Failing

Now in Kentucky, unfortunately, it's called failing if you don't believe in bibble.

Divine Irony:

Only the Government Will Save Your Ass This Time

Another great midnight meme from Noah at Down with Tyranny:

Charlie Pierce, down in Houston, "where there were people from the government, and they were there to help."

One of the things I noticed during my trip from Rockport to Houston in the aftermath of the storm was that the narrative of people helping people was true and righteous altogether, to quote Abraham Lincoln quoting the Bible. What also struck me was that, if we could convince people again that they could help each other through the institutions of self-government as readily as they could hauling bottled water in a truck, or navigating a bass boat through what once was a suburban neighborhood, we would go a long way toward being the country we say we are again. Self-government is a creative act that ought to renew itself, over and over again, through the collective action of the people who choose to govern themselves. As such, it’s possible for government to be a mechanism for charity in this country, because the government is us—or it should be, anyway—and we have convinced ourselves that we are fundamentally a charitable people.

It’s cheap and easy to point out that conservative Texas politicians have discovered a sweet-tooth for Big Gummint now that they’ve got a natural disaster and a public health catastrophe on their hands for the next decade or so. The job of reclaiming self-government is harder than the job of reclaiming the land and the sprawl of what Houston once was. We have been inundated by decades of mendacious propaganda, all aimed at convincing us that government is some alien entity so that we don’t once again engage the creative force of self-government and aim it at the people who are looting the country’s wealth and destroying its natural beauty. It’s worked, too. The many acts of charity in Texas over the past two weeks have been used far too often as anesthesia by the people who would rather not see the country apply its government as a permanent shelter for those in need. Look, they say, this is what people can do for each other. This is what the churches can do. We don’t need government program X, Y, and Z.

This is said, often, by people who did not go to those places, by people who would have fought the Morrill Act, and by too many people who would have walked out of the Congress in 1861. Nobody can do anything but admire the charitable whirlwind that was J.J. Watt of the Houston Texans. But, out in the field, the little churches and small communities are hanging on by their fingernails. (One person told me that it was God’s miracle that there hadn’t been any of the customary summer thunderstorms since Harvey passed through. She didn’t know what she’d do with more water on her land.) The job of rebuilding (and, god knows, the job of preparing for the next hurricane, and the next one, and the one after that; they’re lined up at the moment like a chorus line out into the Atlantic) has to be done by the people acting through their government, and not through the little Baptist church with the twisted tin wall in its front yard.

Wanton Fuckery

Rude Pundit, on DACA repeal:

It's all part of the wanton fuckery at work here. The evil they do is merely for the sake of evil, merely to show they can do it, merely to punish the powerless. If we do nothing, if we don't vote them out in 2018, if we don't demand action, if we don't clog their streets and their courts with our voices and bodies, then they will move on to exerting more and more power.

War on Women on Verge of Major Victory in Kentucky Court

Had to be Mississippi, right?  The first state to lose its last and only abortion clinic?  Or Kansas, where the freakazoids murdered Dr. George Tiller.  Oklahoma or Idaho or Alabama.  One of those deep-red, backward, shitty states full of slope-headed, mouth-breathing morons who can't abide women having control over their own bodies.

Not Kentucky.

Bruce Schreiner of the AP:

Its survival on the line, Kentucky's last abortion clinic is bracing for a pivotal legal showdown with health regulators and the state's anti-abortion governor that could determine whether Kentucky becomes the first state in the nation without an abortion clinic.

The licensing fight, set to play out in a Louisville federal courtroom starting Wednesday, revolves around a state law requiring that EMW Women's Surgical Center have agreements with a hospital and an ambulance service in the event of medical emergencies involving patients.

State regulators defend those conditions as "important safeguards" to protect women's health. The clinic in downtown Louisville counters that the requirements lack any "medical justification" and amount to an unconstitutional barrier to abortion.

But the case's significance goes beyond a debate about state law.

"The stakes in this case couldn't be higher: the very right to access legal abortion in the state of Kentucky is on the line," said Dr. Ernest Marshall, who opened the clinic in the early 1980s.

SNIP

The lawsuit is one of two pitting the clinic against the state. The other lawsuit is challenging a new Kentucky law requiring doctors to conduct an ultrasound exam before an abortion, then try to show fetal images to the pregnant woman. The law says she can avert her eyes.

