Terri Whitehouse August 21st, 2008
Senate candidate Bruce Lunsford will issue a “Bill of Rights” for Kentucky women in late September. Silly him. We’re just low-hanging fruit, natch.
Of course, someone should let the usual suspects know that their privilege is showing. Because unless you’re a woman living in one of the wealthiest burgs in the state, Kentucky can be a pretty inhospitable place when it comes to those trivial little things like jobs, education, and health care.
Terri Whitehouse July 7th, 2008
Jake at Page One has a thorough Mitch McConnell roundup this morning. I hope everyone had a safe and happy Independence Day. USA #1!!!
Terri Whitehouse June 17th, 2008
Page One and some other self-aggrandizing bloggers have noted Sen. Mitch McConnell’s shaky poll numbers, and I wanted to expound on that a little.
Career beltway-ist McConnell has done his best to paint incumbent candidate Bruce Lunsford as an incompetent status-seeking businessman. Funny, then, that Lunsford is leading among low-to-middle-income Kentuckians without college educations. Now, I hold nothing against people who make more than I do, and I certainly wouldn’t go hurling “college-educated” around as an insult, but given that Kentucky ranks near the bottom in terms of education and income, McConnell is going to have a heck of a time positioning himself as someone who is really in touch with the “average” Kentucky voter.
Being that McConnell’s campaign site has been redesigned to showcase his ability to roll up the sleeves on his tastefully casual shirt rather than sit around pushing papers in a suit and tie, I’d guess that he’s more than a little worried. Over half of Mitch’s twenty most-recent blog posts urge readers to sign a petition for a bill designed to do exactly nothing about our petroleum dependence, so I’d urge you to try something different instead. Why, it seems like it was only yesterday when McConnell thought it’d be enough that he brought home the pork-barrel projects. I guess he’s getting wise that Kentuckians need someone with a little more substance than that.
Terri Whitehouse June 5th, 2008
Reading more national coverage about the posts below, it is clear that it’s not just us Kentuckians that are sick and tired of Sen. Mitch McConnell and his shenanigans. So I’d like to issue a little challenge for those of us who truly want to Ditch Mitch this November.
For every minute (~ 510) that it took a clerk to read the bipartisan climate change bill aloud, I’d like to urge you to to donate to campaign of Bruce Lunsford. At a rate of penny per minute, that would total a mere $5.10 donation. A nickel per minute would total $25.50. You get the picture. I know it’s not a great deal of money. But I think it would be a powerful gesture, regardless.
The people of Kentucky and of America are not pawns in Mitch McConnell’s political power games, and before we hit him at the polls, we must hit him where it *really* hurts - his pockets. The government’s business should never be political strategy. Not on my dollar. Not on my penny.
If you agree with me, please repost this blog entry wherever you think it may be welcome, and urge like-minded people to do the same. When a person such as Mitch McConnell makes it so crystal-clear that he has zero interest in representing the people of the Commonwealth, then we have no choice but to elect a person who does. And that person is Bruce Lunsford.
UPDATE: You can also sign up to volunteer for Lunsford’s campaign here. DO IT!
Joe Sonka January 2nd, 2008
Well, the winners of the 2007 Bluegrass Rooties have been awarded over at BGR, and there are plenty of heroes and villains to be had.
The biggest winner is Team Ditch Mitch, with 3 Rooties! Ditch Mitch won Best KY blog, Matt Gunterman won best KY blogger, and Jim Pence won hardest working KY blogger.
Congrats! DMKY is just getting warmed up!
Matt Gunterman November 3rd, 2007
In the wake of his piece earlier this week in The Guardian (UK), Terence Samuel writes again on the topic of the burgeoning progressive movement in Kentucky, but this time for The American Prospect.
Blue Moon Rising in Kentucky?
Democrats are using a gubernatorial race in Kentucky as a warm-up for swinging the state — and the nation — blue in 2008.Terence Samuel
Barring some unforeseen, cataclysmic shifts in the public mood, Kentucky Democrats will score a huge win in next Tuesday’s gubernatorial election, booting one-term incumbent Ernie Fletcher. But as euphoric as the Democrats are about the prospect of retaking the governor’s mansion in the Bluegrass State, they have their eye on a bigger house, hoping that a 2007 victory in the governor’s race will be a harbinger of what’s to come across the country in 2008.
They dream of a win in Kentucky for the Democratic presidential nominee and defeat of Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senator who has acquired a reputation as a real Machiavelli for having outmaneuvered home-state Democrats so often and for so long. “That is not going to happen this time,” promises State Party Chairman Jonathan Miller.
The incumbent Fletcher, a physician and former three-term congressman, trails his Democratic challenger, Steve Beshear, by double digits, with the most recent polls showing him 20 points down. Fletcher once got in trouble for flying his plane too close to the U.S. Capitol during Ronald Reagan’s funeral, only to return home and watch his administration crash and burn in the face of corruption charges. He was indicted by a grand jury in 2006 after facing accusations of corrupt hiring practices. None of the charges were felonies, and the case was eventually settled, but Fletcher never seemed to recover.
Democrats smelled blood in the water. As one of only three statewide contests anywhere in the country, Kentucky offered a rare chance to measure the public mood in a non-election year, and it gave Democrats a change to do a test run on their 2008 campaign apparatus.
