstock Lode with Daniel Jones, who was the chief investigator for the Senate intelligence committee when that committee was looking into the practice of rendition and torture and the other extraconstitutional horrors perpetrated in our name by the late Avignon Presidency, and who also looked on in anger as the CIA worked overtime to ratfck the investigation and to bury its result. This is the first of a three-part series. I'd say that the extended weekend forecast calls for fury and outrage.

It begins with a holy-shit moment straight out of a paranoid political thriller, except that it was real, and it happened here. From The Guardian:

There was one document in particular that proved it. Jones and his team had found it years before, placed mysteriously onto a shared computer network drive the Senate intelligence committee investigators were using in northern Virginia, not far from CIA headquarters. But they hadn't appreciated its full significance until the agency, in an attempt at refuting a report that was still far from publication, told Barack Obama's staff that the committee was pushing a hysterical interpretation of the agency's fateful post-9/11 embrace of torture. The document, prepared for Leon Panetta when he was CIA director, had reached the same conclusions about the torture program that Jones had. As long as Jones had it, he would be able to show that the agency knew full well how brutal the torture was; how ineffective its torturers considered it to be; and how thoroughly the CIA had covered all of that up. As long as Jones had the document, that is. Lurking in the back of his mind was the event that had led him to devote five years of ceaseless work, through nights and weekends: the CIA had already destroyed evidence of torture. It did that before the Senate had launched an investigation, and long before that investigation had turned acrimonious. Inside the small room in Virginia the CIA had set up for the Senate investigators, Jones reached for his canvas messenger bag. He slipped crucial printed-out passages of what he called the Panetta Review into the bag and secured its lock. Sometime after 1am, Jones walked out, carrying his bag as he always did, and neglecting to tell the agency security personnel what it contained. After years of working together, no one asked him to open the bag.

And thus was saved a document that gave the lie to everything the CIA ever said in public about how it squandered the moral authority of the United States in the world. It is important to note, as Ackerman does, that Jones didn't remove this document to leak it—no Ellsberg, he—but to make sure that the cover-up artists from Langley didn't burn the thing.

How to Beat the Trumpists

It's Festival Season, with local fairs and fish fries and fests every weekend. The Trumpists will be out in force with their lies and their bullying and their racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic threats.

How do you stand up for American Democracy and Democratic candidates without giving in to screaming rage?

George Lakoff, via Down with Tyranny:

How Can Democrats Do Better?

First, don’t think of an elephant. Remember not to repeat false conservative claims and then rebut them with the facts. Instead, go positive. Give a positive truthful framing to undermine claims to the contrary. Use the facts to support positively-framed truth. Use repetition.

Second, start with values, not policies and facts and numbers. Say what you believe, but haven't been saying. For example, progressive thought is built on empathy, on citizens caring about other citizens and working through our government to provide public resources for all, both businesses and individuals. Use history. That’s how America started. The public resources used by businesses were not only roads and bridges, but public education, a national bank, a patent office, courts for business cases, interstate commerce support, and of course the criminal justice system. From the beginning, the Private Depended on Public Resources, both private lives and private enterprise.

Over time those resources have included sewers, water and electricity, research universities and research support: computer science (via the NSF), the internet (ARPA), pharmaceuticals and modern medicine (the NIH), satellite communication (NASA and NOA), and GPS systems and cell phones (the Defense Department). Private enterprise and private life utterly depend on public resources. Have you ever said this? Elizabeth Warren has. Almost no other public figures. And stop defending “the government.” Talk about the public, the people, Americans, the American people, public servants, and good government. And take back freedom. Public resources provide for freedom in private enterprise and private life.

The conservatives are committed to privatizing just about everything and to eliminating funding for most public resources. The contribution of public resources to our freedoms cannot be overstated. Start saying it.

And don’t forget the police. Effective respectful policing is a public resource. Chief David O. Brown of the Dallas Police got it right. Training, community policing, knowing the people you protect. And don't ask too much of the police: citizens have a responsibility to provide funding so that police don't have to do jobs that should be done by others.

