Tag Archives: #Kentucky

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I voted!

The rural counties of the Bluegrass State used to be solidly Democratic. Kentucky has had only a few Republican governors in recent memory, and up until the 2016 elections, the state House of Representatives was controlled by the Democrats, the one of the last legislative chambers in the South — I was tempted to write “in the Confederacy,” but Kentucky never seceded or joined the CSA — controlled by the Democrats.

Since then, the Bluegrass State has been solidly Republican. Donald Trump carried Kentucky in both 2016 and 2020, by huge margins.

How have things changed? I noted a sample ballot on the walls, and all of the candidates for the city council of the city of Irvine — where I do not vote — were listed as Republicans. Not a single one was a Democrat, which means that no Democrat even entered the May primary.

The races in which I could vote? Other than the presidential race, only the contest for Kentucky’s sixth congressional district were even contested. All but one had a Republican nominee, with no Democratic opponent, while one, for Commonwealth’s Attorney, had a Democratic nominee, but no Republican opponent. Naturally, I voted for all Republicans, but left the vote for Commonwealth’s Attorney blank.

The line was much longer than I had anticipated; there were well over fifty people who were in line when I was. And yes, the Commonwealth required a positive ID to be able to vote.

At least in our county, we had paper ballots, which we marked, and then fed into a machine reader. This way, if there is a recount necessary, the paper ballots have been retained for recount. This is the way elections should be held.

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Once again, I was right: the Lexington Herald-Leader has endorsed all Democrats.

On October 4th, I engaged in a Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — conversation with Rick Green, the executive editor of what passes for my closest newspaper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, concerning newspaper’s endorsements of candidates. In a response to Daniel Pearson, the primary editorial writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, I wrote:

How much good do you think newspaper endorsements actually do? My ‘local’ newspaper, the Lexington @heraldleader, will endorse every Democrat running in the Sixth District, and every last one of them, other than for small districts, will lose. @EditorRAG

Mr Green responded, with a quoted retweet:

Well, considering our editorial board hasn’t yet interviewed all the candidates, your predictions may be flawed. The endorsement process allows us to ask tough questions + probe deeper on visions + platforms than most voters get to hear. Our report-out in the form of endorsements is designed to inform voters, not direct them for whom to vote.

Was my prediction wrong? Continue reading →

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You in a heap o’ trouble, boy! As Leroy Jethro Gibbs once said on NCIS, “Believe me, son, you will not do well in prison.”

Wilmer Romero, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Only 18 years old, already a hardened criminal, and now he’s facing life in prison without the possibility of parole. It seems that young Wilmer Geovvany Romero isn’t the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree.

The mugshot? That’s the most recent of four mugshots for young Mr Romero, who has a listed birthday of September 6, 2005, and is listed as being 5’4″ tall (64″) and weighing 130 lb. His stay in jail might wind up on the unpleasant side.

Teenager arrested in connection to Lexington shooting that left an 18-year-old dead

by Christopher Leach | Thursday, May 9, 2024 | 10:31 AM EDT

The Lexington Police Department has arrested an 18-year-old man in connection to a deadly shooting that left another 18-year-old man dead. Continue reading →

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They tried that in a small town

Linda Blackford, the longtime columnist for what my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal hasn’t written about Jason Aldean’s hit “Try That In a Small Town,” but she is aghast that someone tried something stupid in a small town and it didn’t work out well:

‘Deeply traumatized.’ Arts retreat at Pine Mountain ends after confrontation. What’s next?

by Linda Blackford | Wednesday, August 23, 2023 | 10:58 AM EDT | Updated: 2:47 PM EDT

For 110 years, a small swathe of mighty Pine Mountain has been a shelter, a school, and a gathering place in Harlan County. But this past weekend, Pine Mountain Settlement School instead became the latest flashpoint in our culture wars.

The Waymakers Collective, a group of Appalachian artists, was holding its annual meeting at Pine Mountain Settlement School. It included performances, artist workshops, film screenings and art activities. Participants stayed in the cottages and dorms around the compound.

