beshear andy Gov
1123 re-elected gov (as dad was) did not tack ctr in deep red state
gop supermajority (gerry?)
4/24 blocked from appt mcconnell replacement
an 919
beats bevin, // va trifecta; went to rural cty, bevin went after teachers
pence and trump stumped, djt save me from impeach (how?)
an 4 24
a republican state representative in Kentucky is proposing a bill that, if passed, would repeal the requirement that employers provide workers with lunch breaks. It also includes language that would result in a reduction in net pay for many workers.
The Kentucky Center for Economic Policy (KCEP) — a fiscal policy think tank in the commonwealth — recently broke down House Bill 500, which was sponsored by Republican Rep. Phillip Pratt. Aside from its language allowing companies to avoid having to provide lunch breaks to workers, it would also eliminate mandatory rest breaks and end the requirement to pay time-and-a-half wages to employees who work seven days a week. HB 500 also removes any liability for employers who don't pay workers for time on the clock traveling between jobs, and allows companies to not pay workers for tasks associated with starting and ending a job.
Additionally, the bill reduces the amount of time workers have to report labor violations from five years to three years, and blocks plaintiffs from being paid punitive damages for suffering emotional distress, humiliation or embarrassment over wrongful termination.
READ MORE:[(Opinion) Republicans are trying to flood the labor market with cheap child labor
"Collectively, these provisions weaken multiple common sense protections for safe working conditions and fair pay that have been a part of Kentucky’s safeguards for more than half a century," the KCEP wrote in its analysis of the bill. "HB 500 will make work more dangerous by depriving workers of food and rest, incentivizing them to travel too quickly to get to their job site, and discouraging them from taking proper precautions at the start of shifts. And it will take pay away from workers when they are moving between job locations, working excessive weeks, and engaging in necessary tasks at the beginning and end of the work day."
Should the bill pass, Rep. Pratt would stand to reap a financial benefit, as he is the owner of a lawn care and landscaping business in Georgetown, Kentucky. Outdoor workers like landscapers typically have to take frequent breaks throughout the day due to the physically demanding nature of their jobs — particularly in hot summer months. In Texas, for example, the City of Dallas mandates that construction workers have a 10-minute break every four hours (a bill Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law last year eliminated mandatory water breaks).
Even if the bill passes the Kentucky legislature, Democratic Governor Andy Beshear is unlikely to sign it into law. But Kentucky Republicans have the ability to override him due to their veto-proof majorities in both chambers. The Kentucky legislature's official website shows that HB 500 has not yet received a full floor vote.
Rep. Pratt announced in late 2023 he will not seek a fifth term in office, and will serve out the rest of his term, which ends on December 31.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/kentucky-senate-president-thinks-gop-controlled-state-legislature-could-review-gubernatorial-election-and-challenge-democratic-beshears-victory/
no lnx
Kentucky Senate president thinks GOP-controlled state legislature could review gubernatorial election and challenge Democrat’s victory
Written by Alex Henderson November 6, 2019
On Election Night 2019, Democrat Andy Beshear pulled off a shocking political upset when he defeated incumbent Republican Gov. Matt Bevin in Kentucky’s gubernatorial race. But it was a very close race. Bevin has yet to concede, andRepublican Robert Stivers (president of the Kentucky State Senate) has suggested that Kentucky’s GOP-controlled state legislature could end up choosing Kentucky’s next governor.
Kentucky, unlike Florida, does not have automatic vote recounts in gubernatorial elections. But Bevin has the option of requesting a recount. And under Kentucky state law, a candidate has 30 days to formally contest an election’s results after they have been certified by the Kentucky Board of Elections. As of Wednesday morning, Beshear’s victory has not been certified.
The 57-year-old Stivers, the Courier Journal reported, said that according to the research of his staff, the election could ultimately come before the Kentucky State Legislature for review. And The Week notes that Section 90 of the Kentucky State Constitution says that “contested elections for governor and lieutenant governor shall be determined by both houses of the General Assembly, according to such regulations as may be established by law.”
According to the vote count on Tuesday night, Beshear won by about 5100 votes. Stivers asserted, “There’s less than one-half of 1%, as I understand, separating the governor and the attorney general. We will follow the letter of the law and what various processes determine.”
