Skippy can't dance

Gov. Steve Beshear may have missed the irony of putting the same guy who ran the KAPT program into the ground in charge of his study group for public employee pension reform.

But as the General Assembly moves toward to a special session for the purpose of putting a Band-Aid on the bloody mess, the possibility exists Jonathan Miller and Beshear could become accidental heroes for fiscal sanity.

The closer we get to insolvency of the fringe benefits systems, the more discretionary spending will get crowded out in favor of piles of cash for employees and retirees. Heck of a way to instill discipline, but with these guys it's surely our only shot.

Will Obama mess up KY's pension reform party?

The mainstream media is pretty excited to see the General Assembly, the teachers union, and other "stakeholders" join hands over their latest plan to tweak our way out of the $26 billion public employee fringe benefit disaster.

The reason for all the hand-holding and singing is that Frankfort is counting on President Barack Obama to implement a federal universal health insurance plan, thereby removing the states' responsibilities for employee health coverage. Since most of the actual problem with the "pension" mess is the opulent health insurance benefits given to public employees, we continue to celebrate official inaction.

Maybe President Obama will make corruption illegal in our public school systems so we won't have to worry about that, either.

Anti-smoking Nazis ride north

County officials in Kenton, Campbell, and Boone counties are trying to spring public smoking bans on the people of their counties simultaneously this summer without much public discussion.

More evidence of tax dollars working to fool you

If you have kids in public schools in Kentucky, expect to see more nonsense over the next six years relating to school "testing" than you have ever seen in your life.

Here is why.

Help us rebuild Bluegrass Institute

The hacker who took down the Bluegrass Institute, it turns out, did a heck of a job.

After several false alarms that had us believing our sites might be coming back up at any moment, it is now clear that the old sites won't be up for at least another week, if at all.

So I have rebuilt the Institute's blog on my own. Please take a minute to check it out, leave a comment, and tell a friend.

We are working furiously to build a much stronger web presence and we will succeed to better pursue free-market policies and making Kentucky into the kind of place free people can live together more peacefully and prosperously. Thank you.

Can't keep a good blog down

The Bluegrass Institute is making the most of a hacker attack to revamp it's entire web presence, but this afternoon the public policy group's blog is up with new content.

Readers of the Bluegrass Policy Blog will find the comments section much, much easier to use than it used to be. Check it out.

And as always, arguments from every side are greatly encouraged. Thanks.

Update: a blog poll on the new site brings up the question of how far we want transparency to go. Should government transparency include posting welfare payments to individuals on the internet for everyone to see?

Hey Mayor Jerry, at least do a silly task force!

This really shouldn't be about politics.

Jefferson County Republican Party Chairman Brad Cummings said today Louisville should put it's spending information on the internet. The gesture is well-timed, but it is amazing that Mayor Jerry Abramson, a Democrat, should even have to be prodded a little bit, much less harassed by a local political figure, to do the right thing:

“The people of Louisville Metro deserve to see how their tax dollars are being spent through an online database that can be accessed through Google or any other search engine” Cummings said. “Secretary Trey Grayson has shown great leadership on this very important issue with Governor Steve Beshear recently proving to be a willing student of Trey’s vision. Our Mayor should sign up for the same class while seats are available.”

Page One has more.

Franklin County jail Sex Tax passes

Franklin County taxpayers get to dole out 4% pay increases for county employees next year, thanks to a Fiscal Court budget vote on Friday.

And the budget includes a levy similar to the old Spanish-American War tax which will pay off the rest of a $5million court settlement awarded to five women. They sued after being victimized sexually by a former Franklin County jailer.

Anyone care to guess whether the Franklin County Sex Tax will be repealed after paying off the court settlement?

A great idea from across the aisle

Lexington blogger Ralph Long (he ran against Rep. Stan Lee in 2004) has a great idea for making state government more transparent. He says we should make public all expenditures on state credit cards. That's a good one.

Ralph also got a little rough with fellow Democrats Gov. Steve Beshear and Rep. Mike Cherry for coming late to the government transparency party.

"Let’s give Steve Beshear credit for being able to steal a good idea... this is such a great idea, I think it is, then why did it die in the legislature and who killed it? I don’t know why this died, other than most of our legislators wouldn't know a good idea if it bit them in the ass, but the guy that killed this puppy was Mike Cherry."

Ralph is starting to sound like a right-wing blogger.

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.