They also had permission to use the chapel, and set it up as a “healing space” with pillows, mats, a table of aromatic oils and an “om” symbol, which symbolizes the universe in the Hindu religion. They were not allowed to move the pews, but Pine Mountain staff set up tables.

On Saturday, someone took a picture of the chapel and posted it on social media, which was soon shared around the Harlan County community of Bledsoe, where Pine Mountain is located. According to a statement from the Pine Mountain board, community members called the interim director and board chair about the chapel. Pine Mountain officials asked the Waymakers to move the “healing space” to another location, and the Waymakers agreed, according to the statement.

But before they could do so, a group of men and women in trucks and on ATVs, entered the Pine Mountain campus, blocked the exit, and then made their way to the chapel. According to the Waymakers’ statement, “the people who entered the chapel demanded that we leave. Our group was told they did not belong there, were desecrating a Christian space, and needed to leave right away. We were shocked by this as we had rented out the entire campus of PMSS for our event and were treating the entire property with respect and in the manner we had communicated to PMSS prior to our event.”

But the Waymakers, who are dedicated to the art of the marginalized, including indigenous people, people of color and LGBTQ folks, were terrified. They decided to end the retreat early, and according to their statement, left in a large convoy, so no one would be driving through Harlan County alone.

There’s more at the original.

The Waymakers Collective legitimately rented the grounds on which they were holding their gathering, and should have been allowed to use it as they chose. And the Pine Mountain Settlement School should have been fully aware as to whom and for what the Waymakers were renting their facilities.

But there’s more to it than that: the Pine Mountain Settlement School should also have been aware of the culture in Harlan County, and that the people there might not have been quite as receptive to those “dedicated to the art of the marginalized, including indigenous people, people of color and LGBTQ folks.” Surely the Settlement School folks had heard of Senate Bill 150, to protect normal kids from the homosexual and transgender lobbies, and been aware that both of the county’s state Representatives, Adam Bowling (R-District 87) and Jacob Justice (R-District 94), and state Senator Johnnie Turner (R-District 29), all voted for the bill. They should have known that the voters of Harlan County vote strongly conservative Republican, giving 85.38% of their votes to Donald Trump in 2020, as well as huge margins to Senators Mitch McConnell in 2020 and Rand Paul in 2022.

Translation: renting space to Waymakers would not have gone over well in Harlan County, if the populace in general knew about it.

Mrs Blackford was, of course, highly upset about the whole thing, about how Harlan Countians might be less than eagerly receptive to a group touting, among other things, homosexual and transgender acceptance. Of course, Mrs Blackford’s newspaper has a solid record of endorsing politicians who really don’t line up with the voters in the Bluegrass State:

And yes, every one of them lost. In 2022, when no serious Democrat chose to run in the Sixth District, and a perennial kook candidate won the primary, a guy so bad that even the state Democratic Party wouldn’t support him, the Herald-Leader couldn’t bring itself to endorse the incumbent Republican, Representative Andy Barr, but chose to make no endorsement at all. That’s how much they hate conservatives and Republicans.

This is where Mr Aldean’s song arises: as much as the urban left hate it, it reflects an obvious truth, that the culture of the rural areas, and most certainly in the rural areas of the Bluegrass State, is simply not the culture of the larger cities, and attempting to force urban culture on rural counties simply hasn’t worked out very well.

Back to Mrs Blackford:

Harlan Judge Executive Dan Mosley, who was married at the chapel, said he understood the feelings of people like (Tate) Napier.

“One way to coexist is respect,” he said. “Respect for different people’s culture and ideology. Someone may not agree with my religious beliefs but they could respect them by not disrespecting where I worship, and I could respect their religious beliefs, too.”

Mrs Blackford, and the majority of commenters on her column, apparently do not see hosting homosexual and transgender-positive meetings in a Christian church as “disrespecting where (Harlan Countians) worship,” but it’s pretty obvious that some in the county did.

‘Read the room‘ is defined as “to be or become aware of the opinions and attitudes of a group of people that you are talking to”. In choosing Harlan County for their gathering, the Waymakers just didn’t read the room very well.