EMW gained an ally in its licensing fight when Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky was allowed to join EMW's lawsuit. Planned Parenthood argues that Bevin's administration has used the transfer agreements to block its requests for a license to provide abortions in Louisville.

EMW's legal team believes the case "falls squarely" within a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down Texas regulations that required doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and forced clinics to meet certain standards for outpatient surgery. The Supreme Court has found that access to an abortion must be guaranteed, but it remains to be seen whether eliminating every clinic in a single state would pass that test.

"Will we build on the momentum of last year's Supreme Court decision upholding abortion rights?" Marshall said. "Or will Kentucky be the harbinger of a future where the right to abortion only exists if you live in the right zip code?"

Read the whole infuriating thing.

The Resistance: Solidarity

from Down With Tyranny:

And Repugs Want To Take It Away

Blatantly stolen from Down With Tyranny:



So with every bite of hot dog and sip of beer, thank those commie union agitators for:

The Weekend
The 40-hour Week
Safe Workplaces
Lunch Breaks
Overtime Pay
Minimum Wage
Workers' Compensation
Paid Vacations
Sick Days
Pensions

Don't Let bibble "literacy" Get Away With Murder in Your School

You know damn well that this bullshit is just a cover for freakazoids to intimidate and proselytize students.

The ACLU knows it, too, and is ready to fight the motherfuckers, but they need your help.

Kentucky has more than 170 public school districts that are responsible for approximately 1,200 public schools. Many of those schools will soon be offering "Bible Literacy" courses to their students as a direct result of HB 128 that passed into law last session by the General Assembly. 

While courses on the Bible can be taught in public schools in a constitutionally permissible way, the ACLU of Kentucky has reason to believe that not all of the schools that offer this class will faithfully adhere to those constitutional limits.

Contact us if you, or someone you know, has specific information about your school district using these courses to "preach," instead of "teach." Also, please keep copies of any classroom assignments, worksheets, or other materials that you think highlight that fact. Simply email us at info@aclu-ky.org and include "Bible literacy" in the subject line, or fill out our legal intake form.

Best of luck to all of Kentucky's teachers and students as they kick off the school year. While school officials are not permitted to sponsor prayer or proselytize in school, students may freely express and exercise their faith. There are always a number of Know Your Rights resources on free exercise of religious liberty in public schools available on our national organization's website.

Bevin's Lying About Pensions. Of Course He's Lying

Yeah, why exactly would you believe Governor "I Got Mine, Fuck You."

He is NOT going to give state workers a grace period to retire before he guts their pensions.

He's saying that now so he can trick more workers into getting stuck with 401k plans that his Wall Street buddies will strip and steal.

This motherfucker liar has lied about everything from day one.  Anybody who believes him now deserves the catastrophe he's got planned for you.

From the Herald:

In a Facebook Live chat with state employees on Monday, Bevin said that any changes he and lawmakers make to Kentucky’s pension plans would not include an “emergency clause,” so they would not take effect immediately upon his signing legislation into law. That would give state employees a few months to decide their best course of action under restructured retirement systems.

Bevin said he expects to call a special legislative session this fall to address the tens of billions of dollars owed by the states’ pension plans.

“I don’t see this going into effect until the top of the year, maybe, at the earliest,” Bevin said. “I would be remiss to try and pick the date. Maybe we wait until the end of the fiscal year, which is June 30. There’s been no determination on that yet.”

David Smith knows what kind of lying motherfucker we're dealing with.

 “When I say you’re looking at a mass exodus, I mean it,” Smith said. “I’ve communicated with 300 or 400 members since that report came out Monday. And that’s just me personally. We have other people in our organization who are taking calls. We’re telling everyone, ‘Get ready to pull the pin.’”

You know how repugs are always saying government doesn't work, then they get elected and make it come true?  Bevin is taking the decades-long lie about how incompetent state workers are and by  forcing thousands of experienced workers to retire and be replaced by minimum-wage drones, making that lie come true.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article170740742.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article170740742.html#storylink=cpy

One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

Read this piece on Wednesday's rally to demand Gov. "I Don't Know What History Means" Bevin remove the statue of Traitor in Defense of Slavery Jefferson Davis from the Capitol Rotunda.

If you had been there, you might have noticed something unusual about the Rotunda statues, meant to honor the great men of the Commonwealth.

