Wednesday, 19 November 2008

The Smell Of Cryonyism In the Morning

Reports of cronyism with this administration keep coming and coming without any end in sight. Apparentley, the politicization of the Office of Homeland Security is the latest instance of Beshear taking care of his own.

Gov. Steve Beshear’s Office of Homeland Security is becoming a popular entrance to the state payroll for Democratic political aides and donors with friends in Beshear’s inner circle.

This month, while Beshear complained of a projected state budget shortfall of nearly $300 million, Ralph Coldiron started a $100,000-a-year job as executive director of the office’s emergency telecommunications services.

Previously, Coldiron worked with Beshear chief-of-staff Adam Edelen at Thomas & King, a Lexington restaurant franchisee. He also worked for former Lexington Mayor Scotty Baesler and Gov. Wallace Wilkinson.

Isn't this the organization that is in charge of counter-terrorism in Kentucky? One has to wonder how does being a friend of Beshear qualify these people for a position in home land security? I have no idea, but it appears to be major determining factor with a number of the department's hires.
  • Aaron Horner, hired for $70,000 as deputy executive director. Previously, Horner was a congressional aide to Yarmuth. He has given nearly $20,000 in political donations in recent years, including to Beshear and Edelen.
  • Chuck Geveden, hired for $70,000 as chief administrative officer. Geveden worked on the campaigns of Beshear (for whom he was driver) and Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo. A former Franklin County sheriff’s deputy, he since has taken another job at the Transportation Cabinet. Beshear also hired his father Charles, a former lawmaker, as deputy justice secretary.
  • Paul “Will” Carle, hired for $52,000 as staff adviser. Carle, a Louisville political consultant, was the fund-raiser for Conway’s attorney general campaign. Carle since has followed Edelen to the governor’s office.
  • Coldiron, a Democratic activist who handled real-estate and construction deals for Wilkinson, the former governor, and others. He also worked as an aide to Baesler at Lexington city hall in the 1980s.
I'll sleep better tonight knowing that these political hacks are in charge of our security. Won't you? The money quote from the story comes from State Sen Vernie McGaha (R) from Russell Springs.

“It bothers me, some of the names I see over there who are being hired. A lot of people ask, ‘are these political payback jobs where the administration is rewarding loyalty?’” said state Sen. Vernie McGaha, R-Russell Springs, a member of the Senate committee that oversees homeland security.

Well DUH. Normally, I would just laugh this off as another instance of Beshear bringing the corrupt political system of yesteryear back to Frankfort. I would laugh at another broken Beshear promise. I would laugh at the fact that now we know the meaning behind the slogan "taking care of his own". Unfortunately, the safety of Kentucky citizens is no laughing matter. We have people in charge of our security who have no clue what they are doing. These appointments actually endanger the lives of citizens in Kentucky. It is reckless to put friends ahead of the lives of the people in this great Commonwealth. Unfortunately, we are stuck with 3 more years of this ludicrous behaviour from Beshear's gang.

Posted by brians at 4:46 PM in Kentucky Politics
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Some Stories Just Have To Be Read To Be Believed

The most unbelievable story of the day comes from Nicholas County. Words just couldn't describe my thoughts after reading it. Hat tip to my friend Rob for pointing this story out to me.
Posted by brians at 4:43 PM in Cultural Events
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2010 Senate Race

This year's election is just over and people are already looking at the 2010 Senate election in Kentucky. It sounds like all of the major Democrats are hopping at the chance to take on a "vulnerable" Sen Bunning. Even the national pundits are targeting this race.

Personally, I think it is funny to look 2 years into the future and make any prediction about a race, but let's do it anyway. I why the Democrats are looking at this race. 4 years ago Sen Bunning bumbled and stumbled his way through the campaign and almost lost to a no-named generic Democratic candidate. I have no idea why Bunning ran such a horrible campaign 4 years ago. Was he on some type of medication that caused him to seem lost at times? I don't know. What I do know is that he has been really strong the last couple of years. His stand against the Wall Street bail out was exceptional. If he can bring that type of focus and passion to the campaign trail, I think he can win regardless of the opponent.