Sam Marcosson, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Louisville, told the Courier Journal that it’s a risky “proposition to suggest that the General Assembly would take vague allegations of unspecified irregularities and call into question a gubernatorial election.” And Joshua Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky, told the Courier Journal that in order for the Kentucky State Legislature to review the election results, Bevin would need to call a special session of the Kentucky General Assembly; after that, a panel consisting of eight members of the Kentucky House of Representatives and three members of the Kentucky Senate “would hear evidence and make a final determination — and that determination would be final.”
Beshear’s victory is stunning in light of how Republican Kentucky is. In 2016’s presidential election, Donald Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton by 3 percent in Kentucky — and Trump visited Kentucky in a last-ditch effort to save Bevin’s reelection campaign. But Bevin was deeply unpopular in his state; even so, a Democratic gubernatorial victory was a major political upset.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/gop-incumbent-resorts-to-racism-in-close-governors-race/
Exactly one year before Kentuckians will decide whether to reelect Mitch McConnell, they face a governor’s election in which the incumbent, Republican Matt Bevin, faces a challenge from Democratic state Attorney General Andy Beshear.
According to Morning Consult, Bevin is the most unpopular governor in the nation. Campbell Robertson explained why.
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https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/10/kentuckys-leaders-are-siding-with-the-coal-industry-and-its-poorest-residents-are-paying-a-price/
no lnx
ENVIRONMENT
OCTOBER 28, 2019
Kentucky’s Leaders Are Siding With the Coal Industry, and Its Poorest Residents Are Paying a Price
“If we don’t do something really powerful and really meaningful soon, then the people who live in vulnerable areas … will suffer the most.”
RACHEL LEVEN
ZACH GOLDSTEIN
Joanna Eberts
This story was produced in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity.
Todd Bentley stepped onto his porch and saw the storm swelling the creek near his home. If this kept up all night, he feared, the creek could overflow its banks and wash out his neighborhood’s road. He headed out into the rain with his teenage son to secure his mother’s trailer across the street.
In minutes—before they could finish—they were up to their waists in floodwater. They had to clamber into the hills to escape. There they crouched for hours in their family cemetery, lightning striking around them, the water below them carrying cars, ripping up pavement and lifting homes off foundations.
“He started crying on me, it was happening so fast, and I, literally, I shook him,” Bentley recalled. “I said, ‘Son, listen. We’re fighting for our lives now—you’ve got to keep it together.’”
Nine years after they survived the flood, storms fill Bentley with dread. He watches the creek. He paces.
What if it happens again?
Flash floods have troubled Kentucky for decades. Now, extreme rainstorms are worsening with climate change, increasing the odds of more disasters like the one Bentley’s community endured. For Kentucky’s poorest residents, the people living in flood-prone hollows with surface mines nearby, that means an ever-present threat to both life and hard-won possessions.
But the state isn’t on the front lines of the fight against global warming. Its leaders, concerned about the impact on coal, have positioned themselves on the other side of that battle.
That’s created a dangerous and expensive disconnect—and not just in Kentucky, a Center for Public Integrity analysis shows.
Nine of the 10 states that emit the most heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution per person helped block the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which would have been the largest effort by the U.S. government to limit climate change. Four of those states, including Kentucky, were among those most often hit by disasters in the past 10 years—generally powerful storms, which science shows are worsening as the planet warms.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it sent nearly $2 billion in taxpayer aid to those four states over the same period to clean up and prepare for future hits. That accounts for two of FEMA’s major programs, just part of the disaster aid flowing to states.
Kentucky alone received more than $530 million from 2009 to 2018. Severe storms and floods accounted for most of its 16 federally declared major disasters. Half of those battered Pike County, home to a quarter of the state’s active coal mines in 2018 and to Bentley’s neighborhood.
The choices that state leaders make now will have life-changing consequences for generations, experts warn. Michael Hendryx, a public health professor at Indiana University Bloomington who studies environmental justice, said he wonders whether officials promoting inaction truly think global warming is not an emergency or are simply making a cynical bet that they won’t be harmed.
“They’ll be the people who have the money and power to defend themselves as climate change gets worse,” he said. “If we don’t do something really powerful and really meaningful soon, then the people who live in vulnerable areas … will suffer the most.”