More, it seems that the only real objection came when the Waymakers started using the chapel for part of their meeting; that put them in direct conflict with a conservative, Protestant Christian community. At a time in which there’s a great deal of conservative pushback against the forcing of homosexual and transgender ideologies on people who want no part of it, there’s really no surprise that the Waymakers encountered resistance.

If the homosexual and transgender activists had simply kept to the apparently-very-outdated maxim, “What we do in our bedrooms is nobody else’s business,” rather than today’s, “We’re here, we’re queer, and you damned well better approve of, use our pronouns, and fête us,” there’d have been no legislation such as Senate bill 150, and it’s highly unlikely that the mostly leave-us-alone people of eastern Kentucky would have bothered the Waymakers. Then again, the Waymakers would have probably been actually displaying their art, rather than going on to point out that particular artists were in some fashion different from normal people.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well-reasoned conservative commentary.

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Saturday morning

Polar Bear, a 125 to 150 lb male Great Pyrenees tried to move in with us this past spring, but he had a human of his own who lived ¾ mile away. We have two other dogs, and Bear just loved to come and visit them.

We first met Bear when our younger daughter was taking our two for a walk through the fields, down toward the river, and Bear, who was wandering through the fields himself, saw them and trotted up to join them. He’s so big that you don’t have to bend down to pet him; his head is high enough that it’s right at your hand when he’s walking beside you.

He also leans against your hip when he’s walking with you!

Sadly, Bear was killed when he was hit by a car. He usually walked back to his own home, because his human didn’t want us to feed him, or he’d stay with us forever, through the fields, but for whatever reason he had, he chose to walk down the road and was struck. But Polar Bear quickly made us love Great Pyrenees dogs!

Cotton Bear

A lady in Boston, Kentucky, is selling her farm, and she has to rehome her Great Pyrenees, Cotton. We met Cotton a month and a half ago, and committed to take him, but we had to wait until now, because we were already fostering another dog. That dog has now returned to his human, so SSG Pico and I are driving to Boston Saturday morning to pick up Cotton Bear. He’s 5¾ years old, a neutered male, and he seems great, but it might be difficult rehoming a dog that old.

Pamela, his human, was having to keep him in a kennel on her farm, and in her house, because she has a neighbor who might well be described as the slang term for the rectum, so it’s good that we’re getting him out of there. Pamela told me that she just sold her farm, so we’re heading there at just the right time; I just wish we could have brought him home earlier.

We have a fenced-in yard of maybe half an acre, plus 7½ acres more in which he can roam and play, though we’ll keep him inside the fence until he learns that this is his new home. Wish us luck!

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“I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” We need to take care of Americans first!

I will start out with full disclosure: I am not a fan of Lexington Herald-Leader columnist Linda Blackford. She’s a liberal writer among a seemingly all-liberal editorial staff at what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal. But I have to laugh when a supporter of more government action winds up complaining about the inefficiency of government!

FEMA knows disasters. Why aren’t they doing a better job in Eastern Kentucky?

by Linda Blackford | Friday, August 12, 2022 | 10:48 AM EDT

There’s probably not a lot that Sen. Brandon Smith, R-Hazard, and Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear agree on, politically or otherwise.

My nephew Nate flirting riding with KY National Guard lieutenant during search-and-rescue missions in Breathitt County. Click to enlarge.

But they are united on this — flood victims in Eastern Kentucky are not getting the help they so desperately need from the federal government in the wake of catastrophic flooding on July 28.

As Tessa Duvall wrote in a story on Thursday, “State Sen. Brandon Smith, R-Hazard, said in news release, he has received ‘countless phone calls from desperate eastern Kentucky residents’ outlining FEMA’s ‘alleged inaction, denials and an indication of surprisingly inadequate financial assistance to rebuild their homes and lives.’ “

Beshear has heard the same stories and concluded, “it’s not right.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell also announced Friday that he “spoke personally with President Biden, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Mayorkas, and Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) Administrator Criswell to advocate for increased aid. After hearing concerns from Eastern Kentucky residents and local officials during this week’s visits, Senator McConnell contacted FEMA Administrator Criswell again to encourage expedited assistance for Kentuckians impacted by flooding.”

Sometimes, it’s good to have one of the most powerful politicians in Washington on your side.

