Politics Kentucky Style... the series

[AbsoluteArmorer]

http://www.bluegrassreport.org/bluegrass_politics/2006/03/corrupt_senate__1.html

Corrupt Senate President David Williams (R) once again shows us his disgustingly petty and partisan attempts to exact political revenge trumps all other things for him. This time, he aims for state Treasurer Jonathan Miller (D) and tries a backdoor budget maneuver to mortally wound Kentucky's pre-paid tuition program (KAPT) since his efforts to do in the courtroom appear to have failed miserably -- like pretty much all of his other courtroom efforts over the past year or so.

For those who don't know much about KAPT or the current controversy, you should this post that I wrote back in June 2005 when the matter was headed to court as a primer on the issues and politics.

Now that the prevailing belief is that Franklin County Circuit Court is ready to rule against Williams and the Fletcher administration in the action brought by Attorney General Stumbo and Miller, Williams is using the budget to take out his petty revenge once again.

Rather than explain what he's doing, I've re-posted below an e-mail that Miller sent out last night to the thousands of KAPT families in Kentucky about Williams' likely unconstitutional maneuver -- not that he cares much for the rule of law or separation of powers.

But this is nothing more than The Bully from Burkesville using the public trust to retaliate against anyone who has the political guts to stand up to his egomaniacal edicts. You've already witnessed his revenge against the Supreme Court and Franklin Circuit Court for standing-up to him when he tried to seat an Indiana resident in the Kentucky senate. Now he's going after Miller, and Stumbo, for having the guts to go after him when he tried to screw KAPT families.

[AbsoluteArmorer]

1. Gambling anyone?

This report is 10 yrs old but I'm sure the $$$ is still lobbying quite well today for those red blooded politicians in Kentucky.


http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/coinop_congress/easymoney/KY.html

Kentucky

At least $1,148,288-- Includes 1993-94 and 1996 lobbying expenditures

June 9, 1997

Every day is Derby Day in the Bluegrass State, which boasts seven horse tracks and four off-track betting parlors, but no casinos of any kind. Kentucky also has a state lottery with a history of inefficiency and corruption which includes the mass resignation of seven lottery commission board members and the lottery president in 1993 and 1994, after a state audit uncovered faulty procedures and conflicts of interests.

Kentucky's got a bit of a reputation for official corruption when it comes to lobbying as well. Case in point: The horse-racing operative who slipped $500 to then-Speaker of the House Don Blandford in 1992. "Bless your heart," said Blandford, unaware that the FBI had the whole thing on videotape.

Racetrack owners and their out-of-state investors -- some of them big national casino operators like Merv Griffin's Players International in Atlantic City, owners of the Bluegrass Downs track in Paducah -- have pushed for land-based casinos at tracks in order to compete with riverboat casinos in neighboring states. So far, they have had little success.

Kentucky only makes campaign contribution records available on paper, for 10 cents a page, and lobbying reports for 15 cents a page. Mother Jones obtained partial figures on lobbying expenditures from Common Cause of Kentucky, which showed that gaming interests lavished at least $1,148,288 lobbying state lawmakers for the periods of September 1993 through April 1994, and January 1996 through April 1996 alone, making our Kentucky figure another very conservative one.

[AbsoluteArmorer]

2. Boone County Republicans spew.... get over it... move on ...etc etc

Isn't this how most Neocons and Republican's handle their scandals? "Lets move on"

Fletcher scandal frustrates Ky. GOP
By Stephenie Steitzer
Post staff reporter

Those are among words at least a dozen Northern Kentucky Republicans use privately and publicly to describe their feelings about the seven-month long scandal that has embroiled Gov. Ernie Fletcher, the first Republican chief executive in the commonwealth in 30 years. "I think that most Republicans are anxious for it to be over," said Marcus Carey, GOP chairman in the 4th Congressional District Republican Party.

In May, Attorney General Greg Stumbo began investigating whether rank-and-file state jobs were being filled based on political affiliations rather than the merit of candidates, as the law requires.Since then, 14 current and former members of Fletcher's administration have been indicted, most on misdemeanor violations of the Merit System law. In August, Fletcher pardoned the first nine who were indicted and said it covered any criminal activity in the administration that might be investigated by the grand jury. Among those to be indicted and pardoned was former Kenton County Judge-Executive Dick Murgatroyd, who served as Fletcher's deputy chief of staff. He later was among nine indicted officials who Fletcher asked to resign. Some Northern Kentucky Republicans say they are disappointed Fletcher's tenure has been marred by scandal after all the hard work by the GOP to get back the governor's mansion. Republicans last held the executive post in 1971, when Louie Nunn was governor.


Republican Boone County Commissioner Cathy Flaig said she wasn't disappointed with the governor but with Democrats who have used the investigation to trounce on the Republican Party.

"We need to be united," she said. "We don't need to be picking at each other."
Flaig and almost everyone else interviewed said they believe Fletcher was misguided by young, inexperienced people who were running his administration.
"They did not have the political and professional maturity that older folks in the business have," said Kevin Sell, a Campbell County Republican and coordinator of the local Associated Builders and Contractors Political Action Committee, which heavily supports Republicans.
Others have said the people who were politically savvy enough to get Fletcher elected were not as knowledgeable about running an administration.
"The reality is, once you begin to govern, sometimes things are a lot different from when you are running for office," said state Rep. Jon Draud, R-Edgewood.
Fletcher spokeswoman Jodi Whitaker said the governor admitted some members of the administration who were misguided or over-enthusiastic made mistakes.
"At this point we believe it's time to move on," Whitaker said.
While some say the administration mishandled the attorney general's investigation from the start, others note that the critical misstep was in not firing some of the indicted officials sooner.