While there were also governors races in Mississippi and Louisiana, the results there seemed forgone conclusions — Republican wins — and the races were never really contested. (In Mississippi, Gov. Haley Barbour is headed for easy re-election on Tuesday, and two weeks ago, GOP Congressman Bobby Jindal became the first Indian American elected chief executive of a U.S. state.)
Kentucky, however, was another story; in part because it has long been a place where frustrated Democrats believed they should be performing better. There have been constant hints and reminder of what is possible Bill Clinton won Kentucky twice. When Fletcher resigned his House seat to become governor four years ago, Democrats won the special election and have held onto it since. And of course, in 2006, they finally knocked off the perennial endangered 10-year incumbent Anne Northup, who lost by three percentage points (51 to 48 percent) to John Yarmuth, a political columnist who was stridently anti-war and anti-Bush.
“Kentucky is going to be blue next year, even if Hillary Clinton is the nominee,” says anti-McConnell crusader and blogger Matt Gunterman.
But for more than two decades, the state’solitical apparatus has been controlled by Republicans, most particularly McConnell, who may be the most attractive target of all the current efforts. McConnell, whose willingness to stand by the White House on Iraq has hurt his standing at home, has had to endure a sustained barrage of attacks led by national Democrats and an increasingly organized grassroots effort at home.
On McConnell’s birthday in February, Gunterman launched a blog called DitchMitchKY.com, which has become a popular clearinghouse for all things anti-McConnell. “The conservative movement is just imploding, and you could see he was vulnerable,” Gunterman says,
After wild successes in the 2006 midterms, Democrats saw Kentucky as a way to keep their momentum going, and they have invested enormous amounts of time and money to what would have otherwise been a little noticed, off-year re-election campaign for a troubled incumbent governor.
But McConnell is not on the ballot until next year, and Republicans say Democrats are setting themselves up for more heartbreak with all the talk of unseating him. “I don’t see where they are getting their information that he’s vulnerable,” says Rebecca Fisher, spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. She also points out that Democrats have not yet found an opponent for McConnell.
The Republican hope is that voters in Kentucky next week, and around the country next year, will decide to vote on issues like taxes, abortion, and guns, instead of Iraq, corruption, and their general gloom about the country’s future. Fletcher’s spokesman told me that he expects Kentuckians to come back to conservative issues, and when that happens the governor’s race will tighten up. That is likely the same playbook that will guide GOP strategy in the 2008 presidential race. The question is whether they have the time or the credibility to pull it off either in Kentucky or beyond.
Democrats, from national party insiders to independent advocacy organizations to big labor, have all descended on Kentucky. This week the AFL-CIO announced a final weekend push to turn out union members across the state. Beginning Saturday, organizers said they expected union volunteers to knock on up to 17,000 doors and make 72,000 calls in the last four days of the gubernatorial campaign. Those are also the first four days of Get-Out-the-Vote efforts for the 2008 campaign.
Matt Gunterman September 13th, 2007
I’m off Friday morning to DC to cover and participate in the September 15 March on Washington this Saturday.
I thought I would leave you with this video that The Nation compiled to celebrate the progressive community’s efforts in Kentucky to support the troops, end the war, and ditch Mitch McConnell. The mag posted it along with Bob Moser’s article, “Kentucky at War.”
Matt Gunterman September 13th, 2007
Bob Moser’s excellent analysis of the development of the movement to support the troops, end the war, and ditch Senator Mitch McConnell (R) has hit the stands.
The piece is too long to block quote here, but I’ll include excerpts particularly relevant to the Kentucky progressive blogosphere. You can read the entire article here.
Kentucky at War
Bob Moser[...]
As summer–and McConnell’s recess vacation–approached, two new sets of nontraditional allies materialized to help LPAC bird-dog the senator, who makes his home in Louisville with his wife, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. Matt Gunterman, a 30-year-old rural Kentucky native and Yale University graduate student, launched the DitchMitch blog earlier in the year, bringing together a varied band of bloggers from around the state on a composite site with a common goal. And in June, two young native Kentuckians and a Navy veteran opened an Iraq Summer headquarters in Louisville, part of a national campaign by Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI) to target key members of Congress with a homegrown antiwar message before they returned to Washington to resume the war debate.
By mid-August McConnell was sending out fundraising letters complaining about being harassed by “the ’60s antiwar movement on steroids.” But as the Republican kingmaker well knew, the reality was something altogether different from that old stereotype–and considerably more formidable.
Jim Pence is a 68-year-old, Salem-smoking, pickup-driving, self-proclaimed hillbilly from economically devastated Hardin County, retired after thirty-five years in the factory at the American Synthetic Rubber Corporation. Politically inactive until 2004, when Bush’s re-election and the war in Iraq spurred him to “vow to fight with every ounce of my strength from then on,” Pence now makes some of the freshest, funniest antiwar and political videos anywhere–and as a result, he’s become the unlikely heart and soul of Kentucky’s DitchMitch campaign.
Linking from his own Hillbilly Report website to DitchMitch and YouTube, Pence puts up snappy vignettes on subjects ranging from Kentucky’s annual bipartisan political hoedown at Fancy Farm–where McConnell made a hasty exit this year after being jeered by protesters carrying signs showing him as Bush’s hand puppet–to a fanciful take on Bush and Condoleezza Rice’s relationship, set to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “The Way You Look Tonight,” to a hard-hitting series of exposés of liquor-industry fundraising by Ron Lewis, the holy-rolling Congressman from Pence’s district. “I don’t know, I just disappear into them,” Pence says on a dog-day August morning, navigating Louisville traffic en route to the Iraq Summer office. “I stay up some nights till 4 and 5, editing these things.”
