Shut-up Stupid Sunday: Andy Barr

I’ve written about my disappointment with my current congressman Ben Chandler a lot on this blog. At the beginning of the year if I were to answer one of those polls asking whom I preferred Ben Chandler vs. An unnamed Republican I would have picked the unnamed Republican.

But now the Republican is named and it is Andy Barr.

It wouldn’t have taken much for Mr. Barr to get my vote, he just needed to be less repulsive than Ben Chandler and for half a second in the campaigning he was. Ben Chandler attacked him for supporting Paul Ryan’s plan to gut Social Security, the one part of the Republican’s plans that Andy Barr has drawn the line and refused to go along with his other Republicans.

At that point all Andy Barr had to do was take the high road and point out Ben falsely attacked him and give his own proposals. Alas, he countered by attacking Ben on Obama’s stimulus plan.

Independent analyses of the effectiveness of the Stimulus say that it has created or saved between 1.5 to 3.3 million jobs. It stopped the feedback loop of low demand leading to layoffs lowering demand which could have caused the country to keep shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs a month.

Here in Kentucky, the stimulus money directly hired over 13,000 workers in jobs that support an additional 3 workers or 39,000 jobs. In the 6th district the one Andy Barr is running for it has allowed the improvements to the infrastructure that our Governor, Steve Beshear started in 2007 after it was neglected for a long time. Without the stimulus these improvements would have stopped right in the middle of construction.

Here in the 6th district it is impossible not to be able to see the improvements to made to the area by the stimulus plan, everything from street signs (before most places in the area had me singing the U2 song, “Where the Streets have no name”) to rebuilding major roads that nearly a hundred thousand cars travel on each month that are so bad most of the time traffic has to travel at under 45 mph.

The stimulus program has also provided the seed money for the University of Kentucky located in the 6th district to expand its Center for Applied Energy Research making sure Kentucky will stay one of the top states auto manufacturing by researching better automotive batteries and help lead the way in Carbon recycling, something that is very important for the future of one of the largest coal producing states.

Every time I see a TV playing I see Andy Barr running a commercial saying that the stimulus plan was huge failure and that we should instead follow the Republican plan to increase the rewards to companies that send jobs overseas and will balloon the deficit by $4 trillion in the next 10 years.

So to Andy Barr, I say, “Shut-up Stupid, You could have had my vote, but instead you had to start saying things that anyone who opened their eyes and looked around can see are false. Since you seem to be able to look straight at the real world and then ignore what your eyes are telling you I wouldn’t vote for you to be a street sweeper since you would look right at the dirt and say it isn’t there.”


By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts