He reminds us not to reminisce about George W. Bush (the Dumber), who was the absolutely worst president of all time when he was in office.
That is until his party, the GOP, gave us the orange-hued, pumpkin headed, pussy grabbing babyman.
And that’s why the Republican Party has to be put in eternal time out, because if we don’t stop it, it’s going to destroy us all.
Democrat Steve Beshear, and a previous state legislature, led in part by Democrat Greg Stumbo, started a scholarship program to help college students in Eastern Kentucky finish their degrees. Called the Kentucky Coal County College Completion Scholarship, it was funded by the state initially at $1 million before expanding to more counties and growing to $4 million in scholarships that went to many colleges in coal country. …
Of course, something was bound to fuck it up, and that is the fact that the coal industry is a dinosaur that doesn’t understand that it’s long past time to be extinct. See, the program is funded by a coal severance tax, which is based on the value of coal that is processed in the state. And because coal is fucked, the amount of that tax being collected is falling as the amount of coal mined in Kentucky falls. “Revenue from the tax dropped from $310 million in 2011 to $100.5 million in the fiscal year that ended June 30,” so, yeah, coal’s fucked.
So asshole Republican Governor Matt Bevin, who seems to be doing everything he can to dick over the poor in his state (although, to be fair, the poor did a pretty good job of self-dicking by voting for Bevin), has proposed eliminating the scholarship program in his latest budget. Obviously, when the jobs are drying up, you want to make sure that the poorest areas of your state remain mired in horrific poverty.
Kentucky has one of the lowest rates of college degree attainment. It’s 47th (West Virginia is 50th because, yeah, coal). Republicans will just pretend that the “good” jobs that disappeared a long damn time ago are going to come back, instead of admitting that history and technology are making coal into just black rocks that should stay in the damn ground. And let’s be honest here: those jobs have always been shitty and dangerous and underpaid.
If Bevin gets his way, a whole lot of young adults will be forced to give up college or go into the debt spiral that higher education entails, the future be damned in favor of an illusion of bringing back a fake past.
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