DitchMitch creator Gunterman, whose postgraduate goal is to fire up an Internet-based “Ruralution,” connecting grassroots progressives from rural America to spur political action, sees Pence as a prime example of the passion and wit that generally go untapped by Democrats and urban progressives. “There’s no one like Jim in the entire United States,” says Gunterman. “Not with his age and his ornery attitude. He is very much a hillbilly, and he’s reinvigorated the term.”
In his three years of crisscrossing Kentucky to publicize its antiwar and progressive insurgencies, Pence has also stirred up the state’s traditionally timid left-wingers. “When I first went out with my camcorder, I’d go up to people at peace rallies and ask them, ‘Would you like to say something to Mitch?’ and they’d just go, ‘Uhhh…’ Or even if they would say anything, they’d say, ‘But I don’t want my picture taken.’ I just kept saying, ‘The newspaper’s not even going to cover this, and if TV does, it’ll be for ten seconds. Whereas this video’s going up on YouTube tomorrow.’” As Pence kept filming and posting his increasingly popular videos, the activists opened up and embraced this new mechanism for showing that, yes, the military stronghold of Kentucky has a vigorous antiwar effort. “People are stepping out more than they would a few years ago,” Pence says. “Now I can’t get them to stop talking when they see that camera. People know me now, and for the most part they trust me–whether or not they should!”
While Pence and DitchMitch have inspirited Kentucky activists, they’ve also pushed the state’s more established media to take notice of the progressive groundswell. “DitchMitch gives us the power to hold the media accountable in Kentucky for the first time,” says 24-year-old Shawn Dixon, a native of rural western Kentucky who’s just started his first year at NYU law school. In 2004, when Dixon was working as deputy policy and communications director for Democrat Daniel Mongiardo’s uphill Senate challenge to Republican Jim Bunning, he spent much of the campaign in a state of frustration over Kentucky newspapers’ assumption that the incumbent would cruise to victory. “There was no recognition that this would be a competitive election and that this guy was beatable until about a month before the election, when it became impossible to ignore.” Bunning wobbled back to Washington with a slender 23,000-vote victory, but this time around, with LPAC continually raising eyebrows and DitchMitch helping to popularize the anti-McConnell movement, “the media don’t have a choice,” Dixon says. On the same day in late July that Louisville’s Courier-Journal ran a column about McConnell’s dip in popularity (below 50 percent approval), the Herald-Leader in Lexington ran a story, sixteen months before the election, titled “McConnell Vulnerable.”
That’s music to Pence’s ears. “It’s not just what he’s done to perpetuate this war,” says the high-tech hillbilly. “It’s what he hasn’t done for Kentuckians, with all his power, on healthcare and so many other issues that really matter to folks at their kitchen tables. We’re trying to cut through the kind of moral-values crap that McConnell’s been using for twenty-five years to get himself elected. We’re doing what we can to show the emperors without their clothes. And show that the folks who don’t like Mitch, and can’t stand this war, are just regular people like me who finally woke up and spoke up.”
[...]
Matt Gunterman September 12th, 2007
Coming to a newsstand near you: The Nation with Bob Moser’s cover story entitled “Kentucky at War,” which examines Kentucky’s progressive grassroots community and how it’s reshaping the political and ideological landscapes of that state — and doing so outside the rigid, tepid, and unresponsive party structures.
It’s gonna be a hell of a read!
Joe Sonka September 6th, 2007
Daniel Solzman of The Kentucky Democrat has a great interview with Lt. Col. Andrew Horne, who has been quite active this summer with Vote Vets, assisting the Iraq Summer Campaign, and continuing to pressure Mitch McConnell on his rubber stamping of Bush’s failed Iraq policy.
Some interesting comments in the interview, such as his discussion on how KY blogs have been able to coordinate with activists, using the wildly successful protests at Bellarmine, Mitch’s apartment and Berea as examples. He also discusses the 2008 race against McConnell, and what it would take to get him to join Stumbo in the Democratic primary next Spring.
Some excerpts:
DS: Did you ever outreach to bloggers on Kos or MyDD during your campaign? Also, do you have any thoughts on the way that blogs have revolutionized politics altogether?
AH: During the campaign I never personally initiated contact directly with any bloggers. I had some contact me and I know my supporters were very active in that regard.I was and still am impressed with the way the blogs can disseminate information in a way that mobilizes people. However, there are blogs where the participants are simply talking but not getting involved. The important synergy is between the blogs and grass roots that can turn words into passion and then into action. A good example is the Iraq Summer Campaign. The blogs disseminated information across the state and the nation so that a small group of people in Berea, KY knew they were not alone in opposing the war and challenging McConnell to bring a responsible end to it. I have no doubt that some of those 100 people in Berea were there because they heard about 800 people in Louisville, KY or 400 in Boise, Idaho, or one of the other 40+ locations across the nation. That would not have happened without the blogs. The people in Berea did not hear about other events through the traditional media and would not have heard or seen the passion without YouTube and the blogs. I believe this trend will only continue as people who participated in the Iraq Summer Campaign and other similar causes adapt these tactics to their own agenda. I would call it non-linear activism.