In some parts of Kentucky, residents say they believe the state’s treatment of coal has increased the risk of disasters in yet another way. Consider the Harless Creek flood that threatened Bentley’s life. Water rushing down the hills from mines—including one the state had allowed to operate on an expired permit—intensified damage from the pounding rain, according to an engineering study prepared for a lawsuit. Afterward, the state cited two companies for violating laws intended to protect people living nearby.
The Kentucky governor’s office didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. John Mura, a spokesman for the state’s mine regulator, the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, wrote in an email that the agency concluded the mines above Harless Creek did not contribute to flood damage. But both the agency and the companies settled lawsuits filed by people living along the creek.
The state now has a system in place to prevent companies from mining with expired permits, Mura wrote.
“The Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet has worked with mining companies to increase safety practices while it has been extremely diligent in holding permit holders accountable to their permit obligations,” he wrote.
Harless Creek was one of at least three cases in Kentucky in which engineering studies found that inappropriately operated or cleaned-up mines worsened flood damage, said Jack Spadaro, a former federal mine regulator who served as an expert witness for plaintiffs in lawsuits about those incidents. The floods collectively killed at least one person and destroyed the homes or belongings of more than 250 residents, according to news reports.
But the problem is far more widespread than just those three cases, Spadaro said. And the areas around mines tend to be poor, making recovery much harder for the people living there.
“When they lose their house,” he said, “they lose everything.”
‘Misguided reasons’
In September, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevinstepped up to the lectern in a historic downtown Louisville hotel to deliver the keynote speech at an energy conference for leaders from southern states.
Days before, dozens of countries and businesses committed to swift action to stem the climate crisis by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Demonstrators turned out in cities around the world, including Louisville, to demand that elected officials do better. But at the Louisville conference, sponsored by oil, gas, coal and electric-utility interests, speakers suggested that the causes of global warming are uncertain. Bevin called people pushing for climate action irrational. His message: Leave fossil fuels alone.
“We are prematurely abandoning our [fossil fuel] assets for what I feel—and I think it’s probably shared by others—may be misguided reasons,” said Bevin, a Republican whose state is the country’s fifth-largest coal producer.
In fact, the science is clear: What’s happening to the planet is different from the natural variability of past eras, when Earth gradually warmed and cooled as its orbit shifted. The world has never in recorded history been so warm, or warmed this fast, U.S. and international research shows. Most of that change occurred in the past 35 years, triggered by decades of heat-trapping, man-made emissions, the federal government says. Burning fossil fuels such as coal is the primary cause, according to decades of scientific studies.
Kentucky’s lung-damaging sulfate pollution, pumped out by sources such as coal power plants, used to partially shield the state from warming because the particles reflected sunlight into space. Those emissions have plummeted. For two decades now, temperatures in the state have risen.
Scientists say the consequences include more heavy downpours. Kentucky storms dumping at least 2 inches of rain over a 24-hour period—storms that pose a flood risk—have increased 20 percent since the early 20th century, said Kenneth Kunkel, lead scientist for technical support for the federal government’s National Climate Assessment.
“We see very strong evidence for extreme rainfall increases across the eastern U.S.,” he said.
Kentucky disasters often hurt poorer areas. For example, more than half the counties hit by federally declared major disasters from 2009 to 2018 had larger shares of households receiving federal food aid than the state overall.
That’s a common problem nationwide, one the federal disaster relief system doesn’t effectively address, said Craig Fugate, a former FEMA administrator. Congress didn’t set up FEMA to account for inequalities that precede disasters, such as homelessness and poverty, he said.
“The system was built for the middle income,” Fugate said. “If you’re poor, the system is not designed to make you whole.”
In Kentucky, Bevin’s administration is basing its preparations for disasters on climate science, even as he casts doubt on it. A 2018 state flood risk assessment, citing a 2017 federal study about climate effects in the region, warns that flooding events are likely to become more frequent and severe.
At the same time, the state continues to push for the status quo on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. In September, Bevin intervened in court to support the Trump administration’s “pro-coal” replacement to Obama’s climate rule—a substitute that projections by the independent research group Resources for the Future suggest would reduce U.S. climate-warming emissions just one-tenth of a percent by 2050.
Bevin is up for re-election Nov. 5. His opponent, Democrat Andy Beshear, acknowledges climate change is happening but also pushed for the demise of the Clean Power Plan — a rule put in place by the Obama administration—and has supported its replacement.