LOL! That won’t be good enough for Mrs Blackford and the Herald-Leader not to endorse former state Representative Charles Booker in the November election! The Lexington newspaper always endorses Democrats, and if Mr Booker is running against incumbent Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) rather than Mr McConnell, they also endorsed Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes in 1984, and Amy McGrath Henderson, in 2000, over Senator McConnell. Both lost in huge landslides.

But if we are all on the same side here, what is the problem? FEMA administrators surely have enough experience — many decades — with catastrophic flooding to know that if someone’s house is completely flooded, they aren’t necessarily going to have the documents they need to prove they own it. They must know that people need help immediately, and lots of it. They must understand that $37,900 — the total cap for housing reimbursement — will no longer go very far in rebuilding a house from scratch these days.

And they must understand that if that help is not forthcoming in rebuilding, people will have to leave, further hurting the region.

Surely she can’t be surprised that bureaucrats act like bureaucrats.

Mrs Blackford noted that there’s a hard cap of $37,900 in disaster assistance money, and while that certainly won’t rebuild a house, it doesn’t matter: FEMA agents cannot authorize more money than the law allows. Checking the website for Clayton Mobile Homes in Richmond, $37,900 won’t even buy a decent house trailer. Earlier today I found one mobile home for $50,000, two bedrooms and two bathrooms, and a whopping 820 ft², but now that one is gone.

If you didn’t have good flood insurance, too bad, so sad, but you are stuck to another object by an inclined plane, wrapped helically around an axis. And flood insurance, if you can even get it, is extremely expensive, beyond the means of many of the poorer people living in eastern Kentucky. A lady I know in Irvine had flood insurance, because it was required for her to get a mortgage on the home she bought. Trouble is that the only flood insurance she could afford had a $10,000 deductible, and the March 2021 flood did $6,500 in damage to her home. She spent all of that money for flood insurance, and it did her no good at all. Really, flood insurance is only good if your home is a total loss.

But, most importantly, she mentioned that we have sent billions of dollars in money and equipment to Ukraine, a country surely in need, but a country that is not the United States! The United States has sent Ukraine roughly $9.1 billion so far, and $9.1 billion could provide $100,000 in housing aid to each of 91,000 families in eastern Kentucky, far more than were unhoused by the flooding.

Don’t worry about Ukraine; we need to take care of Americans first!

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We’re not really serious about rape

Haley Reed, photo by Oldham County Detention Center, and is a public record.

It seems that every day I see another story about another criminal treated leniently. From the Lexington Herald-Leader:

Former Kentucky teacher gets 5 year prison sentence for sexually assaulting student

by Taylor Six | Sunday, June 26, 2022 | 9:59 AM EDT

A former choir teacher at Oldham County High School was sentenced on Thursday for raping an underage student in 2018.

Haley Reed, 40, of La Grange, was sentenced to five years in prison and is not eligible for probation, according to multiple media reports. Reed will also be required to complete sex offender treatment and register as a sex offender for life.

According to court documents, Reed pleaded guilty in March to third-degree rape and first-degree unlawful illicit sex acts with a minor under the age of 18.

There’s a bit more at the original, but the story from WLKY has a lot more information:

Reed, who wore glasses, and had her hair in two braids, kept quiet in court Thursday. But the young man she admitted to having sex with in the spring of 2018, at school, said plenty.

“This woman did everything in her power to try and cut me off from my friends and family, as well as make sure she was my whole world,” the victim told the court.

Now 21, her former student read a victims’ impact statement detailing what happened when he was 17. He called Reed a “predator’ and a “monster” and urged the judge not to continue to let her walk free.

“If I was a girl and she were a man, it would be a much different story, a pedophile is a pedophile. She deserves the maximum sentence,” he said. . . . .

The young victim, now in college, said, “Today, a pedophile is getting what they deserve.”

While she received a five-year sentence, Reed could be eligible for parole if she completes a sex offender treatment program.

Miss Reed was originally charged with:

  • KRS §530.064(2)(a) Unlawful transaction with a minor, 15 counts, a Class C felony
  • KRS §510.060(1)(d) Rape in the third degree, 10 counts, a Class D felony;
  • KRS §510.090(1)(d) Sodomy in the third degree, five counts, a Class D felony.