…..
AH: If the right race comes around I am not done in politics. Regarding 2008 against McConnell, the encouragement I am getting is humbling but that is a race that should not be taken on lightly. Because of the amount and breadth of support I am getting I will take a very serious look at it, but in the end I will base my decision on what is best for my family and whether my candidacy will be in the interests of the people.
The entire interview is at The Kentucky Democrat.
Matt Gunterman September 5th, 2007
The Louisville Eccentric Observer’s Stephen George has a cover story this week on the combined efforts to ditch Senator Mitch McConnell (R) in 2008. The article is a fantastic read, but since it’s a substantial piece of journalism, I’m only excerpting the bits relevant to the blogosphere here.
What, me worry? Inside the growing movement to oust Sen. Mitch McConnell
By Stephen George[...]
There are several groups in Kentucky, however, whose direct interest is to see McConnell go down in ’08. They are online groups, mostly led by bloggers. They are becoming unified. And they are drawing attention.
“We’re creating a true foundation for a lasting progressive movement in rural America,” Matt Gunterman, founder and editor-in-chief of DitchMitchKY.com, said in a recent phone interview.The site, which went live March 12 and morphed from a Facebook group of the same name, collects work from six bloggers working in various parts of the country, most from a progressive perspective. It gets about 2,000 unique visitors a day. Last Wednesday, the day after “Take a Stand,” it got 6,000.
Gunterman told me Kentucky’s progressive blogosphere has developed organically, and largely along the idea that a commercially successful political blog in the state is still unlikely (Mark Nickolas has always had difficulty sustaining BluegrassReport.org on advertising alone), so it’s better to develop a community and work off each other. Following DitchMitchKY.com’s lead of multiple bloggers, the superb BluegrassRoots.org has just reinvented itself — it now offers reader diaries, a feature popularized by DailyKos.com, the most widely read political blog in the country. There is also the brand-new PageOneKentucky.com, a progressive, for-profit digest of state and national politics.
Jim Pence runs HillbillyReport.com. He travels the state documenting resistance to and reaction against Republicans, and lately it’s been mostly McConnell on the receiving end of the 69-year-old’s pointed video camera.
“People out there are really committed, and they have friends, friends of friends,” said Pence, who also blogs frequently for DitchMitchKY.com. “This thing is kind of snowballing, I think.”
What does all this mean for McConnell? Perhaps most substantially, it appears he will to need to revise his well-worn campaign style — ignore criticism, then spin, distort and attack — to cope with the increasing volume of discontent at home.
“You have to play hardball on McConnell’s level,” Cliff Schecter, a well-known blogger and journalist who works for Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films, said. Schecter, a senior contributor to DitchMitchKY.com whose work also appears in the American Prospect, Washington Monthly and HuffingtonPost.com, worked on the 2002 campaign of McConnell’s opponent, Democrat Lois Combs Weinberg.
McConnell is in an uncomfortable wedge right now. Many Republicans recently called his leadership into question after a last-minute turnaround vote on a controversial immigration bill, largely perceived as an act to placate his base that went against his party. A majority of his constituency stands at odds with his position on Iraq, and navigating those waters is becoming more difficult by the week.
“Part of (his problem) is his position as minority leader,” Lt. Col. Andrew Horne, a former congressional candidate and high-profile member of the antiwar crowd in Louisville, said. “Now, people are starting to see where he’s standing on some things that I think before he was able to distance himself from.”
His constituents want him to support an end to the war: The Courier-Journal’s Bluegrass Poll said in February that 52 percent of Kentuckians wanted McConnell to oppose the troop surge; perhaps more telling, only 40 percent supported his decision to vote for it.
“This is not a kind of minor thing people are angry about,” Schecter said. “Here, you’ve got a war that the country is in turmoil over and wants to get out of. He refuses to listen to people.”
Gunterman said the profound corporate interest in American politics, and the unprecedented waste, fraud and abuse that has resulted from the privatization of the war effort specifically, is the manifestation of McConnell’s “money equals free speech” ethos — and that will curb him in the end.
“I think what you’re actually seeing, the argument you’re going to see coalescing, is that the Iraq war is the most wicked manifestation overall of the corruption” currently in the Republican Party, Gunterman said. “I know we are going to make (McConnell’s) life miserable over the next year, and I know we’re going to make sure he inherits the legacy he deserves as being the father of the culture of influence-mongering and money-grubbing in D.C. and Frankfort that has paralyzed our nation’s institutions of government at a time when the people need them most.”
[...]
Matt Gunterman August 26th, 2007
There’s been a very exciting development over at BlueGrassRoots.org this weekend.
BlueGrassRoots.org is among the oldest and most established blogs in Kentucky and it’s the home site of our very own Joe Sonka, who had the biggest story in the Kentucky blogosphere this year with his coverage of the Creation Museum opening.
The new BGRoots 3.0 is the most advanced blog in Kentucky now and is a fantastic resource for the Kentucky progressive blogosphere. Like MyDD, OpenLeft, SwingStateProject, and DailyKos, BGRoots is diary enabled.
Check it out and create an account and blog away!