Planning for climate-worsened disasters, as Kentucky is doing, can save money and lives. Flooding is already the state’s “most frequent and costly natural hazard,” killing 41 people over a recent 11-year period and causing an average of $40 million in annual losses, according to the Kentucky Division of Emergency Management.
But simply planning won’t be enough, experts caution.
It will be impossible to protect people and infrastructure from climate change in the long term without also reining in—what scientists call mitigating—heat-trapping emissions, said Lynne Carter, a Louisiana State University adjunct professor.
“Right now, we’re … incrementally coping. We’re not even coping very well,” said Carter, a co-author of the most recent National Climate Assessment, released by the Trump administration. “If we don’t do any mitigation, the problem is going to just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger.”
Kentucky isn’t the only state preparing for the very climate disasters its policies help fuel.
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, a Democrat-turned-Republican, leads a state that emits more carbon dioxide per person than all but two others; he says he doubts the science that man-made fossil fuel emissions are warming the planet.
Meanwhile, his emergency managers are planning for a future of more rain and landslides triggered by climate change.
In Nebraska, the state with the ninth-highest carbon dioxide emissions per person, Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts’ administration has questioned whether climate science is settled while relying on a hazard mitigation plan calling climate change “an increasingly important factor” in local risks.
Like the Kentucky governor’s office, Bevin’s campaign spokespeople did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesman for Beshear, Bevin’s challenger and Kentucky’s attorney general, wrote in an email that all energy sources are needed to address the planet’s warming—he did not say how that would lower greenhouse gases—and the right strategy would provide jobs for Kentuckians.
“Mining plays an important role supporting Eastern and Western Kentucky families,” Sam Newton, the Beshear campaign spokesman, wrote in an email. “Andy is on Team Kentucky, which means he’ll fight policies that hurt Kentucky families and work with anyone to help Kentucky families.”
The offices of the West Virginia and Nebraska governors didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
There’s a cost to ignoring climate science. U.S. taxpayers already have begun paying it.
Seven states—all of which opposed the climate-focused Clean Power Plan—account for more than a third of FEMA spending to help communities rebuild after and adapt for natural disasters in the past 10 years, according to figures from the agency. Those states, including Texas and Florida, received $21 billion between them.
‘Ticking time bombs’
Small and seemingly benign, Harless Creek meanders beside a road that shares its name. Homes sit nearby between two mountains—Todd Bentley’s among them.
On a sunny day in June, his family gathered at his mother’s hair salon, a white-paneled house with a wooden porch that overlooks the creek.
Around a coffee table cluttered with newspaper clippings and photos of the flood, they remembered Bentley’s grandmother escaping up the mountain that night in 2010 in her pajamas, a quilt over her head. His mother, Janie Caudill, racing back from Tennessee, stopping only to pick up rubber boots. Residents shining flashlights across the creek to signal that they were alive.
The next day, Caudill’s uncle, Bill Blackburn, stopped by on the way to his house. He lived in the hollow and also hadn’t been there during the storm.
“He said, ‘Well, I’ve got to go home … I’ve got the keys right here in my pocket,’” Caudill remembered. “We didn’t have the heart to tell him that he didn’t have a door there to unlock.”
Pike County has a history of flash floods. Officials here cut a mountain in two in the 1970s so they could reroute the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River to avoid flooding, a $78 million operation that was one of the largest land movements in the Western hemisphere. But Harless Creek took everyone aback.
Seven inches of rain fell between 4 p.m. July 17, 2010, and 1 a.m. the next day. By 8:40 p.m., Harless Creek was over its banks, transforming into a torrent. The floodwaters damaged, destroyed and in some cases carried off more than 100 people’s property: homes, vehicles, sheds. In a county where nearly 30 percent of residents live in poverty, it represented an especially heavy loss.
The amount of rain the storm dumped was brutal, but Bentley and other residents suspected that nearby coal mines played a significant role in the flood. They hired lawyer Ned Pillersdorf, who asked an engineering firm to investigate.
The firm’s findings: The operations of two companies’ mines in the mountains above the neighborhood increased the size and speed of the flood. That’s because unstable dirt and rock surfaces exposed through mining sent more water downhill instead of absorbing it, Spadaro said. Forty-four percent more water rushed into the area, the firm concluded, increasing the “destructive energy of the flood waters.”
