Coming this spring to Frankfort

There's big news out of Frankfort. This spring, Steve and Jane Beshear will be sponsoring a Holiday Egg hunt on the Capitol grounds.

A few questions for a few UK students

We have a few questions we'd like to ask the University of Kentucky students who protested the naming of the new basketball dormitory, to be paid for fully with private donations, the Wildcat Coal Lodge.

How many of you pay your own electricity bills as opposed to having mommy and daddy foot your room and board expenses?

Are any of you actually from Kentucky's coal counties, or the coal counties in neighboring states?

Do any of you have anyone in your family who is employed by the coal industry or its related businesses?

Do any of you have family or friends who are from the communities that rely on coal money for a large percentage of their economic activity, such as retail sales?

If so, then you have skin in the game (to quote your beloved president, Barack Hussein Obama) and you have standing to criticize the decision because you have a personal stake in the future of the coal industry. You are the ones who will be paying higher prices for electricity and you are the ones who will see the hometowns of your relatives and friends suffer economically.

If not, then leave the discussion to the grownups and those who would be most impacted by the demise of coal mining, and go protest something like UK's ban on alcohol on school property. Your opinions would be much more relevant in that debate.

Naming rights for an evergreen donation?

Much ado is being made over an innocuous line in a press release referring to the prospective state Christmas tree as "the Commonwealth Holiday tree."

Why the Frankfort Plant Board will be retrieving the tree is something that doesn't quite compute with us. Doesn't the state have personnel and equipment sufficient enough to travel out in the state to cut the tree and haul it back to Frankfort? Why should the FPB face the possibility of having to drive to Pikeville or Paducah to get the tree?

But putting that aside, we've watched with amusement this week the furor over the naming rights to the new University of Kentucky basketball dormitory. The donors put up money to build the facility on the condition it be called "Wildcat Coal Lodge."

So we have a suggestion for all those would-be tree donors out there who have a tree meeting the criteria.

How about you give the tree only on the condition that it be called "the Commonwealth Christmas tree" and tell Steve Beshear and Jonathan Miller that if they insist on being politically correct for fear of offending a minority of Kentuckians, they can't have your tree but you will gladly provide them a few limbs that they can shove up their holiday anuses?

Horse manure

Not only is coal mining one of Kentucky's signature industries, it is responsible for employing hundreds of people in eastern and western Kentucky and contributing to the financial and business success of several counties and town in the state. Yet there are a number of people, mostly Democrats, who are trying to dismantle the coal industry without regard to the economic havoc they would create.

They claim their actions are environmentally motivated.

These same people are clamoring for allowing some form of casino gambling at Kentucky's horse racing tracks to prop up another of the state's signature industries.

Leaving the issue of why they'd demonize one of the state's signature industries while at the same time trying to artificially prop up another signature industries for another discussion, we think this "save the environment" line is worth looking into.

Wonder if anyone has ever determined just how much methane that horse flatulence puts into the atmosphere, and what kind of "carbon footprint" horses have and how much they contribute to global warming? After all, if cow flatulence is supposedly so bad for the earth, surely horse gas is equally evil.

And if coal mining is ruining drinking water in the mountains, what about runoff from horse poop in the Bluegrass?

Just a little something to think about on a cloudy Wednesday.

When dinosaurs speak

What happens when dinosaurs speak?

You get this.

Someone needs to tell Wendell Ford to go back to Owensboro, continue to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day, and keep his worn out, discredited opinions to himself. His time has come and gone with very little if anything to show for the benefit of Kentuckians during his time as governor or in the U.S. Senate.

General Cliched Talking Points

Could retired Gen. Wesley Clark have uttered more old, tired, cliched and patently false talking points than he did in this interview with the Herald-Leader?

How anyone can say that Democrats believe in "taking care of people" when they are voting for legislation that will cause energy bills to skyrocket and will result in Medicaid cuts?

We always thought military men had honor, and part of honor meant not lying to the people. Someone forgot to tell Gen. Cliched Talking Points that.

About the only thing Clark said that wasn't a tired old false talking point was when he said President Obama should listen to the field commanders when it comes to making a decision on sending more troops to Afghanistan. He strayed from the talking points on that one, for sure.