Unions need to go on the offensive. Unions are instruments of freedom-- freedom from corporate servitude. Employers call themselves job creators. Working people are profit creators for the employers, and as such they deserve a fair share of the profits and respect and acknowledgement. Say it. Can the public create jobs. Of course. Fixing infrastructure will create jobs by providing more public resources that private lives and businesses depend on. Public resources to create more public resources. Freedom creates opportunity that creates more freedom.

Third, keep out of nasty exchanges and attacks. Keep out of shouting matches. One can speak powerfully without shouting. Obama sets the pace: Civility, values, positivity, good humor, and real empathy are powerful. Calmness and empathy in the face of fury are powerful. Bill Clinton won because he oozed empathy, with his voice, his eye contact, and his body. It wasn’t his superb ability as a policy wonk, but the empathy he projected and inspired.

Values come first, facts and policies follow in the service of values. They matter, but they always support values.

Give up identity politics. No more women’s issues, black issues, Latino issues. Their issues are all real, and need public discussion. But they all fall under freedom issues, human issues. And address poor whites! Appalachian and rust belt whites deserve your attention as much as anyone else. Don’t surrender their fate to Trump, who will just increase their suffering.

And remember JFK’s immortal, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Empathy, devotion, love, pride in our country’s values, public resources to create freedoms. And adulthood.

Be prepared. You have to understand Trump to stand calmly up to him and those running with him all over the country.

Tell Feds to Reject Bevin's Murder Medicaid Plan

You've got only 30 days.  Go to Medicaid.org and click on “View Section 1115 Demonstration List” to find Kentucky. Don't know what to say?  Write this:

 

"Expanded Medicaid as implemented by the Beshear administration has made huge strides in improving health among Kentucky's working poor.  It has also started to do what no other effort in Kentucky's 224 years as a state has done: finally eliminate generational poverty in the Commonwealth. 

Please do not approve Governor Lying Coward's plan to kill 400,000 Kentuckians and bust a $2 billion hole in our state's budget."

Jack Brammer at the Herald:

The federal government told the Bevin administration Thursday that its Medicaid waiver proposal has “sufficient information to evaluate” and it now wants to hear from Kentuckians what they think about the proposal.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Press Secretary Marjorie Connolly said the agency has certified the completeness of Kentucky’s application for a Medicaid waiver, one of the first hurdles the proposal must clear.

She said the next step is a 30-day federal comment period.

“After the comment period and review and consideration of public input, the waiver process usually involves significant additional dialogue between HHS and states,” Connolly said. 

“We are prepared to continue working for as long as it takes to find a solution that builds on the historic progress Kentucky has made under Medicaid expansion and avoids moving backwards.”

To comment, go to Medicaid.org and click on “View Section 1115 Demonstration List” to find Kentucky.

Bevin submitted his proposal to the federal government last month for the program that provides health insurance for 1.32 million Kentuckians.

The most controversial measures include premiums and co-pays and a requirement that able-bodied adults be engaged in their communities for at least 20 hours every week, through a job, classes, volunteering or other specified activities.

Go to Medicaid.org and click on “View Section 1115 Demonstration List” to find Kentucky.  Stop reading this and do it now.  NOW.

AttN Dem Hillary Haters: You've Swallowed Repug Lies

Yeah, all you "Democrats" who just can't bring yourselves to vote for the super-qualified candidate: you're falling for the same freakazoid hate-driven lies that hanged and burned to death a million women who dared to step an inch out of line.

Like them, Clinton is innocent of all charges.  Twenty-five years of the most ridiculous, hysterical claims and yet dozens of enemy investigations have turned up exactly bupkis.  

You're refusing to vote for her not because you question her honesty or competence.  You're refusing to vote for her because she doesn't have a penis and therefore is evil.

You're all morons and you're going to get exactly the president you deserve, because he's going to kill everyone one of you before the sun sets on his inauguration.

