Moar gunz will pertek us

Via wonkette commenter Msgr_Moment

And by "us" I mean white people only.

Go Wind, Young People

That's where the jobs are and will be.

Erik Loomis:

Jed Kolko provides an interesting analysis of where the American job market is headed. 

Couple of points:

1) It’s hardly surprising that health care is the fastest growing overall work sector, although it’s also notable that the single biggest category of job growth is wind turbine technician, which I hope turns out to be true. (emphasis mine)

2) It’s equally unsurprising that the fastest declining job categories all revolve around the old industrial economy, with both production and movement of goods in collapse. I didn’t even know the U.S. still had sewing machine operators as a job except for often illegal sweatshops in California, but whatever is left of that sector is still declining.

 And there's nothing older and declining faster in the industrial economy than coal. Go wind, young people, wherever you can find it.

On Medicaid, Matt Bevin Doesn't Know What the Fuck He's Doing

First, he's a lying coward. He's not cancelling or even freezing the expansion, probably because somebody explained that the feds would drop the entire government on his head if he tried it.

Gov. Matt Bevin announced Wednesday he has begun work to transform Kentucky's Medicaid program by 2017.

 
But in the meantime he envisions no major changes in the government health plan that covers nearly 1.3 million Kentuckians.

But he's gonna fuck with it anyway, because there's gotta be a way to divert those millions of sweet, sweet, federal tax dollars into the pockets of his corporate friends.

 

There is no rational reason to mess with a program that COSTS NOTHING to lift tens of thousands of Kentuckians out of poverty. 

Unless your real agenda is to hand millions of tax dollars to your rich friends and campaign donors, taxpaying Kentuckians be damned.

That's all that "transforming" Medicaid does: take tax dollars that currently go toward improving the health of actual Kentuckians and allow them to work and escape poverty, and giving those dollars to private companies for pure profit.

Ask Bevin and his minions what exactly is wrong with the current, highly successful and dirt-cheap Medicaid program and the only thing they can say is "corporations aren't making a profit off of it!"

Because that's all that government is for, as far as faux-libertarian greedheads like Bevin and his minions are concerned: making billionaires and corporations even more obscenely rich and keeping working people - the working poor who pay taxes the rich avoid - too sick and poor and beaten-down to fight back.

 

Congrats, Matt: you've got your nickname.   "Greedhead Coward"

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

Our Only Governor is going to announce at 10 a.m. just exactly how he is going to strip 400,000 Kentuckians of health care.

Meanwhile, he's dictating major changes in state government policies that affect 4.5 million people without even pretending to attempt a proper policy analysis.  Everybody who thinks that he applied the list below to his first ridiculous "executive orders," stand on your head.

Mark Kleiman at Ten Miles Square:

Public policy analysis is the discipline that considers what actions would best serve the public interest in a given situation, and how those actions can be implemented through actual institutions. Like any discipline, it seeks the truth, but the truth sought is pragmatic, in the original sense of that term: truth about what is to be done, rather than merely about how the world is to be described.

That differentiates policy analysis from social science.

Policy analysis differs from policy advocacy in that it regards policy choices as instrumental: it reaches a policy conclusion at the end of its argument, rather than starting with a preferred policy and seeking arguments in its support.

A full policy analysis, if one were feasible, would answer the following questions:

SNIP

So we should not expect the application of policy-analytic methods to lead everyone to agree. What we should expect it to do is to eliminate options that don’t make sense under any reasonable set of values, and to help identify the factual and normative bases of actual disagreements. It also forces it practitioners, at least while they are doing it, to step back from individual or group self-interest, and from received opinion and factional loyalty, and try to reason in the public interest.

But of course the "public interest" is the last thing Bevin gives a flying fuck about, unless you define "public" as "all my billionaire friends and campaign donors."

Hating Planned Parenthood Because It Keeps Women Out of Poverty

And women who are not chained by poverty are not slaves to the corporatocracy or theocracy.

