A Senate vote for lower taxes, transparency

State Senate candidate Chuck Ellinger is running against Rep. Kathy Stein, who wants to make bullets illegal in Kentucky.

Ellinger has already been promised a spot on the powerful Senate Appropriations and Revenue Cabinet, while Stein, now thankfully the former House Judiciary Chair, would be reduced to making easy-to-ignore floor speeches.

By the way, I'd like to point out here a major advantage to tracking the legislature through Kentucky Votes. The above reference to HB 715 will always stay up as an example of Rep. Stein's radical anti-Second Amendment stance. At the LRC site, this evidence has been scrubbed just because Stein asked for it to be.

Please sign up for email updates at Kentucky Votes to track the action in Frankfort.

Incest pays in Lexington

On Thurday September 4, U.S. District Court Judge Jennifer Coffman will announce a settlement in a class action lawsuit between employees of the Fayette County Detention Center and the City of Lexington.

But the fix is already in.

Jail employees got caught in the middle of an incestuous relationship between the attorneys who run the city and the attorneys of Miller, Griffin & Marks who represented the jail employees.

The attorneys are all going to get paid, as usual, but it appears the employees are going to come up short with a surprisingly low settlement.

It's worth mentioning at this point that the biggest ongoing civil lawsuit against the city related to mismanagement of the jail is taking place in Jessamine County.

Educating ourselves into oblivion at $4000 a pop

Now that I have two children in college, I sure don't want Sen. Barack Obama making higher education "more affordable" as he promises to do.

In an outstanding post on Jay P. Greene's Blog entitled "Obama's Higher Education Plan: Throw Money Now, Ask Questions Later?" about Obama's proposed $4000 "gift" to every college student, Mathew Ladner gets to the heart of the matter:

"The Congress has been chasing its own tail on "college affordability" for decades -- providing more and more subsidies, watching costs go up and up, begin process again. Einstein's definition of insanity certainly comes to mind."

"Sadly, the Obama plan would simply add more fuel to the fire and leave our very serious higher education problems unaddressed. We need to take a long, hard look at higher education, not simply throw more money at the problem."

With with lower academic standards gaining acceptance at our institutions of higher education and no check on higher costs, much of what we are going to see is colleges growing larger on borrowed taxpayer money turning out less-educated graduates and charging much higher fees for the whole mess.

Better to spend more on merit-based aid, less on need-based aid, and watch education results and consumer value appreciate.

Obama: keep Palin barefoot, pregnant, jobless

Sen. Barack Obama can be forgiven for not understanding economics given his life as a "community organizer" and rabble-rousing government employee.

We can even sympathize with his lack of business acumen for the same reason.

But when he tries to pass off a muddle-headed equal-pay policy as some kind of attack against Gov. Sarah Palin, it is out of more than a sense chivalry that our patience runs out.

Businesses who discriminate against women in the workplace do so at great risk to themselves. But the "Paycheck Fairness Act" Obama refers to is no more than a slick payday bill for trial lawyers like John Edwards.

Further, passage of that bill will only make it more difficult for women to get jobs because employers will judge the enhanced risk of a lawsuit to weigh more heavily than the risk of hiring a woman if a qualified man is available.

Pray for the people in Gustav's path

... or take the Michael Moore approach and have a good belly laugh about all the political gain you might get from the suffering. The point missed by some like Moore is that Louisiana replaced Gov. Kathleen Blanco with Gov. Bobby Jindal.

A timely tribute to Michael Moore

Changing the way Kentucky votes

Rep. Jimmy Higdon has pre-filed a bill to allow voters who aren't registered with either of the two major political parties to pick a party in primary elections and choose among its candidates.

The bill would still keep candidates who are not Republicans or Democrats off primary ballots. This means Kentucky taxpayers will continue to subsidize the candidate selection process for the two major parties. Smaller parties will continue to choose their own nominees at their own expense.

While the state is supposedly trying to spend tax dollars more wisely, perhaps we should consider letting the political parties pick candidates on their own, without taxpayer money. That would save state and local governments millions of dollars.

At the very least, we should try again to move the candidate filing deadline to after the General Assembly session to improve legislative efficiency.

A little help from McCain's running mate

Gov. Steve Beshear would do well to learn at least one thing from Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

A view of the madness in Dayton

I was pretty excited to get press credentials for the John McCain/Sarah Palin event in Dayton, Ohio Friday.

Then I realized that meant I had only a so-so view of the screen. So here is a unique view of press row and the backs of 15,000 heads:

From the Wall Street Journal:

"For starters, we'd say Governor Palin's credentials as an agent of reform exceed Barack Obama's. Mr. Obama rose through the Chicago Democratic machine without a peep of push-back. Alaska's politics are deeply inbred and backed by energy-industry money. Mr. Obama slid past the kind of forces that Mrs. Palin took head on. This is one reason her selection -- despite its campaign risks -- seems to have been so well received by Republicans yesterday. They are looking for a new generation of leaders."

Blog shot around the world

You probably have never heard of Gary Pearce. He is a Democratic political consultant in North Carolina who has managed several successful gubernatorial campaigns there.

The reason he needs a little attention today is because of a sentence in a post on his blog in which he summed up a very interesting element of the political discussion in America.

He said:

On the Bus to meet Sarah Palin

I'm on the bus going to Dayton to see Sen. John McCain name his Veep.