One Republican said privately that Fletcher would've been better off if he had admitted mistakes upfront - much the way Kenton County Clerk Bill Aylor did last week when he pleaded guilty to a DUI charge.

Publication date: 11-28-2005

http://news.cincypost.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051128/NEWS01/511280364

[AbsoluteArmorer]

3. Sen McConnell's ways and means

This is one GOP lackie!

The bane of the Capital Hill establishment. Two years ago, Feingold, along with senior Sen. John McCain (R-Az.), introduced a remarkable piece of legislation, meant to effectively abolish the corrupt and undemocratic system of campaign finance. The McCain-Feingold Bill would limit Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions and ban "soft money," the unlimited contributions to political parties which are then diverted to individual campaigns. For the last two years, however, McCain-Feingold has been ignored by the United States Congress, left to languish in some subcommittee.

The Senate, however, was a different matter. The ultimate country-club, the Senate is dominated by those politicians who know who how to manipulate the system best. Many of them, rich from large campaign war-chests and PAC money, staunchly refuse to change it. Among these is hawkish Sen. Mitch McConnel (R-KY), head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. As the dispenser of funds for Republican candidates across the country, the anti-reform McConnell took money away from Republicans who supported McCain-Feingold, like Washingtonian Linda Smith (who lost her Senate race), and gave them to candidates who could take down his political enemies. Private Enemy No. 1 for McConnell is--you guessed it--Russell Feingold. Neumann's campaign, funded by McConnell's committee and others, promptly used the money it received to run a series of vicious negative advertisements against Feingold.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=96375

[AbsoluteArmorer]

5. Good Ole Ky Pork

More Kentucky Pork

Porkbusterssm_1The Cincinnati Post lists some pork for it's local area put together by the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste. This includes some northern Kentucky pork. Some interesting statistics:

Among the states, Kentucky ranked 16th in per capita pork spending, with $185 million in projects, or $44.43 per person. Ohio came in 44th with $226 million, or $19.76 per person.

A good deal of Kentucky's bounty can be attributed to Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, the Senate's No. 2 Republican.

I'd say it's time to let the Senate's leaders know what we think of the pork they are pulling down. Those of us in their respective states need to really let them know.

http://conservativemusings.typepad.com/

[AbsoluteArmorer]

4. Since 1888 in Louisville, vote fraud existed

Campbell, Tracy 1962- "Machine Politics, Police Corruption, and the Persistence of Vote Fraud: The Case of the Louisville, Kentucky, Election of 1905"
Journal of Policy History - Volume 15, Number 3, 2003, pp. 269-300

Excerpt

Although vote fraud is an acknowledged component of American political culture, scholarship on the inner workings of stealing elections is rather thin. Despite popular exposés by nineteenth-century muckrakers, the functioning dynamics of vote stealing remains somewhere beneath the visible layer of political analysis. The Gilded Age has been the recipient of some extensive studies of ballot corruption, but scholars have generally concluded that the extent of fraud in changing the actual outcome of a specific race was exaggerated, and with the advent of the Australian, or secret, ballot in the early 1890s, American elections took on a decidedly freer and fairer tone. The scholarship surrounding vote fraud has also tended to focus on a secondary issue: Did the secret ballot diminish fraud to the point where earlier turnout levels could be seen as inflated? Following the lead of Walter Dean Burnham, numerous scholars have answered decidedly in the negative—the level of fraud was so insignificant as not to change turnout totals in any meaningful way. 1

The focus on voter turnout has served to minimize the impact of flagrant fraud on the process of conducting fair elections and the counting of votes, and has subsequently diminished our understanding of the corrosive nature of election fraud on American political history. This article explores the electoral history of one American city—Louisville, Kentucky—to provide a corrective to this circumstance. The high point of the electoral corruption in Louisville occurred seventeen years after it became the first American municipality to adopt the secret ballot in 1888. The 1905 Louisville municipal election was one of the rare moments in American history when an entire city government was thrown out of power by a court decision, even after the incumbent administration had served in office for well over a year. As such, Louisville provides a case study...

http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/access.cgi?uri=/journals/journal_of_policy_history/v015/15.3campbell.html

log into this site above for further information on this article.

[AbsoluteArmorer]

6. Another KY republican Bush puppet

http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060413/NEWS0103/304130027

Bunning highlights war during Ky. speech
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PADUCAH, Ky. – Despite losing more soldiers in Iraq than any other U.S. Army unit, the 101st Airborne Division’s resolve to accomplish its mission in Iraq should be recognized, U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning said during a speech in Paducah.

“They remain the most aggressive soldiers in doing their job to give the Iraqi citizens freedom and a democracy,” said Bunning, R-Ky.

Bunning, during the Wednesday speech at the Rotary Club, predicted that the number of troops deployed in Iraq will be reduced to 50,000 by the end of the year as Iraqis take over the country’s security. The U.S. must commit to keeping troops in Iraq until the government there is stable, he said.

Bunning echoed President Bush’s argument that the war in Iraq is an important part of fighting terrorism.“Right now, we are keeping the terrorists on their own soil,” Bunning said. He also defended efforts of the Department of Homeland Security and the renewal of the USA Patriot Act.“Terrorism is never going to go away,” he said.

[Roland99]

7. Guess that includes the massive dog-and-pony show in Tal Afar recently