Bryce Covert at The Nation:

Already forgotten in the aftermath of the San Bernardino shootings is a more persistent terrorist threat to average Americans: right-wing extremists. Robert Lewis Dear, who shot and killed three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, has since pleaded guilty to being a “warrior for the babies.” His actions follow a long tradition of violence against abortion providers. That violence is increasing: The number of clinics reporting threats and targeted intimidation has increased from about 25 percent to more than 50 percent since 2010.

Dear’s terrorism hasn’t affected the GOP’s congressional crusade against the women’s-healthcare provider, however. Immediately after the shooting, Senate Republicans said they would proceed with efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, which currently receives about $500 million from the federal government. About 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s clients are low-income (which is measured as being at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty line).

Unintended pregnancies among poor women have been increasing, while those among well-off women are falling.

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.

SNIP

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.

Democracy and Civilization Hanging by One Vote in Kentucky

No, The Gooch never voted Democratic - except, as Joe Gerth noted, for House Speaker, when it really counted - but his defection means that state House dems are one seat away from losing the chamber they've held for almost a century.

FRANKFORT, Ky. - State Rep. Jim Gooch, of Providence, released a statement Monday saying he is switching from the Democratic to the Republican Party.

The makeup of the Kentucky House is now 50 Democrats, 48 Republicans.

And when the repugs take over all of state government - probably sometime this week - it's the Randian Paradise of Kansas for us.  Nuke us now, please.

Proof Before Claims

Divine Irony:

↵ Reblogged from cure-your-delusions

And no, scribbles from your Big Book O' Bronze Age Bullshit is not proof.

My Home

Divine Irony:

It's All About the Skin

No, honey: you did not think they were muslims.  You saw that hated dark skin and knew that anti-muslim hate gave you an excuse to attack people you think of as ni**ers.  Cuz all them browns is ni**ers, ain't they?

From PZ Myers:

A racist woman mistakes two Brazilians as Terrorists. While filming a YouTube comedy skit in front of a local airport, a racist woman stopped her vehicle on the side of the road and started calling my friend and I terrorists. Being that I’m an aspiring filmmaker, I pulled out my camera and started recording the incident. I served the U.S Air Force and I honestly never thought this would happen to me. It’s disgusting how ignorant and blind people are nowadays. People like her need to be shunned out of society, because that’s the mentality that keeps us from progressing. SHARE this, we need this negativity shunned!

It's not negativity, son; it's racism. And no amount of "shunning" is going to stop it.  800,000 dead in a civil war couldn't stop it.

Hillary Clinton to Voters on a Disgusting Subject

It's the Rude Pundit's fantasia, so you know it's rude and crude and brilliant.  Just read it.

Is there really a Hillary voter who would be dismayed by this? Or even a potential Hillary voter? What could it hurt?

Deport the Real Threat

Digby:

And once again, this is completely irrational. We have had a small handful of Islamic terrorist attacks since 9/11 which were perpetrated by alienated losers looking for a reason to shoot up or blow up a bunch of people --- something that happens almost every day in this country. The idea that this particular problem in America has anything in particular to do with Muslim extremism and therefore requires that we ban Muslims from entering our precious country is daft. If it's safety we're looking for we'd be better off deporting angry white guys with gun collections.

QOTD: What Makes Us Sick

Zandar:

The fear and hatred from "Christians" in this country just makes me physically ill.

Welcome Back, Sol

The actual reason for the season:  days start getting longer starting today.

Divine Irony:

kidsneedscience:

Understanding the Solstice

The first day of winter and the shortest day of the year begin tomorrow, December 22, the day of the Winter solstice.  At 4:48 am Greenwich Mean time, the Solstice will arrive.  The word solstice is relatively old in English, dating back to the 13th century.  Solstice derives from the Latin word solstitium meaning very literally the point at which the sun stands still, a combination of the words sol meaning sun and the past participial stem of sistere meaning to come to a stop, make stand still.  Celebrated thoughout history as either a secular or religious day, the solstice marks the point on the ecliptic when the Northern Hemisphere is pointed most away from the sun and therefore has the shortest day. 