Terri Whitehouse August 22nd, 2007
Dave Meyer of OpenKY.com has a timely post about Mine and Health Safety Administrator, Richard Stickler. As has been reported in the media, Stickler is a former mining executive whose safety track record was less than satisfactory. And, as Meyer points out in his post, Sen. Mitch McConnell played a big role in Stickler’s recess appointment:
I know there has been a hold on the MSHA Director nomination on the other side of the aisle. I have been told that there will be an objection yet again today. But I want to plead with those from the other side who may believe that this is not the perfect nominee— he is the nominee, nominated by the President, reported out of the HELP Committee. If he were to be drawn down and this whole process were to be started all over again, we wouldn’t have an MSHA Director for months and months into the future. We need a permanent Director of the Mine Safety and Health Administration.
The McConnell/Chao/mining connection has been previously documented on DM-KY. Meyer’s post on the topic is definitely worth the read.
Matt Gunterman August 20th, 2007
I’m pasting today’s Political Notebook from the Courier-Journal’s Joseph Gerth below. It’s especially fun to read today, and he even offers a contest at the end: email him your ideas for doctored photographs of Ernie Fletcher.
Okay, very briefly, let me tell you how I see the world of politics, political journalism, and political blogging evolving in Kentucky.
First, professional political journalists now produce (and will continue to produce in the future) the vast majority of raw factual, objective materials that bloggers use. That’s the case because journalists are trained professionals, they get paid to do what they do full time, and they build up the networks needed to get the information they need to produce their craft.
Second, bloggers — on the left and the right — take the raw material that journalists produce and put it in a partisan context. Now, of course bloggers do upon occasion produce news of their own, but that’s the exception and not the rule. As an aside, I would never, ever, ever want to blog full time. I enjoy my day job too much, which is probably what these journalists would tell you about their experience with blogging, too. There is a real need among political junkies for our partisan context, however. We also spur dialog and provide a platform that allows for ideological issues and differences to be vetted.
In the end, with all this talk in the national media and traditional press about the inherent friction between bloggers and journalists, I think the biggest threat to political journalists, their profession, and trade is apathy among the public and a population that is so disconnected and uninformed from politics that it can’t digest and engage with it at the level of complexity that is needed in an increasingly complex American society.
In short: political bloggers number among political journalists most ardent readers, and political blogging has introduced me to the work of several journalists that I was previously very unaware of. Political blogging and political bloggers, as they both mature as a medium and community, might well serve to strengthen and broaden the impact of political journalism.
That having been said, I want to say that I’m a little bit disturbed by the behavior of Governor Ernie Fletcher (R) and his goons as of late. This altering of the image of Democratic candidate Steve Beshear takes the cake. Why?
As a transparently and viciously partisan and vicious blogger, I can and do say very ornery things about incompetent Republicans in Kentucky. That’s the luxury of being a blogger, especially one sitting a thousand miles away in the quiet seclusion of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, where the only thing distracting me at the moment is a beautiful creature standing a few feet away from me and looking at the New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia.
I doctor photographs, like this one and this one. I say things like, “Ernie Fletcher has a vagina up his asshole,” and, “Robbie Rudolph is a redneck idiot with no formal education,” and, “Stan Lee mixing his Christian fundamentalism with our politics makes him no better than a radical Islamicist.” I say these things because there’s a lot of truth to them and I say these things because I can. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to read my blog.
Yet, when our governor and his campaign start behaving like me, I think it betrays a great deal–that we already knew–about why the Fletcher administration is where it is. Ernie Fletcher and his goons never really understood the gravity and responsibility of the office and the unique opportunity they’ve been given. They still don’t understand it, and they never will understand it. But the people of Kentucky do understand it, and that’s why they’ll elect Steve Beshear this November.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Joseph Gerth | Political Notebook
Look before you leapState Auditor Crit Luallen recently produced an audit mildly critical of the way state tourism funds have been spent, saying that Kentucky needs to develop a better strategic plan for spending new marketing money and determining if the money was spent wisely.
That upset at least one Republican blogger, Jessamine County Attorney Brian Goettl, of Conservativeedge.com, who asked in a headline: “What does LuAllen know about tourism?”
In the blog report, Goettl goes on to ask, “What does LuAllen know about tourism or marketing? What does her audit staff know about it? I would venture to say very little … LuAllen has no business making such pronouncements unless she can demonstrate her competence in the area or show that she relied on competent experts.”
Well. Luallen, a Democrat, points out that she served as tourism secretary under former Gov. Brereton Jones and continued to work on tourism projects as executive cabinet secretary under former Gov. Paul Patton.
During her time in those two roles, the state expanded or built convention centers in Louisville and Northern Kentucky, passed a $100 million bond issue to upgrade state parks and saw the private development of numerous attractions, including the Newport Aquarium, Louisville’s 4th Street Live and Kentucky Speedway, which she said were partly the result of changes she and the administrations she worked for sought in state law.
“The record is there,” she said. “I have a strong background in marketing, in economic development and in tourism and that was one reason we looked at this issue.”
Goettl said in an interview that he would like to review Luallen’s record as tourism secretary more closely before determining whether she and her office are qualified to make such recommendations.
The doctoring is in
Last week state Republican Chairman Steve Robertson said that doctoring photos is fair game in the governor’s race between Gov. Ernie Fletcher and his Democratic opponent, former Lt. Gov. Steve Beshear.
