Yesterday morning a German friend emailed me to say that The New York Times Sunday travel section was running a feature on the finer qualities of bourbon and bluegrass in Kentucky.

He’s read much about Kentucky lately, and it’s intriguing him. Just last week, both the London-based Guardian newspaper and The American Prospect magazine ran pieces on the growth of progressive culture and politics in Kentucky. These follow in the wake of Bob Moser’s monumental cover story on Kentucky for The Nation in September.

When Terence Samuel, who authored the Guardian and TAP articles, interviewed me, he made the comment, “Everyone’s talking about Kentucky.”

People around the world are talking about Kentucky because — right here, right now — Kentuckians are offering them hope. In us they see the potential that the American spirit that has inspired so many generations of the past is finally awakening and is ready to take on the wicked specter that is the creation of hate- and fear-mongers like Pres. George W. Bush (R), Sen. Mitch McConnell (R), Gov. Ernie Fletcher (R), and Rep. Stan Lee (R).

They see it in the workers who are out canvassing neighborhoods today. They see it in the peace demonstrators who are agitating to end a senseless war. They see it in the families who are fighting for their children’s health care. They see it in the crusade to protect and restore our environment. They see it in people of faith who are standing up to the bigots and bullies who have dominated Kentucky pulpits for too long.

The evidence is all around that something is happening in Kentucky, and the world is hungry for that something to be a people who are innovative, bold, tolerant, and progressive.

There is not a thing about McConnell, Fletcher, or Lee that’s any of those things. They are instead calculating, rigid, bullying, and conservative.

Soon-to-be Governor-elect Steve Beshear (D) will have the opportunity to communicate to the world what the new Kentucky is all about.

Ernie Fletcher saw “selling” Kentucky as a mere re-branding exercise. Nothing of the substance changed, and the discerning public could see through that. Fletcher’s take on “unbridled spirit” was anything but.

But Beshear can change the substance because he is not beholden to the baser elements of Kentucky society; his opponent will win the vote of every sort of bigot our state has to offer. With Kentucky’s urban center of Louisville poised to enter a sort of renaissance (barring the next Bush recession undermining its growth), Kentucky can become part of a new face for the United States to the rest of the world, one that is dynamic and provocative, welcoming and welcomed.

Kentucky can’t move forward on jobs, education, or other quality of life issues if it doesn’t tackle those elements of its culture that are holding the state back, and Beshear is well positioned to change the conversation and move down a different path.

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This deep into Bush’s disastrous presidency, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the administration is putting regulation into place today that will give a big break to the coal industry by no longer holding them accountable for cleaning up the mess they make during mountaintop removal. However, the disgusting part of this whole process is that Kentucky’s political leaders are allies in this grand scheme to ease regulation on the coal industry whose practices are destroying our natural resources all across Appalachia.

From the New York Times Article on the issue:

“From 1985 to 2001, 724 miles of streams were buried under mining waste, according to the environmental impact statement accompanying the new rule.

If current practices continue, another 724 river miles will be buried by 2018, the report says.”

It’s one thing to be loyal to a president of your own party, but it’s quite another to help him destroy the state your were elected to represent. Shame on you Mitch McConnell. I guess you’ve spent too much time sitting in your D.C. townhouse to appreciate Kentucky’s natural beauty.

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With all the tragedy as of late in our nation’s coalmines and with Kentucky’s Senator Mitch McConnell and his wife Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao at the center of a web of money-grubbing and influence-mongering in Washington that has left these many coalmines the deathtraps that they are for the sake of the almighty campaign contribution and a few ticks on the profit margin, I think the analogy of Kentucky’s gubernatorial election this year being the GOP’s canary in a coalmine is a fitting one.

Watch this latest video from Jim Pence of DitchMitchKY and the HillbillyReport. What’s going on in the video with security personnel at the Kentucky State Fair trying to end an anti-war protest (until they’re set straight by the State Police) is fascinating enough, but what’s even more fascinating is what’s going on in the background: all those cars honking in support of the protest.

Recall that thirteen years ago in 1994, on the cusp of the so-called Republican Revolution, Kentucky served the Democrats in a similar capacity. Then the death in March of that year of Democratic Congressman William H. Natcher (KY-02)—who had represented the district since 1953 and who continues to hold the all-time record for consecutive votes in Congress at 18,401—set up a special election for the seat.