Here is bigger-than-life Abraham Lincoln, in the exact center of the Rotunda.

His left boot toe is shiny because 7 million schoolkids a year visit the Rotunda and just have to rub it.

Yes, of course I did.

There's a sign asking people not to do that. It doesn't work.








Here is Senator Henry Clay:

Here is Senator and Vice-President Alben Barkley:

Here is Dr. Ephraim McDowell, who performed the first successful abdominal surgery in 1809.

 

All of them are cast in bronze, all of them dark brown from time and lack of rubbing.

Then there's this one, in the fourth corner. 

That blinding white motherfucker went up in 1936, 71 years after the Traitor in Defense of Slavery - who might have been born in Kentucky but who grew up and lived the rest of his life in Mississippi - surrendered.

He doesn't belong in the People's House, for more than aesthetic reasons.

But you don't want to hang from a rope until he's gone.






Who do I want in his place?  This guy:

Confederacy Protection Commission Forces Lexington to Jump Through Hoops

The Kentucky Military Heritage Commission met in secret and in secret apparently decided that they will definitely deny Mayor Jim Gray's request to move the Civil War Participation Trophies out of downtown Lexington. 

But first they're going to make Kentucky's first openly-gay mayor jump through a few hoops.

Because they are motherfuckers.

Beth Musgrave at the Herald:

Lexington Mayor Jim Gray has asked the Lexington Cemetery’s board to “help heal the soul of our city” by taking two controversial Confederate statues that have stood in downtown Lexington for more than 100 years. 

In an Aug. 24 letter, Gray asked the board if he could speak at its Sept. 11 meeting to discuss the cemetery as a possible new home for the statues of John C. Breckinridge, a former U.S. Vice President and the last Confederate Secretary of War, and John Hunt Morgan, a Confederate general. 

The 170-acre cemetery off West Main Street “is the one location that generates support from those with opposing views on this issue,” Gray wrote.

The Herald-Leader obtained the letter through an Open Records Act request.

SNIP

 “The Lexington Cemetery is a prestigious site, with beautifully landscaped grounds, that respectfully honors the Civil War soldiers who are buried there,” Gray wrote. “Notably, Fayette County’s two other Military Heritage Commission-designated Civil War monuments are located in the Lexington Cemetery.” 

SNIP

City officials have been told that the military commission won’t grant the city’s request to move the statues unless it can find a suitable home for them. The commission’s next regularly scheduled meeting is in November. 

Two companies, Prometheus Bronze Foundry and Duncan Machinery Movers, have said they will move the monuments at no cost to the city. The Blue Grass Foundation also has set up a fund to raise money for any additional costs associated with moving the statues.

Will this compromise satisfy the confederate-cock-sucking Nazis and the Confederacy Protection Commission?  Of course not.  Motherfuckers, remember?

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/counties/fayette-county/article170209382.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/counties/fayette-county/article170209382.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/counties/fayette-county/article170209382.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/counties/fayette-county/article170209382.html#storylink=cpy

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Herald:

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

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

The letter can be read in full at this link.

Anybody seen Bevin's tax returns for the last decade?  I'll bet my house he's profited from the Commonwealth's pension crisis.  Made money off the very victims he's now exploiting again.

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

Voting Republican

via down with tyranny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Herald:

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

SNIP

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

Over. Our. Dead. Bodies.

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

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

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

Oh, D.R. Tucker, you are so cute.  

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

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

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, stop you're killing me.

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

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

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

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

Bevin Lies About Treason Statues; Gets Schooled by Girl

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

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin said he “absolutely” disagrees with removing Confederate symbols and monuments from government property, calling it the “sanitization of history.”

 

The actual sanitization, of course, is the statues themselves.  They were erected to erase the real history of Treason in Defense of Slavery, turn Slavery Promoters into heroes and reverse Emancipation with Jim Crow.

Bevin - and the Nazi-living apologists who pretend the Civil War Participation Tropies are historic landmarks - has it exactly backwards, as Wonkette explains.

There is a very big difference between the way people see Auschwitz and the way many White Southerners, at least, see Confederate Generals posed triumphantly on horses. Auschwitz serves as a reminder of those who suffered, while the Confederate statues glorify those who fought for continued suffering. You will notice that there are no triumphant looking statues of Hitler in Germany.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stop Squirming

Via Down with Tyranny.