The easiest way to visualize the effect of the Earth’s  orbit around the sun and the changing seasons is to view it from space.  Above, the winter and summer solstices and the vernal and autumnal equinoxes from 2011.  On the equinox (Latin for equal night) you can clearly see that the shadow is straight up and down, giving us equal day and night, while in the solstices, the Earth is either inclined toward or away from the Sun, giving us days and nights of different lengths.  For reference, find the Arabian peninsula in the upper right quadrant of each image.  The second illustration shows what it looks like the Sun is doing, but remember that we travel around the Sun, not the other way around.

Satellite photos courtesy of NASA in the public domain.

Hysteria in Frankfort: Gun Nuts Shitting Themselves in Fear and Excitement

UPDATED

Sheesh. Some holiday-enraged idiot with a gun tries to get past the extremely heavy security at the Health and Family Services building on Main Street, and would-be good-guys-with-guns are locked and loaded all over town.

Rumors flying, people racing for home, but not a peep out of emergency management about anything but approaching tornadoes.

If anybody gets shot, it's going to be the unlucky coworkers of the idiot concealed carriers who have been breaking state law by bringing weapons onto state property.

UPDATE:  Yeah, it;'s bullshit. But that won't stop the hysterical ammosexuals from demanding open carry in state office buildings.  

Matt Bevin Doesn't Know What the Fuck He's Doing, Part Five: Road to Haiti

Hey, he promised he would establish a lords-n-serfs economy in Kentucky and he's well on his way.

From the Courier:

In his first major policy action, Republican Gov. Matt Bevin issued a series of executive orders Tuesday that shield religious county clerks - like Kim Davis - from being named on marriage licenses and roll back efforts by the Beshear administration that would have restored voting rights to thousands of ex-felons.

Bevin, who campaigned on conservative platforms during this year's heated race for governor, said in a statement that he was upholding his commitments to voters.

Among the five orders filed Tuesday, he also implemented a hiring freeze in state government, repealed Beshear's order raising the minimum wage for state employees and abolished the governor's employee advisory council.Roavernor Bevin issued five Executive Orders pertaining to marriage licenses, minimum wage, hiring practices within the state government, the restoration of rights to felons and a superfluous state board.

In other, factual word, Bevin:

•  Took the first un-Constitutional steps toward establishing an xian theocracy, in which any slope-headed, mouth-breathing moron can break any law by pleading jeebus.
• Eliminated any hope of any workers in the Commonwealth getting a living wage.  You wanted to actually feed your family?  Get a fourth job, moocher.
• Began implementing the fiscal austerity that has ruined the economies of every European country that tried it. Because Haiti is a libertarian paradise.
• Proved that he lied when he said he was in favor of restoring felons' rights, and signaled that he will sign any voter-suppression bill the legislature sends him.  

He's exactly the AynRandian motherfucker you voted for, Kentucky: enjoy the coming hellscape.

Bevin's press release:

“Today, I took action to uphold several commitments I made during my campaign so that we can implement real solutions that will help the people of Kentucky,” said Governor Bevin.  “While I have been a vocal supporter of the restoration of rights, for example, it is an issue that must be addressed through the legislature and by the will of the people.  As we move into the New Year and upcoming session, I look forward to working with legislators and stakeholders to build consensus and drive policy that makes a meaningful impact on the lives of all Kentuckians”

The following Executive Orders are being filed today:

•   To ensure that the sincerely held religious beliefs of all Kentuckians are honored, Executive Order 2015-048 directs the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives to issue a revised marriage license form to the offices of all Kentucky County Clerks.  The name of the County Clerk is no longer required to appear on the form.

•   Executive Order 2015-049 relieves executive branch agencies and vendors of the obligation to comply with the higher minimum wage established by Executive Order 2015-370, except as to classified employees with status who have already received increases as a result of the Executive Order.  Their remuneration will not be affected.