I was only 17 years old at the time, but I had been politically aware since the 1988 presidential campaign, when a longtime Democratic activist in my church started hauling me to rallies, the biggest of those being Democratic vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen’s appearance at the Big Tobacco warehouse in Owensboro, today the largest city in the Second District. I don’t remember anything about the substance of what was said there, but I remember the energy, the pomp, and the confidence among the Democrats gathered.

Yet, a mere six years later the entire region of the Second District was seething against the political establishment and its status quo, its distance, and indifference. That establishment was Democratic.

Perhaps that environment is best encapsulated in a scene that has now been immortalized in Michael Moore’s latest film SiCKO. On August 29, 1994, at a rally in Owensboro, “Tobacco Rights Activists” burned an effigy of then First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in protest of President Bill Clinton’s health care plan. With a bluegrass band playing the back ground, Stan Arachikavitz, president of the Kentucky Association of Tobacco Supporters, chanted “burn, baby, burn,” as the effigy was doused in gasoline and two women set it ablaze. When asked for comment by a reporter, Arachikavitz replied, “Hillary didn’t last as long as my Marlboro.” The nation was outraged, but there was a quiet satisfaction among many across western Kentucky.

At that rally was Ron Lewis, the Second District’s newly elected Republican congressman. In what had been a shock to Kentucky’s political establishment—if no-one else—Lewis had defeated longtime Kentucky State Senator Joe Prather in the May special election to succeed Natcher. Lewis had won with 55 percent of the vote on a turnout of less than 20 percent. A fundamentalist Christian, Baptist minister, and religious bookstore owner, Lewis had been recruited to the race by Senator Mitch McConnell, who had been narrowly elected to his own seat ten years earlier in 1984 on the coattails of Ronald Reagan.

You may recalled that Lewis’s campaign commercials in the special election had famously morphed Prather’s head into that of Bill Clinton, who was then near the height of his unpopularity. The national GOP considered the technique a success and went on to use it widely in the general election that year. Meanwhile, rumors had circulated in the district that Joe Prather was in Washington to look for a house. Perhaps it was just a rumor spread by the McConnell machine, but it might as well have been true, such was the arrogance and sense of entitlement of Kentucky Democrats of the day.

McConnell went on to recruit Republican Ed Whitfield—who had just as much personal dynamism as Lewis—to run in the First Congressional District in the fall. Both Lewis and Whitfield won; Whitfield became the first Republican ever elected to the First District.

My point with all this is that the political establishment in Kentucky at that time—conservative Southern Democrats—was a bloated and opaque bubble. Its bloated-ness allowed the good old boys to make room for more of their own inside and its opaqueness kept their less-than-altruistic dealings hidden from the masses, but those very same qualities kept the good old boys from witnessing the trouble that was brewing for them on the outside–in the real world.

Mitch McConnell burst their bubble.

Unfortunately, the Kentucky Republican Party that Mitch McConnell replaced the good old boy Democrats with was a political machine that set about inflaming the ugliest elements of Kentucky’s own culture: its racism, its bigotry, its sexism, its churlishness, its phobias, and its anti-intellectualism.

The thing to remember about Mitch McConnell (and this is something that his fellow Republicans in the U.S. Senate are discovering now about him in his capacity as Minority Leader) is that McConnell always has McConnell’s interests first. He’s not at all concerned about the long-term consequences of his tactics and actions on the people of Kentucky. What he’s counting on is that Kentuckians and the state’s chattering class will never fully digest the disaster that was McConnell’s Senate career so long as there’s plenty of pork named after him spread around the state.

Mitch McConnell took Kentucky, a state already at the bottom of the cultural and economic barrel of the nation, and he exacerbated the very social qualities of the place that had kept true progress (making gains on its peers, rather than playing catch up) out of reach for so long. McConnell’s strategy was to spear his political legacy with a wicked trident of slash-and-burn partisan politics, redneck populism, and moneyed corporate interests.

McConnell’s Kentucky GOP is today the political establishment in the state, and you can see what sort of establishment it is by the criminal behavior and incompetence of the administration of Governor Ernie Fletcher (R).

