About Us

DitchMitchKY.com (DMKY) is the proud home of the political left in Kentucky.

This website is wholly owned and operated by Matt Gunterman, and is one small (and independent) part of the much larger ‘Ditch Mitch’ McConnell movement in Kentucky and across the nation.

A working-class kid from the mean strip pits of McLean County in, appropriately enough, Kentucky’s Western Coalfield, Matt is today a doctoral student in the history of medicine and teaching fellow at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

In 2002 while a student in Scotland Matt launched the McLean County New Millennium News, one of Kentucky’s earliest proto-blogs, and he’s been blogging proper ever since.

On a yearlong leave of absence from Yale in 2006 at the age of 29, Matt returned home to run for county judge/executive [for those of you unfamiliar with local government in Kentucky, think of it as a county mayor]. Running an aggressively progressive campaign, he won the three-candidate Democratic primary with 53 percent of the vote, but came up 48 votes short in the fall against a three-term Republican incumbent, seeking his fourth.

Matt’s historical research explores the intersections of American religion and medicine around 1900; his current project is entitled The Sublime Cup: Ingenuity, God, & the Germ in America. In addition to his scholarly interests and blogging, Matt is also actively engaged in the wider effort to build a lasting progressive political movement in rural America.

Shawn originates from Hickman County in far western Kentucky along the Mississippi River and will matriculate this fall in the JD program at New York University School of Law, where he has been awarded the prestigious AnBryce Scholarship.

Shawn is an alumnus of the University of Kentucky and while there was a prominent campus activist. In 2004 as a student government senator, he sponsored and led the charge to pass a campus resolution opposing the PATRIOT Act’s infringement on civil liberties. His effort was among the first of its kind in the nation and helped spur a broader movement on college campuses against the act. Additionally, the resolution was an important instrument in formally voicing to the federal government the anti-PATRIOT Act sentiment of UK’s non-U.S. citizens, a constituency with no other representation.

Shawn has served as an intern for both the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee and the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys at the Department of Justice. He was also Deputy Director of Policy and Communication for a U.S. Senate campaign. Before entering NYU Law, Shawn worked in the national non-profit sector building networks and training progressive young leaders.

A New York City native, Cliff Schecter is a scholar of American history and government and is a noted political analyst. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University, Cliff is currently a doctoral candidate in American History at American University, where his research centers on the analysis of tactics and trends in emergent GOP political organizations.

A prolific writer and commentator, Cliff is a regular contributer to national media outlets, including MSNBC, PBS, Knight Ridder News Service, United Press International, and prominent blogs such as The Huffington Post and AMERICAblog.

Cliff has served as a political analyst for CNN, CNBC, NPR, FoxNews, and The Canadian Broadcast Channel. His work, including extensive research on Senator Mitch McConnell, has been featured in The Washington Monthly, The American Prospect, The Miami Herald, Salon.com, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He also currently provides political analysis for the Talk Radio News Service, is a National Political Correspondent and weekly segment host on The Young Turks morning drive-time program on Air America and a regular on The Bill Mazer Show in New York.

Cliff brings with him to DitchMitchKY.com an expansive and equally impressive résumé of involvement in progressive politics and political campaigns across the United States.

Jim lists himself as officially retired, but those of us who’ve avidly followed his career as a blogger know that he’s simply shifted his talents and energies into an entirely new passion for a new era: HillbillyReport.com.

Jim’s work in the 2006 election cycle covering the heated KY-02 race between Democrat Colonel Mike Weaver and incumbent Republican Ron Lewis made him the stuff of Kentucky blogging legend.

Jim, who hails from Louisville but now calls Glendale, Kentucky home, has a multimedia portfolio that blends a skillful eye for the visual with a sly Kentucky sense of humor, and his contributions to DitchMitchKY.com will chiefly fall into this genre.

When asked about the motivations behind his blogging, Jim replied, “Why do I work so hard for change? I have children and grandchildren: it’s that simple and that complicated.”

An Owensboro native who now calls Louisville home, Terri is an alumna of Western Kentucky University and is due to receive an MFA in Writing from Spalding University this spring.

Terri has read at the InKY Reading Series and the Third Tuesday Coffee House. Most of her writings center on music, but she sometimes ventures into dissecting books, too (You can read her reviews at Bejeezus.com). In her leisure time, she drums for a two-piece band called Lurch.

Terri loves her adopted city of Louisville, but wonders what it will take for her hometown to invite her to judge the fare at its premier annual event, the International BBQ Festival. Of course, her contributions at DitchMitchKY.com probably won’t help in that area: it’s held at McConnell Plaza on the Owensboro riverfront.

Joe is a lifelong Lexington native who attended Lafayette and graduated from Transylvania University with a degree in Political Science. He attended grad school at the University of Kentucky and was a political science instructor there for three and a half years.

After escaping the ivory tower of academia, Joe became a political columnist for Nougat Magazine, focusing on media misinformation. He now has a weekly column at W Weekly. Joe also blogs at BlueGrassRoots, where he covers state and national politics, the media and religion. Joe has served as an occasional guest blogger among the academics at Lawyers, Guns and Money, as well.

After several failed attempts to flee Lexington, Joe has accepted that his fate is to stay and help Kentucky turn blue. After all, what would he do without Kentucky basketball and Stan Lee’s mustache?

DISCLAIMER
The opinions, comments and posts of this blog/website (www.DitchMitchKY.com) are the sole products and responsibility of the people who write them and should not be attributed to the members, creators, directors or advisers of the Ditch Mitch Facebook Group, Facebook, Inc, or Ditch Mitch 2008.

Click the image below to join the Ditch Mitch Facebook group, an entity wholly independent of this blog/website. The Ditch Mitch Facebook group is based in Kentucky and is a great resource and outlet for all people interested in contributing to the wider effort to hold Mitch McConnell accountable in 2008.