•   Executive Order 2015-050 prioritizes effective and efficient management of state government operations by implementing a new moratorium on hiring.  This order removes all oversight of the merit system hiring from the Governor’s Office. Unlike Governor Beshear’s Executive Order which had the Secretary of the Governor’s Executive Cabinet approve all personnel actions regarding merit employees, this Executive Order transfers that responsibility to the Personnel Secretary.  Approval of non-merit employees will remain the duty of the Secretary of the Governor’s Executive Cabinet.  Furthermore, effective immediately, all vacant positions in any agency will be reviewed to determine if they are necessary to the maintenance of essential government services.

•   Executive Order 2015-051 rescinds Governor Beshear’s Executive Order 2008-471 which established the Governor’s Employee Advisory Council (GEAC).  The GEAC was created to discuss issues pertaining to wages, hours, and terms of employment for merit employees, but is non-value added given that the Governor has no power to extend negotiation and collective bargaining rights to employees of the Commonwealth.  The merit system, along with the policies and procedures enacted through the Personnel Cabinet, provide sufficient protections and oversight of these issues and functions in a streamlined and efficient manner.

•   While Governor Bevin has been a strong advocate for the reinstatement of non-violent felony offenders’ voting and civil rights, Executive Order 2015-052 suspends the provisions of Executive Order 2015-871 as that order is contrary to the Kentucky Constitution and undermines the very right it seeks to restore by circumventing elected representatives in the state legislature and the voice of the people at the ballot box.  The Office of the Governor will continue to utilize the processes and procedures under current law in the same manner as the previous administration pending further study and consideration by the Kentucky General Assembly.  This Executive Order does not affect anyone whose rights have already been restored by the previous Executive Order.

Here's How to End the Heroin Epidemic Fast, Easy and Cheap

Because the federal government has just freed states to legalize medical marijuana.

Via Political Animal, from the LA Times:

Tucked deep inside the 1,603-page federal spending measure is a provision that effectively ends the federal government’s prohibition on medical marijuana and signals a major shift in drug policy…

Congress for years had resisted calls to allow states to chart their own path on pot. The marijuana measure, which forbids the federal government from using any of its resources to impede state medical marijuana laws, was previously rejected half a dozen times.

Heroin use is epidemic in Kentucky and other states not because suddenly a bunch of law-abiding people achieved their lifelong ambition of becoming heroin addicts.

Heroin use is epidemic because people in chronic pain can no longer get pain-relieving legal medications, thanks to the Drug War Idiots in the state legislature and their destructive, ridiculous, addict-creating KASPER.

You know what relieves pain faster, better and cheaper than either heroin or legal opioids like oxycodone? MEDICAL FUCKING MARIJUANA.

You know why the criminal morons in the Kentucky state legislature will never, ever, EVER legalize medical marijuana?  

No, not because they are pants-shitting Drug War Idiots, although that's a good guess.

It's because lobbyists for the private prison industry and the law enforcement industry and the failure-to-manage-pain industry and all the other motherfuckers who profit off the desperation of people in pain will buy off the legislature and leave Kentucky wallowing in feudal stupidity. Again. Still. Forever.

Not the President's Job to Keep Me Safe

Maybe Americans don't understand the role of civilian control of the military because it's been so fucking long since we were invaded.

Because the limeys burning the White House in 1813 is the closest we've come to an actual existential threat, and even that fell far short of threatening us even seriously, much less to the point of erasing our existence.

Although we came a hell of a lot closer to elimination as a nation 150 years ago, when the only threat was from the idiot and criminal slaveholders* of the south whom we should have slapped the fuck down decades before.

In fact, that's the real existential threat we're facing today. Not from "outsiders," but from the vipers we've nourished at our breast since abandoning Reconstruction: the descendants of Traitors in Defense of Tyranny and their camp followers and apologists.  They're the ones perpetrating more than one mass shooting in this country Every. Single. Fucking. Day.

