KEA Political Battle At High Noon

Gubernatorial candidate Jody Richards can't let the Senate education initiatives SB 1 and SB 2 get through or the KEA won't endorse him.

But Budget Chairman Harry Moberly isn't running for governor. His A&R committee will hear the bills today at noon.

Brother Can You Spare Some Corn?

Spenders of federal tax dollars are going hog-wild on corn trying to make ethanol. This is all wrong and Kentucky would do well to stay out of this -- as far as our tax dollars are concerned.

Corn has nearly doubled in price in the last year. Farmland prices are escalating as more people scramble to join the parade. This mania will doubtless lead to a cornflation we don't need. Meanwhile, the science behind the panic to run our economy on ethanol makes man-made global warming look like a round earth, gravity happens dead certainty.

Seriously, follow the smart money. If we were really going to replace oil with ethanol, Exxon would have already bought South America and turned the entire continent into sugar cane.

Is Anne Northup For School Choice?

Gubernatorial candidate Anne Northup appears to be supporting school choice in her campaign's education policy statement:

When another school, either public or private, is available with a specific curriculum or educational program which would benefit a special needs student, some or all of the state and federal money that’s allocated for that student should be allowed to follow him or her to a school where those needs can be met. We should not view such schools as a threat to our public schools but as assets that can provide interventions with a proven record of success.

Sounds like an endorsement of Rep. Stan Lee's special needs scholarship bill.

House Tax Increase Hits Senate Wall

The minimum wage tax increase was set for a vote in the Kentucky Senate today, but got passed over instead.

If raising the minimum wage was really going to help lessen poverty, it would be hard to justify the screaming this move will bring.

It won't. It isn't. Next.

It's About Time; General Assembly Takes Up Public Pension Reform

Senate Republican leadership is going to speak to the A&R committee this morning about overhauling the public pension system.

This is a very good thing and something that should have been done a long time ago, but I'll take it now.

UPDATE: I've seen the Senate plan and, while it is better than the House plan, it doesn't really fix much. We have a lot of work to do.

"Hey, What About My Liberal Values?"

Pretty funny quote in a Courier Journal article about Jonathan Miller:

"I was in the hollers with substandard housing and outdoor plumbing," recalled Miller, 39. "I wanted to talk to them about affordable health care, about jobs, about improving the educational system. Invariably when I got to that door, the first question I was asked … was, 'What's your position on gay marriage?' "

If by affordable health care, jobs, and education you mean socialized medicine, minimum wage hikes, and funneling billions of more taxpayer dollars to unaccountable bureaucrats, I'd say talking about gay marriage would be pretty productive by comparison.

Bipartisanship In Frankfort

As the General Assembly draws toward a close, only one symbolic bill has passed both the House and Senate. Whether anything else happens may depend on three others -- the Minimum Wage Tax Increase in the House and Senate leadership's education initiatives (here and here).

It's looking like the tax increase will pass and the education bills will get killed by Speaker Jody Richards.

Carry Your Baggage, Sir?

Al Cross has a very good column today covering the Dem candidates for governor.

"I made a mistake with Ernie Fletcher and I'm sorry I did that," Lunsford told the Democrats, who applauded. "I supported one Republican governor in my life. I will never support another one."

Lunsford said zip about the money he continued to give Northup and other Republicans, but the money on the mind of many Democrats is the virtually unlimited cash that Lunsford can put into his campaign. After losing a host of elections to better-financed Republicans, Kentucky Democrats are preoccupied with money, and Lunsford appealed to that fear, saying, "We can spend the money to be in the race with them."

Henry spoke last and did worst, taking credit for accomplishments of the Paul Patton administration for which he had little or no responsibility, such as higher-education reform and appointment of women to judgeships, boards and commissions, even going so far as to say, "We appointed more women. …" He did not. Outrageous.

But in a multi-opponent primary, what candidate will hold Henry to the truth? Otis Hensley? Gatewood Galbraith? Party chairman Jerry Lundergan said all candidates have signed a pledge "not to negatively campaign personally." That appears to help the slates with the most baggage, and to whom he is closest -- Henry's and Lunsford's.

Now This Is A Real Threat To The Commonwealth

We get some pretty meaningless bills from the General Assembly each year, but I just can't imagine anyone thinking we really need to prohibit primary losers from filing as write-in candidates in general elections.

Does Rep. Brent Yonts want to show just how much he hates Sen. Joe Lieberman or what?

Minimum Wage Tax Gets A Boost

Looks like the Kentucky Senate wants to go along with the minimum wage bill.

What a waste.

How Cool Is That?

Billy Harper shreds the prevailing wage law, in a sharp suit, ON THE BUS.

Smile Billy! You are stylin'!

The Political Star No One Knows

A great political story that needs to be told is that of celebrity candidate turned accomplished Agriculture Commissioner Richie Farmer.