On behalf of the people with property damage, Pillersdorf sued both mines’ owners, Cambrian Coal and AEP Kentucky Coal. The businesses’ failure to follow mining rules worsened the flood and residents’ losses from the incident, he alleged in the lawsuit. The companies settled over the next two years, the amounts confidential.
Then Pillersdorf went after the party Bentley’s family thinks ultimately is at fault: the state of Kentucky.
First he sued the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, alleging the agency didn’t properly enforce mining rules — endangering residents—and demanding the state do its job. In 2014, the agency agreed to a confidential settlement and brought in federal investigators to ensure the mines complied with the law.
He later filed another claim against the state. Harless Creek residents requested payment from Kentucky’s claims board, asserting that the energy cabinet’s negligence increased their flood losses, but the cabinet argued that these claims were filed too late. An appellate court recently agreed with the state. The Kentucky Supreme Court is considering whether to review the decision.
Sitting inside his first-floor office in Prestonsburg, west of Pike County, Pillersdorf said it doesn’t surprise locals that companies would ignore mining rules to save money.
“What they don’t understand is, why is the state so damn indifferent to how dangerous these ticking time-bombs are?” he said.
After the storm, the state issued citations to Cambrian Coal for violations that included mining without a permit, inappropriate cleanup and poorly designed and operated sediment ponds, which are intended to capture soil moved during operations. The penalty, after Cambrian Coal appealed, was eventually set at about $50,000. The state cited AEP Kentucky Coal for improper conditions that led to mudslides, fining the company $400.
U.S. taxpayers paid more than five times those combined penalties—almost $300,000—just to rebuild Harless Creek Road, according to federal data obtained by Public Integrity.
AEP Kentucky Coal maintains it didn’t contribute to the flood. The state mine regulator’s spokesman agreed. The residents’ engineering firm did not. While the company settled, it did not admit liability and only “participated in the settlement to promote a prompt conclusion to the case,” AEP spokeswoman Melissa McHenry wrote in an email.
Listen to a radio version of this story here:
Cambrian Coal didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. Neither did Booth Energy, which previously owned the company.
Bentley’s family has far more complicated feelings about the mine owners than about the state’s handling of the situation.
Bentley’s son, Tyler, now 24, is a coal miner. So were Bentley’s father and grandfather, and Bentley himself, before an accident on the job in 2002 left him unable to work. Judi Casalino, his aunt, used to be a sales executive for a coal company.
“It’s hard for me,” she said. “I know that coal mining had a whole lot to do with what happened up here,” but she couldn’t help but also think of Cambrian Coal’s economic impact.
She pointed to Jim Booth, who’d long run the company: “That one man employs 500-something people right now in eastern Kentucky, so let’s give him credit where credit’s due. If he weren’t in the business, it’d be a whole lot of people would have no jobs.”
Just days before, though Casalino didn’t know it, Booth had resigned as a director and shareholder at the company. Shortly afterward, Cambrian Coal and related businesses filed for bankruptcy protection. As of early October, the company owed local governments and schools more than $1 million in unpaid taxes, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported.
Today, the mines that settled with neighbors over the flood have been cleaned up, according to the state. But people here remain shaken.
One neighbor sleeps in her clothes every night “because she’s afraid she might have to get out,” Caudill said, while Bentley, his stepfather and his son “get really paranoid” if there’s a storm brewing. Some people are gone: They couldn’t bear to live here after the flood.
And Blackburn, the uncle who didn’t have the door to lock? Two years afterward, he was dead.
“He grieved himself to death,” Caudill said. “He just couldn’t deal with what he’d lost.”
The powerful and the powerless
Five days after Cambrian Coal settled the lawsuit brought by Harless Creek residents, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., delivered a tribute on the Senate floor to a fellow Kentuckian — Cambrian’s then-owner, Booth.
Booth is a “treasured citizen,” “someone who has taken it upon himself to make an investment in the betterment of his community, county and state,” McConnell said. “Booth’s story is one of success in the free market, and a testimony to what can happen when a small business is given room to take root and grow.”
What prompted this 2012 outpouring by McConnell, one of the most powerful men in Washington, isn’t clear.
But Booth, named by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting in 2014 as one of “Kentucky’s top 10 ‘power players,’” is a reliable political donor who has supported many of the state’s key officials, including McConnell, Bevin and Beshear, the attorney general.
