If we had lower taxes we might have more of this

While the state's major political parties were meeting this weekend, Walmart was actually doing some good.

Did you see this?

Making it harder for politicians to hide what they are doing with your money shouldn't be something we have to argue very hard for. Secretary of State Trey Grayson understands that and is leading the way. If you can get to Frankfort Monday morning and want to help wrest control of Kentucky's government from the hands of those who prefer to keep us in the dark, this is the place to be (click to expand):

Depends on your definition of success

The Lexington Herald Leader can be so funny sometimes.

Take today's editorial as an example. In it, the editors claim "real progress" in a national education report showing Kentucky's high school graduation rate was 71.6% in 2005.

Now all we need to do, they claim, is throw more money at the education bureaucrats who got us to this point. One minor problem with this is those same Kentucky bureaucrats just told us a week ago our graduation rate for 2005 was 82.86%.

In a sane world, the mainstream media would be all over this illusory 11%. But no, the best answer we get from our constitutionally-protected watchdogs is a whitewash, a guilt-trip, and some revisionist history:

"No one in Kentucky has an excuse to rest on laurels, especially when the state is eliminating and underfunding reforms that have worked."

Clearly, these people can't be trusted to address how much we are going to have to dumb-down the CATS tests over the next five years to come anywhere close to mandated proficiency goals.

Mainstream media waking up to transparency

The idea of making the government show us the public checkbook is catching fire.

WHAS Louisville reporter Mark Hebert has a post up this evening about Governor Steve Beshear trying to catch up to Secretary of State Trey Grayson on the transparency initiative promoted heavily by the Bluegrass Institute.

What's funny is this part:

"Spokesman Dick Brown says the internet records transparency initiative has been in the works for some time and will fulfill a campaign promise made by Beshear."

That would be somewhat easier to believe if we didn't have two House bills (HB 105 and HB 769) earlier this year that could have gotten a huge boost with a kind word from the governor back then. Nevertheless, it is good that he seems to be getting on board now. Hope he doesn't spend too long studying it.

A small step forward on a Friday

Governor Steve Beshear deserves encouragement for announcing today a task force to study putting government expenditures online.

Not that we really need to study it too much.

Someone tell Beshear he isn't going to melt if he takes a look at a state with a Republican governor like Mark Sanford of South Carolina about how to get the job done.

Did I mention the press conference coming up Monday about this very issue?

Good driver? Responsible? Here's how you're screwed in Kentucky

We may have done well earlier this year to beat back the legislative effort to make the car insurance companies treat everyone like bad credit risks, but it looks like we are going to get nailed with higher costs anyway.

Governor Steve Beshear announced with great fanfare today a giveaway of $3.2 million from the taxpayers to Safe Auto Insurance Company, an insurer for people with poor credit ratings and bad driving records.

That's because we expanded the taxpayer giveaway market in the 2008 session to include include more service providers.

So if you can't get regular insurance, your guys just got a boost. If you have good credit and a clean driving record, you and your insurer just provided the boost.

How to hide an orgy

A spending orgy is pretty easy to hide in a state government with no transparency. It helps when your mainstream media writes stories upside down like this:

The main sentence in the story is this one: "With one month left in the fiscal year, the General Fund has received $7.8 billion, up 1.2 percent from the same 11-month period a year earlier."

In other words, we have more money than ever before. The problem is not that we need more revenue. We need less spending.

Bluegrass Institute update

The cowards who hacked up the Bluegrass Institute over the weekend will soon see their dirty work reversed.

The Bluegrass Policy Blog may be up as soon as tonight.

The Institute's work on increasing government transparency continues with preparations for a Trey Grayson press conference on Monday.

Chandler compares paying unions to fighting in Iraq

The biggest problem with Rep. Ben Chandler's school spending bill has been it's requirement that union wages be paid on building projects in states which, unlike Kentucky, have learned a lesson on government waste and stopped requiring prevailing (union) wages on such projects.

Chandler made matters worse yesterday with his over-the-top anti-war rhetoric when he said:

"We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq; surely we can invest less than $7 billion in the future of our children, and the future of our country."

Mayor Jim Newberry's dirty lawyer trick

You haven't heard anything in the mainstream media about the filthy, rotten behavior of the city of Lexington in their handling of the many scandals at the Fayette County Detention Center. When the media wakes up to this one you will hear about it, though.

Attorneys at Wyatt, Tarrant, and Combs have tried to get United States Army Staff Sgt. Delmar White removed as a plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against the city for some illegal pay practices. They base their request on the fact that White hasn't been answering their letters or returning their phone calls in the discovery process.

A highly decorated Marine and National Guardsman, White died Sept. 2, 2007 in combat in Bagdad.

Newberry will lose this request and, hopefully, White's estate will be well compensated by the taxpayers of Lexington, who shouldn't forget Newberry's disgusting tactics in his next election.

Kentucky caught fudging graduation numbers

The new “Graduation Counts 2008” report from Education Week has been issued less than a week after the Kentucky Department of education released its own “Nonacademic Data Report” for Kentucky’s public schools. The new Education Week data exposes some very disturbing holes in what we are being told about the performance of our schools.

For example, the Graduation Counts Web articles include a special Kentucky section that shows us how well Kentucky’s education leaders disseminate high school graduation rates.