Like putting a rat in charge of the cheeseheads

Wisconsin is trying to pass a "health care" tax increase just like Gov. Steve Beshear's administration is secretly planning to pack onto Kentuckians' backs. The bitter irony is The Paducah Economic Development Council is trying to recruit Wisconsin businesses to come here, saying "we want your business; we aren't going to tax you out of existence."

Let's hope people in Wisconsin can't speak Kentuckian.

At least Beshear isn't giving child molester a gun

Looks like Gov. Steve Beshear has found his new running mate for 2011. Convicted molester of little boys Ron Berry is out of jail and, thanks to Beshear, newly endowed with voting rights and, as a result, is free to run for office.

Under the partial pardon Beshear gave Berry, however, the pedophile won't be able to serve on a jury or possess a firearm.

I repeat, it would be against the law for Berry to carry a firearm. So there is no need for anyone to worry about that.

What do you think about this?

Please use complete sentences and keep your language clean:

Robbing Peter to pay Guido

Learned yesterday at the State Government Committee meeting that we are borrowing $100 million a year from the Kentucky Teachers Retirement System to pay for teachers' healthcare. And we are paying too much interest for the privilege.

Well, at least that makes their poor investment returns look a little better. How long do you think we can keep this up?

Two candid task farce moments

The Bluegrass Institute's education analyst Richard Innes was the only member of the media at Tuesday's CATS Task Force meeting in Frankfort. His report included two very interesting statements.

Jim Applegate, VP for Academic Affairs at Council on Postsecondary Education, said:

“If out of all of this we don’t end up with an assessment system that allows us at every step of the way to understand where the individual child is on the road to the next step after high school, on to college, on to the skilled workplace, whether they’re behind, they’re ahead, they’re on track – and, it’ll help us understand how to intervene with that child to do the right thing and then allows us longitudinally to reassess at a point in the future to know whether our interventions work or not – then, I don’t know why we’re even bothering to assess. You know, uh, I don’t know what the point is."

While this is a great point, Education Commissioner Jon Draud is glad you didn't hear about it in the lame stream media because then he would have a harder time ducking and covering behind his fake little study group.

And then there is this from Mr. Innes, which backs up the whole point behind Senate President David Williams' SB 1 and Rep. Jim DeCesare's HB 15:

One surprisingly candid comment came from a somewhat unexpected source, Jon Draud’s hand-picked testing expert Doris Redfield, the only testing expert in this entire group. Dr. Redfield said:
“If you are going to do an assessment of learning – an accountability assessment, an achievement assessment – what you want are the students’ very best possible products – that’s probably measured on-demand because of the reliability and validity factors.”
In other words, measuring writing on an assessment is most properly done with on-demand writing prompts such as those already given during the CATS tests. In contrast, writing portfolios do not provide the same level of reliable and valid scores.

There isn’t anything new in Redfield’s statement, but it was refreshing to hear her echo this, anyway.

More great reporting from the Bluegrass Institute.

Save pension money by paying firemen less

As Kentucky's public employee pension black hole grows toward $30 billion in size, we would do very well to consider bringing compensation levels down to private sector levels. A good place to start may be with firefighters:

"“That’s not the case for firefighters,” Frates said, recalling how a recent [single] opening in the Newport Beach Fire Department drew a crowd of 600 applicants, including some who camped overnight. “What the market is telling us is that you don’t have to offer 3% at 55 to get qualified applicants.”"

The quote above came from here.

As reality sets in, we are going to have to look at options like this. We simply can not afford to pay people with tax dollars more than they are worth in the real world.

Hit me baby one more time

I'm headed to Frankfort to hear how great we are doing on public employee pension reform. I'm sure I will hear other lies too. And I'm sure I will like it.

1:23 pm Where's Skippy? UPDATE:
What a disappointment. The first item on the agenda LRC emailed out last Thursday promised testimony today from Finance and Administration Cabinet Secretary Jonathan "Skippy" Miller.

Unfortunately, he is nowhere to be found. Nor is he on the current agenda.

Another reason to fire Ron Bishop

A multi-million dollar class action lawsuit against the City of Lexington has reached a settlement agreement, according to federal court documents, and so the city's taxpayers are about to see tangible harm for keeping Fayette County Detention Center Director Ron Bishop employed way past the time since he has proven himself to be a major liability.

Taxpayers have Mayor Jim Newberry, whose law firm represented the city in the matter and will enjoy another healthy payday, to thank for the hit they are going to take. And it will get worse.

The lawsuit resulted from a management scheme at the jail involving shorting employees on their paychecks in violation of the Federal Labor Standards Act and the Kentucky Wage and Hours Act.

This whole thing is stupid and unnecessary and, as usual with the Newberry administration, the only real winners are the lawyers.

Agreement between the city's and plaintiffs' attorneys was worked out on the phone Monday and the judge ordered a hearing for approval of the settlement for Thursday, September 4.

Ohio's Gov. Strickland hates everyone

"Ohioans for healthy families" hasn't weighed in yet on Gov. Ted Strickland's (D) opposition to their wild plan to mandate businesses provide paid family sick leave to everyone.

The economic development along Kentucky's northern border would be fabulous if these folks ran off their businesses with this stuff. Unions and left-wing groups are trying to get the mandate in the form of a ballot initiative.