Digby:

I think Rebecca Traister has the right answer in her latest piece which delves into this growing theme of Clinton stealing the election:

It’s true that the major hit on Hillary Clinton has long been that she is untrustworthy, which makes it a short step to suggesting that her electoral victories are fraudulent. Surely some of this stems from a reputation and history particular to her. But it seems unlikely that Clinton is, by political standards, uniquely dishonest; former New York Times editor Jill Abramson has written of how her many journalistic investigations into Clintonian malfeasance revealed that Clinton was “fundamentally honest and trustworthy.” The fact that “she can be so seamlessly rendered synonymous with all things untrue,” says Tillet, is at least in part because “religious narratives tell us that women are inherently untrustworthy … The idea of woman as a liar and as evil goes back to the Bible.”

This is some deep primal stuff and non-GOP voters of all ages should take a gut check on this Clinton meme and ask themselves some hard questions. There's something wrong with it and it's not that Hillary Clinton is unusually dishonest or untrustworthy. I expect right wingers to say that. They have primitive views of women. Liberals and progressives should know better. Her policies and her record are all fair game and should be criticized. But this rampant "she's a liar" character smear is something else altogether.

Dissent and the Military

Dave Zirin at The Nation:

 If we accept the notion that we are allowed to raise our voices, or take a knee in dissent, only by the good graces of the military, then we are also implicitly saying that the military has the right to take that ability away. 

And that’s the thing about the right to dissent: You use it or lose it. 

So again, for the cheap seats: Colin Kaepernick is trying to raise awareness about police violence. If you believe he only has the right to do that because of the US military, you are arguing that dissent is possible only if the people with the guns approve.

If you're getting paid, thank a Union.

Because if it weren't for Unions, and the hundreds of union members who have given their lives to ensure we have decent wages, an eight-hour day, a forty-hour week, weekends, safety regulations and workers' compensation, we'd all be getting pennies a day to suffer in some Trumpian sweatshop.

Think Progress:

When Labor Day was originally conceived as a federal holiday, it was as a concession to the labor movement after bloody union unrest that left 30 striking workers dead. It was meant as a day to celebrate the efforts and sacrifices of unionized workers.

A shrinking share of Americans are union members today. But the benefits brought about by the union movement are still just as strong, particularly when it comes to workers’ pay.

Being in a union is particularly helpful for marginalized groups that tend to be paid less than white men. A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that black union workers earn wages that are, on average, 16.4 percent higher than black workers who aren’t in a union. The same is true for women: a report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that women in a union earn 30.9 percent more than women who aren’t unionized.

Unionization also yields salary benefits for white men, who get a 20.1 percent boost for being in a union. But the wage-boosting power of unions has been hampered as the share of workers who belong to one has declined. In 1983, the earliest year the Bureau of Labor Statistics has data for, 20.1 percent of the workforce belonged to a union. Today that share has been cut nearly in half, down to 11.1 percent.

That’s hurt everyone’s wages, not just unionized workers. The wage-boosting power of unions usually spills out into other workplaces because they set standards that everyone ends up adopting. A new report from the Economic Policy Institute found that for men working in the private sector who aren’t in a union, their weekly wages would be about 5 percent higher if union membership had stayed at the same rate as it was in 1979. That would mean an extra $2,704 per year on average.

Non-union women would also benefit, but the impact would be smaller — a 2 to 3 percent increase in wages — because women have historically been a much smaller share of union workers.

The drop in union membership, and the subsequent erosion of the wage benefits for all workers, has played a role in widening wage inequality, holding down pay at the bottom of the scale but less so at the top. In fact, other researchers have found a strong correlation between the fall of union power and the rise of income inequality.

Eat and Drink Union

From Think Progress:

No More Permatemps. Thanks, Obama!

We created the National Labor Relations Board 80 years ago to help Unions fight criminal employers.  But for decades, as repugs kept it neutered, NLRB has been less a friend to workers than our worst enemy. 

But not now.