Bevin tried to unseat McConnell in the 2014 Republican primary, and Beshear—a Democrat—is running against Bevin in the governor’s race this year. But when it comes to coal, they’re on the same page.
Beshear took over his predecessor’s legal fight to block the Clean Power Plan. McConnell marshaled states across the country to resist the rule, and this year — five weeks after acknowledging that human activities are changing the climate—declined to bring up for a vote a bill to keep the U.S. from pulling out of the international agreement to slow global warming. Bevin tapped a former coal executive to head the state’s Energy and Environment Cabinet and pressed an electric utility earlier this year not to close a coal plant.
Newton, the Beshear spokesman, wrote in an email that the attorney general bases his policy decisions on what he believes is best for Kentuckians.
McConnell, Bevin, and Booth didn’t respond to requests for comment. But as recently as this month, McConnell called the Clean Power Plan a “misguided,” “job-killing” and ineffective approach to addressing climate change. Bevin has argued that such rules would suffocate businesses and wouldn’t help anyone. And in a 2013 interview with the Lexington Herald-Leader, Booth said, “When we say there’s a war on coal, we’re sincere.”
The coal mining industry has sunk at least $2.2 million into state and federal Kentucky elections since 2012, according to data from the National Institute on Money in Politics. But these companies don’t need donations to get politicians on their side.
“In Kentucky, it’s more the perception,” said Erin Savage, a program manager for Appalachian Voices, an environmental group. “If you’re not a friend of coal, then you’re not going to get the votes.”
Despite the sector’s enduring political power, coal bankruptcies are mounting as competition from natural gas, solar and wind intensifies. That creates problems beyond job losses: Kentucky and states across the country haven’t required companies to set aside enough money to clean up mines when operations cease.
Mary Cromer, deputy director of the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, worries that the fallout from rising bankruptcies and idled mines could mean more sites that increase flood risks. Her team, which represents coal miners, their families and others in Central Appalachia pro bono, can’t keep up with the demand for help as it is, she said.
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He has tangled with journalists, union representatives and Democrats, but he has been startlingly harsh on less typical targets — like public school teachers. After thousands of educators walked out last year in protest of budget cuts and proposed changes to teacher pensions, Mr. Bevin accused some who picketed a state senator’s business of having a “thug mentality” and called others “selfish” and “ignorant.” He blamed those involved in the walkouts for hypothetical poisonings and sexual assaults as well as a very real shooting.
Quite the charmer, isn’t he?
The state of Kentucky shares some things in common with its neighbor, West Virginia. The population is more than 80 percent white, and the Republicanization of southern states that followed the passage of civil rights legislation is not quite complete.
The current era of all-or-nothing partisanship is an awkward fit for Kentucky. It would be easy to take the state these days for an unquestioned stronghold for Republicans, given their supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature and the fact that Republicans hold all but one of the state’s seats in Congress.
But the thoroughness of the Republican takeover was recent; registered Democrats still outnumber Republicans in the state and in even some of the strongest pro-Trump counties, the rural county courthouses remain all-Democrat shops. As in many Southern, or at least Southern-adjacent, states, the Democratic label is fine for the county clerk but quickly loses its luster the higher the elected office.
Those are the dynamics that lead to Democratic statewide officeholders like Senator Joe Manchin. Bob Moser described their politics as “business-friendly centrism, with heavy doses of gunfire and Jesus.” From that perspective, Beshear (son of Steve Beshear, Bevin’s predecessor) is a flaming liberal who acknowledges the reality of climate change, and supports Obamacare, marriage equality, a woman’s right to chose, red flag laws, and medical marijuana legalization. It will come as no surprise, however, that his main issue is support for teachers and public education.
In announcing his candidacy for Kentucky governor Monday, Attorney General Andy Beshear said he wants to honor teacher pensions and break away from the current culture of “bullying” in Gov. Matt Bevin’s administration.
With educator Jacqueline Coleman as his running mate, Beshear, a Democrat, is the first candidate of either party to announce a bid for governor in 2019…
“Governors have a moral responsibility to act with decency, to do their best to provide good-paying jobs and to provide justice to all Kentuckians,” Beshear said Monday in Louisville. “… We will move forward, and these days of bullying, name calling, and my-way-or-the-highway will be left in the past.”
At this point, there hasn’t been much polling in this race, but it appears to be close. Bevin might have signaled that he’s worried with the release of this television ad....