As I write, that Republican establishment is bunkering itself deep beneath the political reality on the ground in Kentucky. While Ernie Fletcher and his minions ratchet up their language of fear on expanded gaming and hate against sexual minorities and while Mitch McConnell continues to cultivate the corrupt environment of campaign finance in Washington that he fathered and stands steadfast behind the reckless presidency of George W. Bush, neither Fletcher or McConnell is making headway among Kentuckians.

Both are indeed consolidating support among their conservative base, but that base is shrinking. Kentuckians are waking up to the reality of what Fletcher, McConnell, and conservatives truly are.

The people of Kentucky are once again seething against their political establishment, but this time there is an energized and organized progressive Democratic party waiting in the wings. Whereas last time when Kentuckians cleaned political house they replaced bad with worse, this time the alternative to entrenched Republican corruption is a Democratic party that offers the hope of change and a better future for us all.

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Between hiring a stealthy campaign strategist for his 2008 reelection campaign, working to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and reluctantly voting for greater transparency in government, how on earth does Sen. Mitch McConnell find the time to draft some b.s. anti-family and anti-children legislation and find the nerve to call it the “Kids First Act”?

Being a literary sort of person, I should probably recognize this whole nonsense of cleverly naming legislation so that Americans will not be outraged at what the legislation really says and does as an ironic device. Fortunately, my low-brow aesthetic most always trumps my literary one, and from here on out I will refer to this practice (system, manner, or condition) as it occurs in politics, as “oppositism.” The noun “oppositicity” will describe the state or quality of being of an “oppositist” mindset. An “oppositist” shall henceforth refer to any politician who insults my intelligence by engaging in oppositism.

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The Courier-Journal today ran an insightful piece written by E.J. Dionne Jr. on the myth of “big government.” Big government is, of course, a scare tactic used to justify lots of awful things, from lax gun control laws to not providing for the nation’s poor. Just exactly how big our government has actually gotten under the leadership of a Republican president, however, is worth a closer look.

In slightly unrelated news, Mark Hebert reports that nearly two-thirds of Kentuckians want some sort of U.S. troop withdrawal in Iraq.

Also, I’ve been meaning to blog about abstinence-only (mis)education for a number of weeks now, but Mary Q. Burton at the LEO does such a first-rate job in “Sex, lies and abstinence” that I’ll just quote in part:

Teri Lloyd was surprised when the sex education books her children brought home from school seemed woefully incomplete. The books omitted certain parts of the female anatomy — specifically, the clitoris.

“That’s got to be a shame, fear-based thing,” says Lloyd, 49, whose daughter, now 23, attended school at Myers Middle. “We just failed to educate them about their own bodies. What we leave out can be shaming, too. I wondered why that part wasn’t mentioned. I’m not opposed to teaching abstinence; what I’m opposed to is pairing it with shame or with lack of information about birth control and the human body.”

They can give enough of my tax money to fund religious anti-choice pregnancy centers, but can’t find a few hundred bucks for an accurate scientific rendering of the female anatomy? Nice.

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First, we know that President George W. Bush has packed his administration with over 150 graduates of a Virginia-based, fundamentalist Christian college, founded by radical cleric Pat Robertson. These Bush hires have been at the center of nearly every scandal to hit the administration.

Second, a “radical Christian activist group” in Texas has been going around bombing other churches that the bombers themselves don’t consider to be pure, holy, and true enough. The group is rather disorganized at the moment, but the trend is nevertheless frightening.

Third, a radical Christian group invaded the U.S. Senate chambers today to interrupt a prayer being led by an American Hindu. They were arrested, and the prayer continued. Here’s the video.

We’re seeing a disturbing trend, I think, and I believe it will only intensify in the coming years as the majority of the nation moves towards a more inclusive, tolerant agenda to replace the one of hate and fear being carried out by the Bush administration. I think these people, while being small in number, will only radicalize more.

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This Thursday Dr. James W. Holsinger will appear before the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which is chaired by Senator Edward Kennedy.

I plan to live blog the appearance.

Democrats are laying a strong foundation to make the case that President George W. Bush will use Holsinger to advance a radical rightwing agenda of hate and fear.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held hearings today that featured Bush’s first surgeon general, and he had not much good to say about the Bush administration. Here’s a report from Think Progress:

Former Surgeon General Was Muzzled, Censored By Bush Administration

Richard Carmona served as President Bush’s first Surgeon General from 2002-2006. Today he spoke before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and revealed that political appointees in the Bush administration muzzled him on key issues such as “stem cell research, contraceptives and his misgivings about the administration’s embrace of ‘abstinence-only’ sex education”:

[A]lthough most Americans believe that their Surgeon General has the ability to impact the course of public health as “the nation’s doctor,” the reality is that the nation’s doctor has been marginalized and relegated to a position with no independent budget, and with supervisors who are political appointees with partisan agendas. Anything that doesn’t fit into the political appointees’ ideological, theological, or political agenda is ignored, marginalized, or simply buried.