The state report claims statewide high school graduation rate for Kentucky’s Class of 2005 was 82.86 percent. Education Week’s Kentucky section has a sort of “lie meter” on Page 7 that shows the real rate was much lower – over 11 points lower – at just 71.5 percent. Nationally, Kentucky ranks below the median in 29th place among the 50 states.

There is more interesting information from Ed Week.

While the national spread between graduation rates for boys and girls is 7.5 points in favor of the ladies, here in Kentucky the spread is notably higher at 9.8 points. Why is KERA less successful with boys than girls?

Hispanics in Kentucky also do much more poorly than the national average with a graduation rate disparity of 49.4 percent versus 57.8 percent.

Kentucky’s whites also graduate at a rate 5.2 points below the national average of 77.6 percent.

Only Kentucky’s blacks do slightly better than their national counterparts, but their graduation rate of just 58.2 percent is hardly a testament to KERA.

Not surprisingly, you won’t find these minority graduation rates in the state’s Nonacademic Data Report. You have to go to more honest sources like Education Week if you want that information. Here in Kentucky, our educators prefer to continue using data that has been officially audited and found unreliable, which is how Kentucky comes up with an inflated 82.86 graduation rate in the first place.

Bluegrass Institute education analyst Richard Innes wrote this post.

A step in the right direction

Senate President David Williams has suspended the Capitol Annex renovation that has gotten so much press recently.

In a letter to the LRC, Williams said "...I have determined to indefinitely suspend further renovation of the second floor of the Annex..."

Great. Now, let's get rid of pension and health benefits for part-time government workers.

McCain and Obama still together on transparency

If you have missed the government transparency movement sweeping America because you live in the corrupt little backwater of a state we lovingly call Kentucky, you won't want to miss this:

"The fact that even in a presidential election year the two main contenders Sens. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain can set aside their differences to co-sponsor this bill, is testament to the importance of the issue."

Go here for the rest of the story. While most Kentucky politicians have slept through it, Secretary of State Trey Grayson has been moving full-steam-ahead for taxpayers' right to know.

Bluegrass Institute update

Looks like the Bluegrass Institute's main website and blog should be back up tomorrow. The organization's most popular site Kentucky Votes remains unhacked by the sorry malcontents who couldn't fight on the merits, so they paid some hacker to temporarily quiet the opposition.

Ageism is ugly

Martin Luther King Jr. must be rolling over in his grave to see the media this morning yammering about Senator Barack Obama's "historic" effort based not on the content of his character, but the color of his skin.

I'm still waiting for the fawning reports of Sen. John McCain for being the oldest nominee of a major party ever. Or the first Vietnam POW nominee of a major party. Or the first sitting U.S. Senator who supports tax cuts to be the nominee of a major party in half a century (not counting Bob Dole, but he was just an old white guy).

More legal troubles for Lexington jail

The union representing employees of the Fayette County Detention Center has filed a grievance against jail administration, CWA local 3372 President Mike Garkovich confirmed today. Multiple jail employees who did not wish to be quoted for fear of retribution said the source of the grievance was a sexual harassment complaint filed by Corporal D. Zirbes against Deputy Director Don Leach.

If you are keeping score at home, mismanagement of the jail has resulted, so far, in a two year-long federal investigation, a class action lawsuit, and multiple civil suits. Keep up the great work, guys.

BlogHillary screams "it's not over"

If you really want to see how angry the Hillary Mafia is, you need to read her blog. They are accusing the Associated Press of trying to sway the superdelegates in favor of Barack Obama. Given that AP continues to report she is dropping out tonight hours after she said it's not true, though, it kind of looks like she has a point.

Trey Grayson speaks

Secretary of State Trey Grayson will make a major policy announcement to the monthly meeting of the Center-Right Coalition on Monday, June 9 at 10 AM in Frankfort. As a result, this meeting will be open to the media and the public is invited.

If you want to come, call me on my cell phone (the number is at the top of this page.)

Is Kentucky about to import economic disaster?

Stateline.org points out Kentucky may face a struggle with yet another entitlement burden if unemployment increases much.

Pamela Prah reports Kentucky is among a group of states with underfunded unemployment insurance trust funds.

"States that are also well below the recommended level with only about six months of money in their reserves are: Arkansas, California, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, North Carolina, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin."

Given Kentucky's troublesome tendency to import poverty-stricken residents from other states, what might be even more disconcerting is that neighbors to the north Michigan and Ohio (and to the west, Missouri) are even closer to insolvency in their unemployment trust funds than we are. Should they decide to scale back on this or other entitlements to weather the storm, Kentucky may be forced to act.

Of course we did have a couple of bills in the last General Assembly (HB 190 and HB 221) that could have started us in that direction.

When you think pension scandal, think JR Gray

While Frankfort officials talk about how to tweak the public employee fringe benefit program to delay Kentucky's inevitable fiscal calamity, don't expect many legislators to say anything about former legislator and newly-minted Labor Secretary JR Gray.

Thanks to a provision in HB 299 from 2005, Gray will get a ridiculous pension boost as his time in the legislature is converted to benefit him as if he were Labor Secretary for the last quarter century.

Nice scam if you can slip it past taxpayers.