Loomis at LGM:

In their myriad ways to avoid not only unions but also responsibility for their own employees, employers have come up with any number of ways to control workers without having any legal obligation to them. One of the most effective ways is to use temp agencies for long-term workers who labor on the shop floor next to actual employees, doing the same work with lower wages and fewer if any benefits. The Japanese auto industry’s investment in American factories for instance has relied heavily on this sort of arrangement. How can a factory unionize when the workers are technically employees of different companies? This is of course half the point of it, the other half being lowering employee compensation. Before this week, the rule was that the temp company would have to grant permission for their employees to be included in such a bargaining unit, which is of course laughable that they would grant. But by a 3-1 vote, the NLRB overturned that rule this week.

The National Labor Relations Board is reaffirming its view that labor law must now address the brave new world of the fissured workplace—where workers are often separated from their actual employer by layers of subcontractors and staffing agencies. On Monday, the board announced a decision on the case Miller & Anderson, ruling that unions that want to represent bargaining units including direct employees as well as “permatemps,” contract workers, and other indirect workers that share a “community of interest” are no longer required to get permission from the parent company.

The old standard, established by George W. Bush’s NLRB in 2004, which required unions to gain such parent-employer consent, allowed companies to use staffing agencies and subcontractors as a barrier to organizing drives. Under the new ruling, a nurses union, for example, can now more readily expand bargaining units at a hospital to include registered nurses who are directly employed by the hospital, as well as nurses who work for staffing agencies hired by the hospital.

This is absolutely huge and another enormous advance in labor law by Tom Perez’s Department of Labor.

In an increasingly fractured world of labor relations, it’s hard to understate how big of a deal this is for easing union organizing efforts. And coming less than a year after its Browning Ferris ruling that established a bold new standard for defining when parent companies are joint employers of subcontracted workers, the Miller & Anderson decision is yet another important step that increases employer accountability to their workers by expanding the responsibilities of joint employers.

Not only does the decision mark an emerging new jurisprudence on labor relations, it also serves to burnish President Obama’s second-term record on labor and worker rights, which includes a rash of bold new policies enacted through executive power.

You can read the decision in this PDF

 

This is why I have zero patience with anyone voting for Jill Stein. While there’s no guarantee that Hillary Clinton will have as strong a DOL as Obama has since naming Perez to his cabinet, there’s also no question that her NLRB appointees will build on these sorts of decisions to improve conditions for workers. I simply assume that most people who refuse to “compromise their values” by voting for Hillary basically don’t actually care about working class people.

It's Our Day, Workers: The Day to Go Union!

Celebrate the huge Union victory at Verizon back in June.  Why would you not want one of these for yourself? Unions are the only protection workers have. Oganize!

Erik Loomis at LGM:

The Verizon strike is over and it is a landslide victory for the workers and their unions, the Communication Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

The four-year contracts would give workers a nearly 11 percent increase in pay over all, up from the 6.5 percent increase that Verizon had proposed before the strike, as well as modest ratification bonuses and profit-sharing.

SNIP 

The unions managed to beat back proposed pension cuts, including a cap on the accrual of pension benefits after 30 years of service. 

The company also agreed to withdraw a proposal that would have allowed it to relocate workers for up to two months anywhere in its geographic coverage area, although it had already expressed an openness to withdrawing the proposal before the strike.

Proposals to change seniority rules and to make the company’s sickness and disability policy more strict were also withdrawn, and the company agreed to change a performance review program in New York City that many workers considered abusive.

Significantly, the new contracts also cover some 65 unionized workers at Verizon Wireless stores, signaling the first time that retail wireless workers at the company have been included in a union contract, a potentially important precedent.

This is an incredible contract. The workers win nearly twice as much money as they originally asked for. They force Verizon to cave on all the benefits and the relocation drive that infuriated workers. They make Verizon back down on outsourcing jobs overseas. They force the company to create 1000 new union jobs and allow Verizon stores to become part of the bargaining unit. In return, the workers give up basically nothing. They allow individual workers to take a buy out if they want it. OK. And they open up slightly on who precisely takes a given call, but maintaining that the worker taking it is a union worker. Who cares. They also had to do some givebacks on health care, but these are the compromises that must be made sometimes. Overall, this is an outstanding contract and a gigantic win for workers.