Why? Because the winds of change will be different in two years. All of the economic woes will be placed at the feet of the Democratic party. They control all the branches of governmnet and will be the ones blamed for all that is wrong with America. Unless they plan on scaling back the tax cuts, environmental mandates, and socialized health care plans, I can't imagine the economy will be able to recover from its current down turn. In addtion, it has become traditional that the party out of power in the White House have a tendancy to pick up seats during mid-term elections. The question at this point is how strong will that wave be? Personally, I don't think it will take much to allow Bunning to win re-election. In fact I can see the wave growing large enough that Yarmuth! could find himself in trouble .

Of course at this point it is silly to look so far ahead, but the one thing I would count on is a coming Republican wave. The cyclical nature of politics makes the wave inevitable. It is just a matter of when. I guess the Dems thinking about running against Bunning are hoping they will be able to get out in front of that wave.
Posted by brians at 4:39 PM in Kentucky Politics
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Early Voting In Kentucky

As many may already know, I have been an opponent of bringing early voting to Kentucky. As such it has put me at odds with the Secretary of State's office on the issue. I was offered the opportunity to ask Les Fugate from the SOS's office questions about my concerns on early voting. I am still not convinced it is a good idea, but I wanted to share his responses so readers can make up their own mind. I want to thank Les for allowing me share his responses. Enjoy!

My concerns on early voting come from my background in computers. To be a good system administrator, one must understand system security and have a healthy dose of paranoia. One of the maxims in protecting a server is to allow as few of services as necessary to the general public as possible. The more services that are available (and the longer they are available), the more likely you are to be hacked. As you know, we have a plethora of counties (120) in this state. I see that as 120 potential failure points in the system when you open up early voting. All of which leads me to three questions.

1) In Ohio this year, groups like ACORN flooded the state with phony registration cards. So many in fact that the Secretary of State couldn't / wouldn't audit the registration cards. If phony registration cards made it through the process then it would be easier to vote multiple times. Add in multiple weeks of early voting and it would be even easier to cheat. What plan would be in place to handle a flooding of the registration system with phony registration cards?

Fugate: In Kentucky, you would not be allowed to register and then immediately vote early like you could in Ohio.  In addition, our elections process is set up so that much of the verification occurs at the local level as the cards are processed.  At the state level, we also remove felons, dead citizens, etc. from the rolls.  We also have one major advantage over Ohio ... we use the full Social Security Number as the unique identifier.  That allows us to catch duplicates very easily. Mistakes will occur (we just found a guy who was registered twice once with the SSN xxx-xxx-1xxx and once with xxx-xx-7xxx. Because he used dashes in the second registration, it looked like a seven instead of a one to the clerk's staff.  However, those kinds of things will occur everywhere.  In addition, the voter registration deadline would be several weeks before early voting begins which allows additional time to reconcile registration issues.


2) If early voting was centralized to a few regional locations I would feel better about the process. But again we have 120 counties that will be administering early voting. With many counties in this state having very lopsided political party representation in county governments and elected officials, what safe guards would be in place to handle potential attempts at voter fraud in all 120 counties?

Fugate: This is a great question.  Currently, there is nothing to balance out political representation.  That is one of the reasons why we would like to add early voting, because it would allow us to ensure a bi-partisan staff in the process.  For instance, when you go to vote absentee today, there is only the local county clerk's staff present. Under our proposal for early voting, you would have to have at least
similar political balance as to what is required at the polls on election day (2 D's and 2 R's).  Without that addition, we would agree with you that there would be too much possible control by one party.

3) In Minnesota, we are seeing all kinds of ballots that are "magically appearing" the day after the election. These were votes that were "accidentally" not included in the original counts. With early voting, there will be a much larger number of votes that would be cast before election day. Which means there is a greater opportunity for magic ballots to show up the day after the election. Ones that were mistakenly never added to the official total. What safe guards are going to be in place to make sure that magical votes don't appear after the election?

Fugate:  I am not sure where these extra ballots are coming from.  In Kentucky, you have to post the printout of election results from each voting site.  So, you couldn't just "find" results.  The only way that votes could be "found" would be in the mail-in absentee voting process. We recognize that there are vulnerabilities with mail-in absentee voting.  That is precisely why we are not in favor of expanding mail-in absentee voting.  In fact, we are hopeful that early voting would cut down on voters using that method.

Posted by brians at 3:39 PM in Kentucky Politics
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