In which a lone voice among the millions takes a good hard look at the current Governor of Arizona, where she is weighed, measured and found wanting. In addition, he also takes a swipe at Know-Nothing firefighters and Do-Nothing Governors.
Excuse me while I whip this out...(sounds of chainsaw firing up)
Dear Gov. Brewer:
Really, Governor? Child Health Care Day?!? Did you think no-one would notice or care that you have:
* Frozen enrollment for KidsCare health insurance program, ($24.5 million, 70,000 children on the waiting list)
* Eliminated children's behavioral health services, ($9.3 million, 4,200 lost services)
* Reduced services for developmentally disabled, ($9.3 million, 300 children)
* Cut Children's Rehabilitative Services, ($3.6 million, 850 children)
* Eliminated high-risk prenatal care services and follow-up, ($2.9 million)
* Disqualified families with children from cash assistance, ($29.2 million, 10,000 families caring for 17,000 children)
* Imposed a variety of cuts on the Department of Economic Security that, among other things, eliminated peer mentoring for foster children and counseling for newly adoptive families, eliminating grandparent kinship care program, cut emergency services and domestic violence shelter beds, ($25.6 million)
* Capped enrollment for child care subsidies, leaving about 20,000 of the 48,000 eligible children without subsidies, ($16.5 million)
In addition, the governor offered the following proposals in her 2011 budget that were not enacted:
* Eliminate health coverage for 310,500 Arizonans including 11,700 children, ($1 billion)
* Eliminate the Department of Juvenile Corrections, ($68 million, 450 juveniles and 1,000 state employees)
Source: Arizona Democratic Party
What in the Hallelujah Fuck makes you think you'd do this and not escape notice?! Is this the kind of nonsense we can expect from you greedheads? Are your heads so far up your own asses that you can't even see that what you're proposing, while appearing to be cost-effective in the short term, is going to be more expensive in the long term as these children grow up with insufficient health care? What's your idea instead, Jan? Putting them all in prison and letting the private prison corporations take care of it, I'd suspect, considering how much money the Prison Industrial Complex is throwing at you.
(Note: This is no disrespect to the decent, hard-working folks in the prisons that have to work. I understand that you have to do what you have to do, but Goddamn it!)
And while I'm on a roll here, let's talk about this lovely little fuck-a-row that just happened in Obion, TN. Seems the county that this lovely little burg resides in happens to have a $75 fee for use of firefighter services. So if your house burns down and you haven't paid the fee...well...Tough Shit. Worse yet, the county commission rated the fire services as being "very progressive."
Let the irony of that sink in for a moment, shall we...
Done? Good. Memo to the Mayor of Obion: What in the tympani fuck is wrong with you? Fire services are Essential Services, numbnuts. It shouldn't matter if they paid the fee, what mattered is their house was burning down. Worse yet, of all the writers at National Review, only one thought morally it was a bad idea. The rest of them came down on the side of the mayor.
Seriously?!? Their goddamn house was burning down. Worry about who's paying for it after it's done, moron. Firefighters should not have to carry a mobile credit card machine before they go out to every call. Is this what we are going to see if the Republicans get what they want? If this is the case, then we're moving to Canada.
Unfortunately, if I do this, I probably won't be able to get there by train. At least, that's what I heard...
Now is not the time?!? Seriously?!?! Why in the all-singing, all-dancing fuck are we the only industrialized country in the world that doesn't have a high speed rail system? Japan has one, so does Europe and a whole host of other countries, many of whom are our allies. So when President Obama put forth the idea of spending a lot of cash-y money to getting one built, I thought (as did a lot of other people) this would be a good idea. Building things like that takes people to design it, build it, and keep it running. Having something like that takes the stress off of our slowly crumbling road infrastructure and allows other means of mass transit other than getting in your red pickup with the Palin 2012 sticker on the bumper...
You know what, fuck it, I give up. None of these people are reasonable. None of them really want things to change. I used to think that there wasn't any difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. And some people may say that there's not really much of a difference at all. Bullshit, says I and here's why: At least the Democrats are trying to do something for Us. The People. You know, the ones that elected them in 2008 in large numbers. Only now, we're trying to gnaw our arms off because we've woken up and seen that Democracy, while one of the better systems of government, is Ugly.
Here's the thing; It's ugly, it's clumsy, and sometimes it even stumbles about like the town drunk from a James Joyce novel, but at the end of the day it's a damn sight better than what the Grand Old Pursesnatchers are proposing. What are they proposing? Simple. Everything will be privately run. Everything. Their ultimate goal is to reduce government to where it's small enough to drown in a bathtub. Then their rich little Christian friends can swoop in and create their little theocracy, kill all the abortionists, homosexuals, and other deviants, round up all the brown people and either put them in special places or send them home whether they originally came from there or not, and make this country safe for white people again.
Of course, that's just my opinion...I could be wrong.