Under KRS §532.060, the penalty for a Class C felony(2)(c) is imprisonment for not less than five (5) years nor more than ten (10) years, while a Class D felony (2)(d) carries a penalty of imprisonment for not less than one (1) year nor more than five (5) years.

In effect, Miss Reed was allowed the minimum sentence for a single count of a Class C felony, and the maximum sentence third degree rape, the sentences running concurrently.

My question is: given that Miss Reed admitted to an Oldham County Police Department detective that she had “sex with a teen student approximately eight times between April and June after school hours inside OCHS,” why was she allowed to plead down?

Reed’s victim, Jacob Powers, delivered a blistering impact statement before the court this afternoon, arguing that she “deserves the maximum sentence.”

“At this time sitting here, it’s been four years since I was a victim of rape,” Powers said. “Four years since a person I originally met at 12 years old, took advantage of me. I wouldn’t say I’m afraid of much, but scanning a crowd at an event, making sure she’s not there, or having to look twice at someone in a grocery store scares the hell out of me. It’s most likely someone else, but if she’s sick enough to do what she did, why couldn’t she be there?”

Powers called Reed a “predator” who did “everything in her power” to cut him off from friends, family and to “make sure she was my whole world.”

“As a 17-year-old kid, I was taken to meet her parents, told I would be the father of her children, and that we would spend the rest of our lives together, marriage included,” he said. “These predatory tactics worked perfectly on me because being a father is all I wanted in life.”

Mr Powers was 17 at the time of the sexual offenses, which is old enough to consent to sex under Kentucky state law, but Miss Reed was a “person in authority” over the student at the time, which triggers the various statutes listed. Miss Reed’s attorney argued that Mr Powers consented and was legally old enough to do so, which drew some national attention to the case.

So, why the minimum sentences? Why don’t we treat rape seriously?

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This is how prosecutors should treat criminals! Try them, convict them, lock them up, and throw away the key.

Jake Messer did not kill anyone; Tonisha Hendrickson did. Mr Messer, prosecuted seriously, was sentenced to life in prison; Miss Hendrickson, treated leniently by Lexington prosecutors, got ten years, much of which she had already served.

Kentucky man sentenced to life in prison in kidnapping over a botched drug deal

by Bill Estep | Wednesday, June 1, 2022 | 11:26 AM EDT

Jake and George Messer. Photo via Clay County News. Click to enlarge.

A southeastern Kentucky man who kidnapped and sexually assaulted a woman after a drug deal went bad has been sentenced to life in prison.

A jury in federal court convicted Jake Messer, 39, of Whitley County, on charges of kidnapping a man and his girlfriend in April 2018.

Messer believed the male victim, who was not named in court documents, had stolen $10,000 that Messer had provided to buy marijuana, according to court documents.

The man thought he had arranged to buy marijuana, but the purported dealers were con men who stole the cash, Todd E. Tremaine, a special agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said in an affidavit.

Messer directed the kidnapping of the man in an effort to figure out if he was involved in taking the money, and kidnapped the man’s girlfriend as what one witness called “human collateral,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jenna Reed said in a sentencing memorandum.

Read more here.

The woman was raped at least twice while she was held.

But this is how criminals should be treated: try them, convict them, lock them up, and throw away the key.

The Messers were bad seed: Jake Messer had a previous conviction for distributing methamphetamines and other drugs, and his father, George Oscar Messer, who raped the kidnapped victim at least once, also received a life sentence. But, as far as I could tell, they didn’t kill anyone, unlike Miss Hendrickson, Xavier Hardin, Seantel Watson, Jemel Barber, Malachi Jackson, and James Ragland, who were all allowed to plead down in exchange for more lenient sentences.

The Messrs Messer were prosecuted by the Feds, and not local prosecutors. But Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn ought to take notice: we can lock away bad guys for the rest of their miserable lives, rather than allowing them to plead down to lesser offenses and being able to look forward to eventually getting out of jail while they are still relatively young.

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The fruits of ‘Lia’ Thomas’ labors If someone was out to destroy transgender acceptance, what would he be doing differently?