In its first salvo, the party unveiled brochures that have Beshear’s head Photoshopped onto a body wearing a white blazer, a white, open-collar shirt and a necklace, leaning against a roulette table and holding a glass of what looks to be white wine.
“Easy Money Steve” they call him because of his proposal to bring casino gambling, and $500 million annually in revenue, to Kentucky.
But we were a bit surprised by Democratic Party Chairman Jonathan Miller’s response condemning the practice. We figured the Democrats would view the Republican attack as tacit approval for such shenanigans if they chose to do the same.
If you were running Beshear’s campaign, how would you doctor a photo of Fletcher? And if you were running Fletcher’s campaign, how would you follow up the “Easy Money Steve” brochure?
E-mail me at jgerth@courier-journal.com, and we may run some of your responses in upcoming weeks.
Poll dancing
Last week we led with a couple of items about a poll by the Lexington public relations firm of Preston-Osborne, which drew questions on the Courier-Journal Web site from some readers who wondered if we had been “snookered.”
The poll, commissioned by The Lane Report, a Lexington business journal, dealt with issues ranging from the governor’s race to casino gaming and seemed to give Democratic gubernatorial nominee Steve Beshear an edge on several fronts.
The basic argument that we had been “snookered” is that Preston-Osborne was founded by Tommy Preston, a longtime friend of Beshear, and the firm also has a contract to do public relations work with the Kentucky Equine Education Project, which supports casinos.
The fact of the matter is that Preston sold his interest in the firm to Phil Osborne in 1997 and hasn’t been involved in the company since (although he and Osborne are friends and still talk regularly). As far as the KEEP connection, Osborne notes that if he fudged numbers for one client to benefit another, he wouldn’t be in business very long.
I don’t doubt he’s correct on that. But what ultimately led us to run the Lane Report results was the fact that the numbers were right in line with other polling data we’ve seen, which gives them some measure of reliability.
Outta hereI’ll be taking some much-needed vacation over the next two weeks. The column should return Sept. 10 but keep the cards and letters coming. I’ll be checking e-mails while I’m away.
Joe Sonka August 16th, 2007
Well, it looks like we’ve really gotten under someone’s skin.
Mitch McConnell is sending out fundraising letters to supporters in which he whines about the "liberals, radicals, far-left, unions, Hillary, Schumer, etc…" who are hounding him about his pathetic record and his obedience to corporate contributers and George W. Bush rather than his constituents in Kentucky. In fact, we are "the 60’s anti-war movement on steroids!". That’s probably the greatest unintentional complement I’ve ever received. I think I’ll have that put on my gravestone/obituary: "one of the leaders of the 60’s anti-war movement on steroids".
Anyway, Mitchy even gives a big shout out to the good folks at Ditch Mitch!
"Liberals on the internet have already created a website called "Ditch Mitch," and 6,000 radicals from across the nation have already signed up."
Hey, Mitchy, glad to see you’re reading the site! We feel humbled by your presence.
And as far as being a "radical", I wish. I don’t think you can have an 8-5 Mon-Fri non-political office job and be defined as "radical". But I aspire to prove you right someday, Mitchy. And we’re FAR more than 6,000, I can guarantee you that.
On second thought, maybe I’ll have "the leader of 6,000 liberal radicals" on my gravestone/obituary, that’s even better. (Though that honor technically should go to Matt Gunterman or Aniello, amongst a few others.)
And look what we have here. Why it’s Mitchy’s full faundraising letter, in all of its paranoid glory. It’s funny, you can almost smell the desperation in here. For Christ’s sake, have a little more dignity Mitchy.
(crossposted at BlueGrassRoots)
Matt Gunterman August 9th, 2007
Courier-Journal columnist Betty Bayé offers her reflections on the lack of ethnic and to a lesser extent gender diversity in the wider blogosphere and the threat of a widening digital divide creating a sort of “unwired” class of Americans.
Not that I needed much reminding, but the last two weeks I spent back in rural Kentucky reminded me how far behind in information technologies our state’s rural communities are. Dial-up is still a major source of online access, and significant portions of the population simply have no use for or no familiarity with the Internet.
It wasn’t impossible to blog while back home, but what would take thirty minutes in Connecticut was taking two or three hours in Kentucky. It was actually faster for me to drive 30 miles north to the Panera Bread in Owensboro and do my work on the free wireless there than do it from home.
And, you know, in these rural communities, high-speed online access can actually be used as a weapon of sorts. Last year when I was running for judge/executive in McLean County, my opponent, a three-term Republican (your typical glorified redneck) who probably knows enough about the Internet to send emails and nothing more, heard that I was using the free wireless provided at the county’s adult education center in Calhoun with my laptop.
In his narrow good old boy mind, I’m sure he imagined I was plotting some grand scheme against him with my brothers from some Yale secret society, but most of the time I was reading Bluegrass Report.
What did our churl do? He placed restrictions on the use of the free wireless, which was no doubt paid for by state or federal funds.
So, I was back to trekking to Owensboro for my online access.
At my ten-year high school class reunion last summer, we discussed how about half the class doesn’t use email. You see, even though we’re relatively young as a class, there was no online access in high school. The first time I ever had an email address myself was when I went to summer school at UC San Diego in 1996. There was only one problem: I didn’t have anyone to email. If a classmate of mine didn’t go off to university, there was no reason for him or her to ever get online unless their work demanded it, and many jobs in the service and manufacturing sectors don’t demand it. And getting online, even for a person so young, is an intimidating prospect.