 

SNIP

For Hamilton Nolan, the lesson is that strikes work and that we should all go on strike when we feel the need to do so.

Strikes work. Strikes have always worked. Strikes still work. Pro-business forces like to deride unions as socialist parasites, but strikes are, in a sense, one of the purest free market actions that workers can take: the refusal to sell labor at a price that is deemed too low. This has the effect of raising the price of labor.

Though “Economics 101″ idiots like to pretend that the free market will always magically produce the perfect wage for every job, the reality is that working people—people with less money—are always at a disadvantage when it comes to asserting the leverage necessary to raise their own wages, because they can’t afford to stop working and lose a paycheck. This is the biggest hurdle that strikes have to clear. It’s hard for working people to leave work, demanding better wages and working conditions. It’s a gamble. But it tends to pay off.

As much as workers need wages, businesses need labor even more. The free market has not raised your wages in decades. The government has not raised your wages in decades. You need to raise your own wages. Organize. Then strike. It’s always good to be reminded that it works.

I’m a bit less sanguine about this. After all, there certainly have been disastrous strikes. But he’s mostly right. If workers stand up and act upon their demands, their chances of living a dignified life are much higher.

For me, the real lesson is that if you don’t support joining a union, you are a fool because you are only hurting yourself. Almost all of us should have unions. Even if you are a faculty member or public employee in the South and live in a right-to-work state, you should still have a union because it will serve as an organized voice and point of power, even if you can’t win a contract. I know, because I helped one get off the ground. Entry-level lawyers at big law firms should have unions. Workers at every private factory or establishment should have unions. Starbucks and McDonald’s workers should have unions. We should all have unions. Organizing like the Verizon workers is not a throwback to the past. It should be an entryway into the future.

No, the Founders were Not Freakazoids

Digby:

This is from a "Daily Kos Classic" (which I get in my email --- you can subscribe too.) I thought it was apropos:

“If I could conceive that the general government might ever be so administered as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded, that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.”
- George Washington, letter to the United Baptist Chamber of Virginia (1789)

“Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, then that of blindfolded fear.”
- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr (1787)

"In regard to religion, mutual toleration in the different professions thereof is what all good and candid minds in all ages have ever practiced, and both by precept and example inculcated on mankind.”
- Samuel Adams, The Rights of the Colonists (1771)

“Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law. Take away the law-establishment, and every religion re-assumes its original benignity.”
- Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791)

“Congress has no power to make any religious establishments.”
- Roger Sherman, Congress (1789)

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."
- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack (1758)

"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people build a wall of separation between Church & State."
- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Danbury Baptists (1802)

"To argue with a man who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead."
- Thomas Paine, The American Crisis No. V (1776)

“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”
- Thomas Jefferson, A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom (1779)

"Christian establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects."
- James Madison, letter to William Bradford, Jr. (1774)

"There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness."
- George Washington, address to Congress (1790)

"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."
- James Madison, General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia (1785)

Agree with their sentiments or not, you simply cannot say that the founders thought they were explicitly founding a Christian nation.

Human Ancestors

Divine Irony:

"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."

 - Voltaire

No, Andy Beshear: Talking to Reporters Is Not A Firing Offense

Such a coincidence that the fired person is the one who makes sure the public knows what its government is doing. (Yes, that kind of reprimand is firing.)

You're a coward and a bully, Andy, and now we all want to know just one thing: What are you hiding?

John Cheves at the Herald:

A longtime champion of Kentucky’s government transparency laws retired Wednesday from Attorney General Andy Beshear’s office after she was reprimanded for speaking with a journalist.

“I came to this decision under considerable duress,” Assistant Attorney General Amye L. Bensenhaver, 58, wrote last month to Beshear. “It is clear to me I cannot survive, much less thrive, in the current office climate, and I have similar concerns about the open records/meetings laws.”