Getty Images. Click to enlarge.

I have asked, many times, what Will Thomas, who now calls himself ‘Lia’, is getting from his record-breaking performances on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team. Yes, he’s piling up victories and records, but everyone will recognize that not only should those records have an asterisk on them, he is doing the one thing he really ought not to want to do, demonstrating the real differences between himself and real women.

Now we have this bill in the Kentucky General Assembly, and the obvious question becomes: would the impetus for this legislation, and similar legislation in other states, have been less were not Mr Thomas doing what he has been doing? I have asked before: If someone was out to destroy transgender acceptance, what would he be doing differently?

‘We’re going to get sued.’ KY bill banning transgender girls from girls sports moves forward

By Valarie Honeycutt Spears | Wednesday, March 9, 2022 | 6:34 PM EST

With a Lexington Republican lawmaker among those in opposition, a Republican bill prohibiting transgender girls from competing in girls sports at the post-secondary, middle and high school levels moved ahead Wednesday.

Senate Bill 83, approved by the House Education Committee with a 15-5 vote, requires the Kentucky Board of Education and the Kentucky High School Athletic Association to establish that an athletic activity or sport designated as “girls” shall not be open to members of the male sex.

“Ninety-six percent chance we’re going to get sued when we pass this,” said state Rep. Killian Timoney, R-Lexington, who voted against the bill. “I’m not sure I feel like spending money on lawsuits.”

Under the bill, the sex of the student shall be determined by the biological sex indicated on the student’s certified birth certificate issued at the time of birth or adoption, Sen. Robby Mills, R-Henderson, the bill’s sponsor, said.

The proposed legislation does not prohibit girls who think they’re boys from participating in boys’ sports, because there are no unfair advantages there.

Further down:

Critics of the legislation have said they haven’t heard of examples of student-athletes harmed by the inclusion of transgender classmates.

There’s more at the original, but if critics say they haven’t heard examples of girls being harmed, then they haven’t been paying attention; the stories about Mr Thomas have been all over the news, and if Mr Thomas competes for an Ivy League school, and the girls who have been harmed have been in Pennsylvania and the northeast, that doesn’t mean it can’t happen in the Bluegrass State.

People have been cowed into silence, or anonymity, for the very reasonable fear of losing scholarships or future job opportunities:

Penn’s women’s team roster lists 41 members. The 16 teammates did not identify themselves in the letter, stating that they “have been told that if we spoke out against her inclusion into women’s competitions, that we would be removed from the team or that we would never get a job offer.”

UPenn Women’s Swim Team, via Instagram. It isn’t difficult to pick out the one man male in a women’s bikini top. Click to enlarge.

Mr Thomas is an extreme example: he’s 6’3″ tall, and was a competitive athlete on Penn’s men’s swimming team, and if not a consistent winner, he nevertheless scored a few victories in Ivy league competition. He went through male puberty, and was fully developed as a male before he succumbed to his mental illness began his testosterone suppression therapy. Mr Thomas went from being ranked “#462 as a male to #1 as a female”.

At least one women’s swim team member has complained that Mr Thomas is still a physically intact male and thinks little of parading around the locker room with his male genitalia exposed.

It is at least arguable that a boy who thought he was a girl and began ‘transitioning’ prior to puberty — something which qualifies as child abuse as far as I am concerned, and ought to be illegal — would have few physical advantages over real girls, and such shouldn’t make a difference on, say, a girls’ soccer team. In a case like that, there wouldn’t be too much opposition on the local level, and the local level is where such matters would be handled . . . were it not for Will Thomas and the legislation he has at least aided in getting passed, if not completely inspired it.

If someone suffers from “gender dysphoria,” it’s really none of my business. If Joe wants to call himself Jane, it’s no skin off my nose, until the point at which he wants to use the power of the state to require me to call him Jane. But Mr Thomas has forced the issue, forced his mental illness ‘transition’ on everybody — with the complicity of Penn, Ivy League, and NCAA officials — and thus he has accomplished what I would have thought the ‘transgender’ community would not have wanted, to point out that ‘transgender women’ really are not real women.