So, there’s still much to be done to move rural Kentucky into the Information Age, but there’s no doubt in my mind that this movement will be beneficial to the communities there.
Joe Sonka August 6th, 2007
I’m back from the amazing YearlyKos Convention in Chicago, otherwise known to me as "the most wonderful place on earth". I was in Vegas for last year’s inaugural gathering, and this year was even better. In Vegas, I was in full "star watching mode", as I basically went to panels to see all of my favorite bloggers in person. This year, my main objective was to learn. Particularly, learn how to build Kentucky’s local/state blogosphere into a force to be reckoned with, just like so many others have over the past year. Specifically, I went to find out how we can Ditch Mitch.
And speaking of Mitch, let me tell you something. People here? They weren’t big fans.
The Ditch Mitch stickers were in high demand (Markos himself happily taking one) and our reputation preceeded us (Shawn and I). At a small state/local blogger panel in which everyone introduced themselves and told of where they blogged/commented, my mention of BlueGrassRoots and DitchMitch produced an unsolicited round of applause. Shawn Dixon spoke on the Southern Bloggers Caucus Panel and let everyone know that, yes, Mitch really is in that much trouble back home. Mitch is a marked man, and everyone from California to Maine gave us their best wishes and told us that they would root us on.
As for Mitch, he’s already scared enough to specifically name our website in his fundraising letters. Unfortunately for him, Kentucky’s progressive blogosphere is just get started.
Terri Whitehouse August 3rd, 2007
The DM-KY team has a jam-packed weekend, and while I won’t be attendance at Fancy Farm, my posting, too, will be sporadic. Don’t let that stop you from checking in, though, as I know that I am looking forward to hearing about YearlyKos and Fancy Farm from some of my favorite bloggers. (I’m not just saying that, I promise.)
To kick things off, check out Sam Youngman’s national coverage of Kentucky’s governor’s race and the impact it will have on the 2008 U.S. Senate campaign. I think all this interest will make for a very interesting picnic!
Joe Sonka July 28th, 2007
(crossposted at BlueGrassRoots)
Remember how everyone was talking about Fletcher still having a chance to make a comeback and beat Beshear? The poll that showed a close race last month? The predictions of Fletcher raising a tidal wave of cash that would be converted into a tidal wave of attacks ads on Beshear that would overwhelm him?
Well folks, those days have come and gone.
Last week, Stamper reported that in July, Beshear outraised Fletcher in primary election account contributions with $78,000, compared to Ernie’s pathetic $6,000.
And remember when Beshear told us in the Progressive KY blogger conference call that he was hoping to raise $4-5 million? Well, I’ve received word that Beshear has already raised over $2 million for his campaign and is right on pace to meet its goals.
And you all know that the poll showing a close race a month ago was an anomaly, as the latest SUSA poll showed Beshear stomping Fletcher in absolutely epic proportions, 59-36.
I think this poll pretty much convinced everybody that Fletcher is a lost cause, and their money might be better spent on a candidate that actually has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. So if you’re a rational conservative bigwig, intent on sucking up to the next Governor, you’d be better off either ripping up the check to Ernie, or sending it over to Steve’s campaign.
Matt Gunterman July 21st, 2007
So, as fellow Team DitchMitchKY member Joe Sonka put it, Kentucky’s progressive blogosphere is taking over CNN. Jim Pence’s health care question that will be presented to Democratic presidential candidates in a debate is making the rounds over at that news network.
You’ll remember that early this week that our very own Shawn Dixon also made CNN for his efforts in bringing Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards to his hometown of Columbus, Kentucky.
Matt Gunterman July 10th, 2007
In case you missed it, national blogger Matt Stoller highlighted the great work of Kentucky’s progressive blogosphere yesterday on his new blogging effort: Open Left. Stoller was on the conference call last week with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Steve Beshear, and it’s nice to have him, Cliff Schecter, and other national bloggers along for what’s going to be a wild ride over the next four months.
And make sure to check out Open Left.
PS: This wing of Kentucky’s blogosphere is most commonly known as the progressive, or lefty, wing, but we also answer to the name “the smart and sexy ones.” However, we do all admit that the MSM blogosphere is home to some pretty folks, too: Mark Hebert has nice eyes and Ryan Alessi has impressive ears.
Joe Sonka July 6th, 2007
In an effort to reach out to the progressive KY blogosphere, soon-to-be-Governor Steve Beshear (D) conducted a conference call with several local bloggers. The roll call included: Matt, Shawn, Cliff, Jim and I from DitchMitchKY; Jonathan Singer from MyDD; and Ted Shlechter from The Bridge. (there might have been others, fill me in if I missed someone)
Beshear noted that the blogosphere is going to continue to play an important role in KY politics, not just in this year’s Governors race, but next year with the Congressional and Presidential campaigns. He felt that this call presented an opportunity to hear some concerns and feedback from us, and the gesture was greatly appreciated by all. Any candidate that wishes to have success in the next 2 years would do well to embrace the post-Bluegrass Report blogosphere.
