Mitch McConnell's new Ad

Mitch is a politician I love to hate. Sadly, he's also my Senator. He's spent 30 years in the Senate, a career politician by definition, and in that time has done effectively zero to improve the quality of life in one of the poorest states in the nation, Kentucky. He's really good at sending pork barrel projects home though, and that has proven highly effective at getting him re-elected.

This year, he's actually got a legitimate challenger. He's down in the polls. The GOP "brand" has basically got negative equity these days because the only loud voices in the party are the "I think the tea party has got some great ideas here!" types, not the moderates who are actually greater in number. Ten polls that came out in the first week of February all have him trailing her, or have them in a dead heat. It's possible for 1 poll to be off, but not 10. To put this in perspective, he's never, ever been even close to being unseated. From his first re-election campaign until his 5th (yep, he's had 5 of them), it's been a foregone conclusion that he'd just win. And some of these polls show that a full 12% of Kentucky residents say they simply don't know Alison Grimes, his opponent. So if the Dems put some marketing dollars behind her, oh and by the way Bill Clinton thinks unseating McConnell is so important he's agreed to campaign with her here in Kentucky, they could easily tip the scales in her favor. For the record, she's spectacular and she's already got my vote. I'm not the kind of Republican who blindly votes for anyone with an "R" in front of their name, and Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul are to shining examples of why that's the case.

So McConnell started running some ads here on TV a few weeks ago. A guy with a raspy voice tells you he got cancer while working at a government facility vital to our national security, and because he had no health insurance, he was really in trouble. So Mitch McConnell really came through for him by getting him... health coverage. Let's examine some of the details behind this story, because it's a doozy.

1. The dude worked at the Gaseous diffusion plant in Paducah. This plant makes radioactive Uranium for use in nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. You remember those infamous "centrifuge" arrays that Iran built which pretty much let the world know they were doing more than just making their own nuclear fuel? Yeah, ours (1812 of them) are in Paducah, and it takes 3,000 megawatts to run them. Fun trick: call your utility company and say you're opening a business that takes 3 gigawatts of power to operate, listen to the reaction from the sales agent. That's like running roughly 6,800 steel mills, simultaneously. 
2. That plant is pretty much the only thing going in Paducah. It offered good paying jobs, and was seen as an alternative to coal mining by many residents. Little did they know that the business of making U-235 is far more hazardous to both them and their community than the coal mining (which is quite dirty and hazardous) so common throughout Western Kentucky.
3. The plant in question is now a superfund site, because it has contaminated the soil and groundwater in the area. Superfund classifies the site as "under control" because it has since put monitoring in place to minimize the contamination, but let's keep that in perspective: it takes a major environmental threat to get listed as a superfund site in the first place. If they declared your house one, you'd move, not ask "well can you keep the contamination risk under control for me and my kids?"
4. McConnell has promised Paducah residents throughout his career that he'll work to keep the plant open, and he has, but there are consequences there too. Without that plant, the Paducah economy will take a huge hit. 550 workers got laid off there in January, and another 500 will lose their jobs in April. Oh yeah did I mention it's a massive health hazard to work there? So the longer it has remained open, the more employees who have fallen ill! He fought so hard to keep it open that he opposed sanctions against South Africa's Apartheid regime because they bought Uranium from Paducah. In 1988 he passed an amendment to exempt the plant operators from lawsuits. Talk about a deal with the devil - a company says "yeah, we'll keep that plant open, but we know it's a death trap so we'll only do it if you exempt us from the inevitable lawsuits." 
5. Workers at the plant wrote to McConnell for years, when they were enduring the kinds of conditions that a Washington Post expose revealed back in 1999. Only after the media picked up the story did McConnell show interest. 
6. The Department of Energy, who oversaw plant safety (not OSHA, think about that), was well aware of the contamination problems. They had even put together a plan for how to address them. That plan was killed by the Senate appropriations committee, led by... Mitch McConnell. We can't waste taxpayer dollars cleaning up a mess we made with taxpayer dollars, right? 
7. McConnell hates Obamacare, yet we all sympathize with the plight of the man in the video. He was sick and had no way to get insurance, because prior to Obamacare you could deny insurance to a dude with cancer! How can you hate Obamacare and yet your campaign ad is "I got a sick guy some healthcare because he couldn't get it on his own?!" Oh and by the way, you made him sick, Mitch!
8. This is McConnell's BEST story?! I have to assume so, since he ran the same story as an ad in his 2008 re-election campaign.

Vote Grimes.