Reversal of Fortunes

Rand Paul has a problem:  The American conservative movement KNOWS that 'Obamacare' is an expensive, repressive failure straight from the desk of Satan himself that is bringing a great darkness upon the land, slaughtering millions on the altar of government death panels, blighting the crops and turning good American kids gay. 

But Paul has the same problem as Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell; in their home sate of Kentucky the Democratic governor enthusiastically cooperated with Obamacare and KYnect (Stop that giggling!  It's NOT a funny name!)  the Kentucky state health care exchange has been one of the biggest success stories of the Affordable Care Act.   McConnell's method of dealing with this unfortunate political reality is to deny that KYnect and Obamacare are the same thing - a position that has resulted in scornful take downs within Kentucky and without.  Paul Just tries to dodge the question.

Thousands of people in Kentucky who would have died without the ban on refusal of coverage due to prior medical condition and the medicaid expansion consider the Kentucky KYnect application of Obamacare a lifesaver and attacking it directly is rapidly becoming political suicide in the state - deep in the heart of the firmly Republican south.

The time is rapidly approaching when Republicans will regret so firmly associating a President they hate with a program Americans are coming to love.  Which is probably why Republicans of yore were just smart enough not to call social security FDR-Security or Medicare LBJcare.

On the Value of Scorn

Of late we've been seeing a lot of bigots, kooks and reactionaries trying to adopt the language of victimization.

Gay rights advocates in the US are not being gracious in their victory over decent people who just wanted to go on treating a whole subset of humanity as second class citizens.  Now various laws designed in the last few years to attack, dehumanize and marginalize gay Americans  topple like dominos and they have the sads and gay rights supporters are being MEAN to them.

A conservative spokes clone accuses Bill Nye of being part of a vast conspiracy to bully people who believe that scientists must just be fibbing with this silly 99% of scientists believe global warming is real and human caused stuff. 

You big meanie!

Scorn is a useful social construct.  It exists for a reason.  In the marketplace of ideas scorn is the health department closure poster on a cafe door.

Some ideas and the people who promote them SHOULD be scorned.  Some positions should be career limiting and socially devastating. 

If you believe this nonsense you are wrong and you should feel bad.

That's how society evolves, less from the new ideas we adopt than from the ones we outgrow.

The Real Benghazi Scandal

For outside observers the spectacle of Republicans shrieking "Benghazi!" for the last few years has been so blatantly partisan propagandizing that you have to wonder how anyone falls for it.

There were more than a dozen attacks on US embassies and consulates under George W. Bush but despite that the Republican Party voted to slash $300 million from Embassy security over the strenuous objections of Obama and the Democrats.

Benghazi is a scandal. Its a Republican scandal.

Disassembled

Piece by piece Allison Redford's agenda of betrayal of the public service workers and progressive Albertans who elected her is rolled back, invalidated by the courts, abandoned and repudiated by the government. A premier who assumed all we Albertans were just inconveniently mouthy bit part players in her heroic story returns to the legislature to watch another major plank of her government shrivel and die.

Schadenfreude is the only appropriate response.

Former Alberta premier Alison Redford’s ill-conceived anti-union project is in shambles tonight, with an agreement to send two bills attacking public sector pensions to a legislative committee where they can die with dignity. 

With the car in the ditch, wheels spinning and headlights pointed skyward, the Progressive Conservative government of Premier pro tempore Dave Hancock agreed this afternoon to send the two controversial pension bills to the committee, which is supposed to report back in the fall. 

If sanity prevails within the PC caucus and the party remains mired at current levels of unpopularity, it seems likely this will lead to the eventual demise of both Bill 9, the Public Sector Pension Plans Amendment Act, 2014, and Bill 10, the Employment Pension (Private Sector) Plans Amendment Act, 2014. 

The agreement by Mr.Hancock’s PC government and all three Opposition parties also suggests the repudiation by Mr. Hancock personally of the radical program attacking public service unions and employees that emerged unexpectedly in the second year of the leadership of fired premier Redford, who finally reappeared in the Legislature today.

This is what a psychopath looks like

A Greenpeace representative tweeting a worried call for people to keep an eye out for a missing friend is an opportunity for this greasy specimen with a shit stained soul to mock him  and make political hay over a missing woman.

Being an unambiguous psychopath, he is doubtless incapable of shame,  but hopefully this display of complete lack of human feeling, concern and decency will follow him forever.

In the mean time everybody please keep an eye out for Louise Veillard, her friends and family are very worried about her.