Watch it part of Carmona’s testimony:

Carmona revealed that when he tried to explain the science of stem cell research to the American public, he was “blocked at every turn, told a decision had already been made, stand down, don’t talk about it.” Additionally, political appointees were specifically assigned to “vet his speeches” and “spin [his] words in such a way that would be preferable to a political or ideologically pre-conceived notion that had nothing to do with science.” He was also barred from speaking freely to reporters.

The politicization of “America’s doctor” fits with broader White House efforts to politicize faith-based initiatives, global warming, contraceptives, and the Justice Department.

On Thursday, the Senate will consider the nomination of Dr. James Holsinger to be the next Surgeon General. Perhaps not surprisingly, Bush has this time nominated someone who has repeatedly put ideology over sound science, peddling views of homosexuality that have been rejected by the medical community.

Here’s a press release today from Senator Kennedy:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Laura Capps/Melissa Wagoner
July 10, 2007
(202) 224-2633

STATEMENT OF EDWARD M. KENNEDY ON THE HOUSE’S OFFICE OF THE SURGEON
GENERAL HEARING

WASHINGTON, D.C—Today, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, released the following statement in response to the U.S. House of Representatives hearing on the Surgeon General nominee, Dr. James Holsinger, Jr.

“Dr. Carmona’s strong testimony is yet another disturbing account of how the Bush Administration has put ideology ahead of the health needs of the American people – this time in the Office of the Surgeon General. Americans want their families to be safe and healthy. As we consider the President’s nominee for Surgeon General this week, we owe it to the American people to be sure that he will base his policies on sound science and best medical practices, and not the politics and ideology that have put our health care at risk.”

###

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Congress has voted to reverse a policy that bars the United States from providing contraception aid to foreign organizations that also provide abortions. Bush, however, will veto yet another bill (fourth? who’s counting?) and the veto will be upheld by right-wing lawmakers.

Better that people die from AIDS or unsafe abortions than send some rubbers overseas. That’s what the American “culture of life” is all about!

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This week, Senator Mitch McConnell sent out a fundraising letter, and in that letter, as described on The Arena, the Courier-Journal’s political blog, McConnell:

…refers to “liberals” 10 times in the letter and he says the Democrats are recruiting a “liberal multi-millionaire to run against me. Rumor has it, he’s already committed to spend $10 million from his personal wealth to take me out.”

Conservatives – and McConnell and his minions chief among them – have been fond of droning about the liberal bogeyman for the better part of a generation now, and it’s been a tactic that’s appeared to resonate somewhat with Kentuckians over that time (however, with the nation falling apart at conservative hands, its potency is starting to dull, I believe; the child has cried wolf one too many times).

So, I thought we’d start a new exercise here at DMKY: quantifying and discussing exactly what Mitch McConnell’s CONSERVATISM, which has been the dominant ideological force molding Kentucky since McConnell emerged as a political force with his narrow U.S. Senate victory in 1984 on the coattails of Reagan’s landslide reelection victory, has meant for this state.

Here we go:

Category One: EDUCATION

- High School Graduation -

According to U.S. Census figures, in 1980 53.10 percent of Kentuckians held a high school diploma, while the national rate was 67.00 percent. In 2005, the rate was 78.90 percent in Kentucky and 85.20 percent nationally. KENTUCKY RANKED 48th IN THE NATION IN 2005.

- Adults 25 or Older Having Completed Four Years of College or More -

According to U.S. Census figures, in 1980 11.10 percent of Kentucky adults held a Bachelor’s degree or higher, while the national figure was 16.20 percent. In 2005, that figure had risen to 18.90 percent in Kentucky and to 27.70 percent nationally. KENTUCKY RANKED 48th IN THE NATION IN 2005.

So, we can see where Mitch McConnell’s CONSERVATISM has gotten Kentucky in the realm of education: nowhere fast.

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