More on this next week...

Hello Mary Lou, Goodbye Truth

Watched a little KET coverage of the General Assembly and was shocked and dismayed to see Rep. Mary Lou Marzian claim that the University of Louisville said that its domestic partner scheme wouldn't cost taxpayers any money.

Well, that kind of depends on who you are talking to at U of L. The people who run the agenda say there will be no cost. The people who run the numbers say $600,000 a year and up.

Did They Run Out Of Bridges To Rename?

Why in the world are we wasting time fixing wages for anyone, much less waiters?

HB 206 comes up for a vote tomorrow.

Another Myth-Busting Study Of The Political Middle

The Washington Post has a column about how divided we are on the issues and debunks the idea that what we all want to is just get along now that Democrats are back in control of Congress.

The CCES survey asked about 14 national issues: the war in Iraq (the invasion and the troops), abortion (and partial birth abortion), stem cell research, global warming, health insurance, immigration, the minimum wage, liberalism and conservatism, same-sex marriage, privatizing Social Security, affirmative action, and capital gains taxes. Not surprisingly, some of the largest differences between Democrats and Republicans were over the Iraq war. Fully 85 percent of those who voted for Democratic House candidates felt that it had been a mistake to invade Iraq, compared with only 18 percent of voters who cast ballots for Republicans.

But the divisions between the parties weren't limited to Iraq. They extended to every issue in the survey. For example, 69 percent of Democratic voters chose the most strongly pro-choice position on the issue of abortion, compared with 20 percent of Republican voters; only 16 percent of Democratic voters supported a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, while 80 percent of Republican voters did; and 91 percent of Democratic voters favored governmental action to reduce global warming, compared with 27 percent of Republican voters.

The study found a similar split on single-payer health care. So if Bruce Lunsford and Greg Stumbo -- who have already alienated most of the primary-voting Democrats in the state -- really want to push socialized medicine, I hope they really have a good time doing it.

Also noticed they are advocating universal pre-kindergarten. After watching two of the top education bureaucrats in the state go on Kentucky Tonight and state clearly their belief that teachers know what's best for children better than parents do, I can't see this idea getting them very far either.

Taxpayer Group Gives Northup a "C"

The National Taxpayers Union has issued its 2006 Congressional Scorecard. Here's how Kentucky's delegation did:

Chandler, F, 16%
Davis, B-, 59%
Lewis, B, 62%
Northup, C+, 54%
Rogers, C+, 54%
Whitfield, C, 50%

Brian Goettl Strikes Back On Pardons

Here.

Another Phony Issue Drags On In Frankfort

Frankfort Dems have been talking smack about "pay equity" but their own guys in the House won't put their bill up for a vote.

Hey, somebody get Nancy Pelosi and Hillary! in here to shake these boys up!

Pence Hits Fletcher Really Hard

Here.

Legislature Shirking Duties On Public Pensions

Emperor Nero has earned enduring scorn for not putting out the fire that burned Rome when it was small enough to handle. Kentucky governors and legislators have done similarly in recent years with the public employee pension plans and the growing threat could burn up our state's bank account.

House Bill 418, passed by the House of Representatives unanimously on Monday, addresses the pension shortfall but does so ineffectively. Kentucky's elected officials aren't exactly fiddling like Nero while the crisis bears down on us, but HB 418 will be a short-lived band-aid approach. The end result may well be about the same.

HB 418 would extend for one year the practice of calculating public employee pensions based on the three highest years of an employee's salary. The good this bill does is to hold off, in theory, the expected tidal wave of government retirees whose pensions we will have great difficulty paying. With the "high three" extended, the hope is that those employees of retirement age will keep working and drawing only one paycheck rather than retiring and coming back to work to draw two checks.

We would like to hope that HB 418 will help as it is intended to do, but far more needs to be done. Here is why: Kentucky's pension problem is not just about investments falling short of future liabilities, it involves how our entire public employee system works. We must end the often-abused system of double-dipping if we are to have any hope of averting disaster with our public pensions. When government employes retire, they should be thanked for the years of service and paid promised pension checks. But we must stop bringing them back at anywhere near their last salary. That practice is breaking the bank.

Rather than nibbling at the edges of the pension situation, Kentucky needs to either encourage would-be retirees to go ahead and leave en masse or to stay around a few more years and -- most importantly -- to train their replacements. In either case, the lack of systematic succession training in government offices is hurting our state financially and will get worse as our population of public retirees swells to unprecedented levels. Instead of hiring back recent retirees at or near their last salary in addition to their pension, we should make training of new employees part of their job before they go.

The reason this will help is that we would be replacing our highest-salaried employees with younger new employees at significantly lower cost. The savings could then be applied to the pension plans.

Continued failure to end double-dipping and to institute effective employee succession planning will result in the public pension plans being unable to meet their obligations. The only solution at that point will be massive tax increases.