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Democrat Andy Beshear and Republican Whitney Westerfield are the men publicly running to be Kentucky's next attorney general. But behind the scenes, scores of corporations, wealthy businessmen, lawyers, lobbyists and labor unions have given several million dollars to two independent groups loosely affiliated with the Democratic and Republican parties, which are spending that money on a barrage of attack ads meant to influence voters.
Many donors hedge their bets, not knowing who will win. Among those giving heavily to independent groups on both sides of the attorney general's race — simultaneously underwriting attacks on Beshear and Westerfield — are 21st Century Fox, the American Gaming Association, Golden Living nursing homes, Duke Energy, distiller Brown-Forman, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, the American Petroleum Institute, eBay, the American Beverage Association, discount cigarette maker XCaliber International, brewer Anheuser Busch and Monster Energy caffeine drinks.
The deep-pocketed donors, mostly from outside Kentucky, have an interest in not getting sued or prosecuted by attorneys general representing the 50 states. This fall, they can focus their efforts on the three states choosing a top lawyer in this off-year election: Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Golden Living, for instance, based in Plano, Texas, gave $25,000 each this year to both of the independent groups involved in Kentucky's attorney general's race. The company is no stranger to statehouse legal problems. Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane is targeting its nursing homes in her state for allegedly failing to provide basic services to elderly residents, a charge the company denies. In 2013, the company agreed to pay $613,300 to settle claims of "inadequate and worthless wound care services to residents" brought by the state of Georgia and the U.S. Department of Justice.
"Golden Living fraudulently billed Medicaid for nursing services which were substandard and, tragically, resulted in harm to patients," Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens said at that time.
Money flows from these contributors to two national groups, neither of which is allowed by law to coordinate with its favored candidate.
The Republican Attorneys General Association is running ads that say Beshear would do the bidding of his "special-interest" campaign donors and Democratic President Barack Obama, who is hugely unpopular in Kentucky. The Bluegrass Alliance for Consumer Rights — largely funded by the Democratic Attorneys General Association — is airing a commercial that shows a man in a bathrobe, supposedly Westerfield, enjoying a pedicure and a facial at a spa instead of doing his duty prosecuting criminals.
Beshear and Westerfield have complained about the accuracy of attacks made by the independent groups, while each insists he has no control over the independent group assailing his opponent.
The Democratic group said it bought $630,000 of television air time on Oct. 5. The Republican group reported spending $2.2 million in Kentucky as of Oct. 2. More money could come in the campaign's final weeks.
Most of the donors give $10,000 to $50,000 per contribution, with some giving multiple times. In exchange, donors get to meet the state attorneys general and their top legal aides at private conferences organized by the independent groups throughout the year.
Last June, for example, the Republican Attorneys General Association hosted its summer meeting at a luxury oceanfront resort in San Diego, according to conference documents available online. Eighteen attorneys general and seven candidates for attorney general spent the weekend golfing, dining, holding campaign fund-raisers and attending business-friendly panel discussions. They were joined by hundreds of executives from banks, payday lenders, tobacco companies, health insurers and technology firms, among many others who paid the RAGA for the access.
For $10,000, "gold sponsor" donors were promised admission to "the private appreciation dinner" with attorneys general at last year's three national RAGA meetings. For $50,000, donors got that same deal, plus admission to even more intimate "host committee dinners" at national meetings, and an "annual opportunity to lead private briefings with Republican attorneys general."
The two attorneys general groups did not return calls last week seeking comment on their Kentucky efforts.
Several U.S. Supreme Court decisions since 2010 allow donors, including corporations and unions, to make unlimited payments to such independent groups. Much of this can be passed along anonymously as "dark money" by organizations that can conceal who funds them. For instance, theconservative group Judicial Crisis Network gave $100,000 on June 1 to the RAGA; because of the way it's organized, it does not have to explain its funding.
"We're seeing these outside groups getting involved more and more in state races, even in down-ticket state races and state legislative races," said Jordan Libowitz of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
"It's particularly bad with an attorney general's race, because then you've got these conflict-of-interest concerns given the very nature of what an attorney general does," Libowitz said. "He's supposed to be the attorney for the people. But these same corporations who get to do back-door lobbying with the attorney general with big campaign donations often have business before the attorney general's office."
oct 2015
http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article42644670.html
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