Horse manure isn't the only thing they'll have to clean up at The Red Mile after Clark's speech in Lexington. There's a lot of bull crap that needs to be shoveled away now, too.

Stepping back into the void

You may or may not have noticed -- or may or may not have cared -- but we've been on an extended hiatus from blogging.

In large part that's due to our disgust with the sorry state of conservative politics in Kentucky.

While the conservative movement, and to a lesser extent the Republican Party, has been galvanized and energized by the Obama presidency on a national basis, the same can't be said for the party or the movement on a statewide basis in the commonwealth.

Gov. Beshear has chosen a new running mate to replace Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo, who's engaged in a Democratic Senate campaign, and is out raising money for the 2011 gubernatorial election. Yet no Republican has even announced his or her candidacy and media pundits are predicting that although Beshear is weak and vulnerable, he's likely to be re-elected.

Our top two candidates for the U.S. Senate seat next year include a candidate widely perceived as a moderate RINO and a candidate widely perceived as a fringe candidate, much as his father's presidential bid was viewed.

No credible challenger has emerged to run against Democrat Rep. John Yarmuth of Louisville, who is in his second term and probably will be around for awhile if he's not ousted this time.

Frankly, we're still disgusted with the conservative movement and the Republican Party in Kentucky. We don't know why the national enthusiasm that has blanketed the country has evaded Kentucky except for a few tea parties. We can't understand why there's no one out there actively challenging Democrats like Yarmuth, Beshear and Greg Stumbo. The eat-your-own mentality that Sens. Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning employed against former Gov. Ernie Fletcher, and more recently McConnell used on Bunning, is something we find repulsive.

But there's a void in the blogosphere that needs to be filled, and we're opting to step back into it.

The state's blogosphere has undergone some changes in the past few months, on both sides of the aisle.

On the right, Brett Hall has let kypolitics.org go to concentrate on the gubernatorial campaign he's managing in Alabama. Hall updated his site from afar up until mid-summer, at which time he abandoned it. David Adams put Kentucky Progress on hiatus to go manage Rand Paul's U.S. Senate campaign.

And on the left, there have been changes. The Rural Democrat is no more. PageOne Kentucky seems to be concentrating on the homosexual political agenda and promoting Little Jackie Conway's Senate bid and ripping Mongiardo's campaign at every turn. Barefoot and Progressive has become a loopy conglomerate of out-of-touch liberals, abortion advocates and atheists.

And bluegrassreport.org is no more. That site, probably the biggest pox on online political commentary ever to disgrace the Bluegrass State, is gone, and the URL tells visitors that the site might be for sale. Good riddance to Mark Nickolas; may he never set foot in Kentucky again and inflict us with his vile excuse for an existence.

We freely admit that this blog was started in defense of Ernie Fletcher. We still think that what happened to him and his governorship was a disgrace never before witnessed in the long, sordid history of Kentucky politics. His attempts to weed out the harmful vestiges of decades of Democrat patronage were stymied by a hypocritical assault by some of the biggest perpetrators of political hackery this state has ever seen. Prosecuted by one of his 2003 opponent's biggest supporters. That effort led by an attorney general with no moral authority and who himself was a documented supporter of Democrat patronage. Indicted by a tainted grand jury full of Democrats and state merit employees, including one whose husband worked for the aforementioned attorney general.

We will still rise to the defense of Gov. Fletcher when necessary. But the emphasis of our return will be to promote common-sense conservatism in Kentucky and to call out Republicans who do not practice such. We will push for an alternative Senate candidate to come out to provide a viable alternative to RINO Grayson and fringe candidate Paul. And we will urge someone to come out early and declare an intent to challenge Beshear in 2011 and start raising money to be able to compete with him in the general election. Our desire will be for a real conservative who understands conservative principles and will be able to follow down the path that Fletcher started to blaze.

We'll also point out hypocrisy, stupidity, insanity and other negative traits in the campaigns of Senate candidates from both parties, the Beshear administration, the media and other blogs whose agendas don't jibe with the wants, needs, desires and values of average hard-working Kentuckians who struggle to make ends meet, have strong faith and belief in God and a system of morality, and are generally the ordinary folks among us. We may not post as frequently as we did before our hiatus, but we're back and we'll do our best to keep readers informed and offer knowledgeable analysis on political and social events in the Bluegrass.