Steve also noted that he was glad he avoided a run-off election in the primary, as the Kentucky Democrats appear to be united on all fronts and in good shape for this Fall. Though polls show him well ahead of Fletcher, he cautioned that we shouldn’t be overconfident. Fletcher is sure to raise and spend plenty of money for attack ads, which could always make it a close race. He did note that he plans on raising $4-5 million himself, excluding outside dollars.
Several of the questions and concerns dealt with Beshear’s advocacy of "clean coal" as the future of KY’s energy policy. Beshear said that he would sit down with leaders from all sides of the issue to reach some kind of common ground; allowing union leaders, environmentalists and industry to meet at the table. He also expressed a desire to enforce regulations on strip mining and mountaintop removal that are not currently followed through on. Additional funding for alternative technologies at universities will also be a top priority. He noted a quite interesting tidbit on the Peabody deal- that Peabody wouldn’t even have the feasibility study done for one of its plants until April. Which makes the special session plan a little….shady?
Beshear also talked a great deal about improving Kentucky’s economy. He noted that KY’s budget is currently woefully inadequate to fund everything that we are in need of. One method of increasing revenue, of course, is his plan to expand gaming. He also criticized the tactic of offering outside businesses tax breaks to move to KY as rather short-sided, in itself. He noted that such companies often move here for a few years, only to leave for Mexico or somewhere else where they can get even cheaper labor. Beshear wants to give small and medium sized independent businesses incentives to stay and thrive here in KY, and he also wants to fund job training programs.
When asked what he would do as Governor in the instance that a bill is passed which prohibits UK and UL from implementing its domestic partner benefits plan, he said that he would veto it. We need to help our universities compete nationally, and having the government impose such a restriction will not allow them to attract and keep our best candidates.
The folks at DitchMitchKY, BlueGrassRoots, The Bridge and MyDD thanked Beshear for setting up this conference call, as it shows a good deal of respect for both the KY blogosphere and grassroots activism. As local blogs in Connecticut and Virginia showed last year, we can have a huge impact on the political scene. We’re glad that Beshear and his staff have recognized this new political reality.
(crossposted at BlueGrassRoots)
Joe Sonka July 2nd, 2007
I’m not really sure how many supporters John Edwards had in Lexington on Friday morning, but I know that he has a lot more now. The line on John Edwards that is making the rounds is that his best asset in the campaign to win the presidency is not his humble Southern background, health-care platform or charm, but his wife, Elizabeth Edwards. After watching her performance during Friday’s Small Change for Big Change event in Lexington, I think that statement isn’t too far off base.
Elizabeth Edwards performed a rather spectacular hour+ Q & A session with over 200 contributors, fans, and potential voters. And due to the online outreach efforts of the Edwards campaign (thanks to Tracy and Amy, via DMKY’s Shawn Dixon) and the southern charm of DMKY’s own Jim Pence, Jim and I were able speak with Elizabeth face to face for roughly 10 minutes before her public Q & A session.
Though the Edwards staff thought we had a decent chance of chatting with her for a couple of minutes, shortly after we entered the venue and set up our cameras (Jim and fellow film guru Erica), we were told that there was no time for an interview. After Jim disappeared for a few minutes to chat up the Edwards folks, he came back saying that she might be doing a short “meet and greet” with some people.
“What’s a meet and greet?”
“I’m not sure”
“I’ve never been to a meet and greet”
“Yea, me neither”
Ten minutes later, Jim pulled me backstage and one of the staff stopped us and asked if we were the guys from DitchMitchKY and told us that we could speak with Mrs. Edwards in a few minutes, but not on camera or on tape. So while all of the slick, dolled up TV reporters waited for Elizabeth to come out for the Q & A, the blogger in ratty Chuck Taylors and ripped pants, and the hillbilly with the Acapulco shirt were whisked upstairs to meet her.
Matt Gunterman June 1st, 2007
With the recent announcement by Mark Nickolas of his departure from Kentucky and undetermined future for Bluegrass Report, it got a lot of us in the lefty blogosphere thinking about what’s next for the movement that Nickolas helped spur in the commonwealth. How do we keep the momentum going? We’ve got some ideas there, and we’ll discuss them here in the near future.
First, however, we thought it was important for us to have some sort of snapshot of where the entire Kentucky political blogosphere — both left and right — stands today.
You might think the obvious way to do that would be to graph the traffic that each blog gets, but traffic can be measured in many different ways. And not all blogs make their stats public, and not all the stats that are made public can be compared one to another: “visits” aren’t the same as “unique visits,” which aren’t the same as “page views,” etc.
So, we came up with a simple little way to quantify a Kentucky political blog’s “gravitas”. We decided to take the “Google PageRank” (definition here; calculator here) of each blog and multiply that number by the Technorati “Authority” index of each blog (http://www.technorati.com).
For the sake of keeping the compilation of the graph below manageable, we decided to set the cut off point for inclusion of a blog at PageRank 4. To give you a sense of PageRank scale: Drudge Report and DailyKos are both 7’s; Bluegrass Report is a 6; Bluegrass Roots & CliffSchecter.com are 5’s; Polwatchers, Ditch Mitch KY, & Hillbilly Report are all 4’s.
The product of this equation represents the area of the circles below. These circles in no way include any metric or quantification of traffic. They’re all about links and quality of links. However, I do think it’s a fair comparison of how the lefty and righty blogospheres stack up in this state.
I tried doing this comparison with the mainstream media blogs, but most of them lack one metric or the other.
Ditch Mitch KY