They're the ones whose fear-mongering and slander of muslims are giving aid and comfort to those syphilitic desert punks raping and beheading because they don't have a real military.

They're the ones who don't understand that presidents lead the country; mommies keep you safe.

Charlie Pierce on the repug "debate":

When Abraham Lincoln took actions based on military considerations, he gave himself the proper title, "commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States." That title is rarely—more like never—heard today. It is just "commander in chief," or even "commander in chief of the United States." This reflects the increasing militarization of our politics. The citizenry at large is now thought of as under military discipline. In wartime, it is true, people submit to the national leadership more than in peacetime. The executive branch takes actions in secret, unaccountable to the electorate, to hide its moves from the enemy and protect national secrets. Constitutional shortcuts are taken "for the duration." But those impositions are removed when normal life returns. But we have not seen normal life in 66 years. The wartime discipline imposed in 1941 has never been lifted, and "the duration" has become the norm. World War II melded into the cold war, with greater secrecy than ever—more classified information, tougher security clearances. And now the cold war has modulated into the war on terrorism.

—Garry Wills, 2007.

I needed to put that on the record because its basic truth was completely lost in a dark land of fear and amid the waving poison ferns in Wolf Blitzer's amygdala.

First of all, none of these people will be my commander in chief. None of these people will have the job of keeping me "safe." The first priority of a president is not keeping the country safe. The first priority of a president—indeed, the only priority of a president—is to preserve, protect and defend not me, but the Constitution of the United States. So sitting there, listening to a bunch of people who never served a day in combat talk about how they're going to turn the Middle East into obsidian glass and how they will keep me safe, it was hard not to fall off my chair. Frankly, I wouldn't hire any of these people to watch my car in a valet parking lot, let alone lead the country into what they never miss a chance to call, "the Third World War." Chris Christie? Ted Cruz? Marco Rubio?

 *Yes, including my ancestors.

"Religious Liberty" Really Is

As we brace for the onslaught of xian theocracy bills disguised as "religious liberty" bills in the Kentucky General Assembly, let's remember what we're really talking about.

Wonkette:

Of course, the legislature’s entire argument for the bill was “religious liberty,” which translates roughly to “whiny ass wingnut Christians shouldn’t have to follow laws they don’t like.”

Proof god Does Not Exist

Divine Irony:

The Real Threats No Repug Will Ever Acknowledge, Much Less Address

Because real threats take hard work and tax money to deal with. Fake threats just take demagoguery.

Rude Pundit:

In fact, most of the things that are actual threats to the vast majority of Americans were either ignored or barely mentioned (Tuesday) night. Here's a short list of Things That Are Way More Likely to Kill You Than Muslim Terrorists or Hispanic Immigrants. These are the real threats to national security:

a. Christian white men with guns. Hell, you could probably just say, "All the fucking guns," and leave it at that. Not once did domestic terrorism from white people get mentioned, and that's probably because we still have a bizarre inability to label shit like Sandy Hook or the Planned Parenthood shooting "terrorism." And gun deaths in general are the security threat that Republicans dare not speak of.

b. Climate change is going to murder the fuck out of millions of people, barring drastic action. And it is going to propel the citizens of poor nations to ever-increasing acts of desperation, which will lead to more terrorism, which we'll probably deal with by bombing the famine-fucked or drowning nations.

c. Infrastructure collapsing around us. The Department of Transportation estimates that 14,000 people are killed annually due to shitty roads and bridges. By the Rude Pundit's mystical mathematical abilities, that adds up to...carry the three...a fuckload more people dying from the failure to invest in infrastructure than from every terrorist attack on the U.S. in the last, hell, let's say 100 years.

SNIP

So, really, you could say that the entire debate was theatre. It was like a bunch of high schoolers telling each other their favorite creepypastas while sharing some cheap wine they stole from their moms. Ooh, who's gonna scare us worse? Even though, at the end of the night, Slender Man is fuckin' fake and drunk driving is real, but guess which one they're afraid of?