Bensenhaver was rebuked in a formal letter July 11 for giving an interview to retired editor John Nelson for a story he wrote in June on the 40th anniversary of the state’s Open Records Act and Open Meetings Act. Nelson’s story, commissioned by the Kentucky Press Association, ran in the Herald-Leader and other newspapers around the state. Bensenhaver had spent 25 years writing open records and open meetings decisions on behalf of the attorney general, whose word carries the weight of law on those subjects.

“You were quoted and cited as a representative of the Office of the Attorney General to the media, activity that falls outside the scope of your job duties, and without permission to do so,” La Tasha Buckner, executive director of the attorney general’s Office of Civil and Environmental Law, wrote to Bensenhaver. “Your actions in regards to Mr. Nelson’s article on the Open Records/Open Meetings Act have severely damaged your credibility and the trust that this office must have in you as an attorney.”

In an interview Thursday, Bensenhaver said she had hoped to stay at the attorney general’s office for another five years. But she felt pressured to leave because her superiors under Beshear kept interfering in the open government decisions for which she was responsible, ordering changes that did not strengthen the transparency laws. The reprimand was the last straw, she said

“I really did enjoy this work and I felt fortunate to do it for 25 years — or at least, for most of the last 25 years,” she said. “But I didn’t want to be put in a position where I was forced to make compromises in this important law that I helped to build.”

SNIP

Under Kentucky’s open government laws, most activities involving taxpayer funds must be conducted in public. Reporters and other curious citizens who are stonewalled by government officials routinely file appeals with the attorney general asking for a legal opinion. More often than not, a favorable ruling from the attorney general will pry loose the information in question.

David Thompson, executive director of the Kentucky Press Association, said Nelson called Bensenhaver for his story on the 40th anniversary of the laws because she is considered one of the state’s leading experts. Thompson said he occasionally had his own conversations with Bensenhaver when he wanted clarification about what records or meetings should be available to the public.

“Here she is, someone who devotes herself day in and day out to open government, and she literally gets in trouble for talking to a reporter about open government,” Thompson said. “I hate to see her go.”

Gray Lambasts AynRandy on Drug War Funding

Good on Jim Gray, but they're both still missing the point.

No amount of money for programs to deny painkilling drugs to people in chronic pain is ever going to solve the problem of people in chronic pain overdosing on heroin because of programs that deny painkilling drugs to people in chronic pain.

This beyond-stupid insanity is not just counter-productive; it is literally murdering people who just want some relief from constant pain. And the murderer is not a heroin dealer; it's the legislators who think threatening doctors into denying painkilling drugs is going to solve anything.

Meanwhile, the DEA is once again snatching a useful drug away and falsely labeling it dangerous. This is the same agency, remember, that labels marijuana as dangerous as heroin but thinks the alcohol and nicotine that kill more than a million Americans every year - pot kills exactly zero - are fucking health food.

Daniel Desrochers at the Herald:

Two dozen people in Louisville overdosed on drugs Tuesday, prompting an emergency room doctor to declare a public health emergency.

Two weeks before, there were 26 overdoses in Huntington, W.Va. Then 50 overdoses in Cincinnati, followed by 12 in Mount Sterling.

On Wednesday, Lexington Mayor Jim Gray, the Democratic challenger to U.S. Sen. Rand Paul this fall, held a news conference in Louisville to chastise Paul and Congress for failing to fund the recently passed Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. It calls for improving prescription drug monitoring programs, expanding treatment for addicted prison inmates and increasing the availability of a drug that counters the effects of heroin and opioid overdoses.

“Legislation without funding is a failure,” Gray said. “You have to fund it and that hasn’t been done.”

Earlier in the year, President Barack Obama asked Congress to provide $960 million with the act, but Congress didn’t include funding.

Gray criticized Paul, R-Bowling Green, for not voting for an amendment that would allocate about $600 million with the bill.