So little time, so many assholes. This week let’s keep it local with a state and municipal politics edition. We certainly have plenty of material to work with.
First up is Scranton, Pennsylvania Mayor Chris Doherty. This Friday Doherty defied a court order and paid every city worker in the city of Scranton minimum wage ($7.25 an hour ) to combat a city financial crisis. However, it is unfair to put all the blame on the mayor. Scranton’s city council has played the jackass card and refused to adopt a financial rescue plan for the city because it will sharply increase property taxes.
The move means that all city employees, cops, firefighters, utility workers, and the mayor himself will be paid minimum wage for the time being. After transferring funds to cover Friday’s payday, the city of Scranton was left with $5000 in the bank. Yes, five thousand fucking dollars. Congrats Scranton, you are actually less financially solvent than most Crass readers.
Obviously, this is a complicated issue, but the fact is you don’t get into this kind of fiscal trouble without some Olympic-level mismanagement. Maybe the people responsible for that mismanagement should get the fuck out of the public sector so that the city can move on and solve its fiscal mess.
Next up, conservative governors who are threatening to opt out of the Medicaid expansion of the Affordable Care Act. This week Louisiana, Florida, Iowa, and South Carolina announced they will not participate in the Medicaid expansion that would drastically reduce the number of uninsured people in their states. Why? Who the fuck knows with these people? Ostensibly this is because of “state’s rights,” but that usually just means the blahs and the poors might be treated with some dignity for a change, and nothing is a bigger threat to freedom than poors living without soul-crushing fear.
Of course, the sad irony is that states with the most resistance to the expansion have the most to gain because they have the most uninsured people. For fuck’s sake, has Bobby Jindal ever been to Louisiana? The place is a shit show of poverty. It seems to me that the job of a governor is to look after the general welfare of the resident’s of his or her state. The plantation mentality never goes away for these assholes. The poor are to be beaten down at every turn so they can never challenge the obscenity of their conditions. Fuck these people, fuck every one of them.
Finally. let’s head out West to take a look at some remarks by State Sen. Kevin Grantham, R-Cañon City, Colorado. Grantham was a participant at the Western Conservative Summit, which is probably even less fun than you would imagine. This year the summit invited Dutch wing-nut Geert Wilders to talk about how Jesus’ America was under threat from Islam a “dangerous, totalitarian ideology” masquerading as a religion. Neat. In his speech Wilders urged America to forbid the building of any mosques because, you know, Sharia law. For his part Grantham, who seems oblivious to what happens in Christian churches, agreed:
You know, we’d have to hear more on that, because, as he said, mosques are not churches like we would think of churches,” Grantham said. “They think of mosques more as a foothold into a society, as a foothold into a community, more in the cultural and in the nationalistic sense. Our churches — we don’t feel that way, they’re places of worship, and mosques are simply not that, and we need to take that into account when approving construction of those.
The conference also featured former Reagan administration official Frank Gaffney, who previewed a ten hour video series about how the Muslims are infiltrating America and are going to make us all have Sharia law so we can’t divorce our third wives and get drunk for Jesus on Independence Day. Gaffney also urged attendees to boycott CPAC this year because CPAC is full of Muslim infiltrators and CPAC refuses to purge them for purity. I guess you can out wing-nut a wing-nut. Well played Frank.
Know of some one who is such an asshole they deserve to be recognized? Email me your nominations to [email protected].
Top image via Wikitravel.
