The first news of these events started to leak out in Tuesday's Lexington Herald-Leader, but I didn't see any diaries about this, nor did it show up anywhere in the blogosphere. Briefly, the two big stories about Kentucky's Republican Governor Ernie Fletcher are:
1) Fletcher's Transportation Cabinet has been hiring mainly political flunkies for many/most positions in the Highway/Roads department. According to the law, these are supposed to be based on merit only. After lots of whistle blowing, yesterday the state Attorney General searched the offices of Fletcher's top aides looking for incriminating evidence. Here is the link:
Search Warrants More after the fold...
2) Somewhat related to this, the Federal Highway Administration is threatening to cut off $600 million in highway aid to Kentucky because KY has not hired enough minorities in the highway dept. In fact, they have hired almost NO minorities, presumably to fill the open slots with Fletcher cronies, who happen to all be white males. The story is here:
Washington to cut $600 million
A few things to note about 'Ernie': He came into office in 2002 as the first GOP gov in KY in decades as this normally Democratic state was quickly turning red. Ernie had been a US congressman before that. (KY registered Democrats, believe it or not, still outnumber Republicans, but that margin is rapidly shrinking.) About the first thing Ernie did to save money (with Federal cutbacks in state aid falling sharply, the state was falling into a financial crisis -- thanks Ernie the congressman!) was to sharply raise the health insurance premiums paid by teachers. Considering that state law prohibited such a high raise, the public uproar was predictable and vociferous, and Ernie very very quickly lost his 'honeymoon' period, and his popularity very quickly started to drop. He had to backpedal on the insurance, and did some financial wheeling-dealing to make sure that the teacher-paid premiums didn't jump so much. (My wife, a teacher, can tell you that her yearly 'raise' -- which has averaged far less than inflation over the last decade -- did not cover the insurance hike.)
What will the recent scandal bring to Ernie? Will he be forced to resign? Probably not, but it might make him easier to beat when he comes up for re-election next year. The man (a 'Christian Conservative Right-to-Life physician', who looks amazingly like a younger Rev Jim Bakker, but not as pudgy) is a standard-issue corrupt GOP governor. If another scandal breaks in this administration, then he should be easy to beat if the Dems can field anybody half decent.
Frankly, I don't really care if this diary gets recommended or not (I've only done 2 or 3 little diaries before, but I've been a faithful dkos reader for many years), but this whole story SHOULD break out into the blogosphere. Here is another story of GOP corruption, this time highlighting how the GOP treats minorities. I'd like to see this story get headlines by Atrios, Americablog, TalkingPointsMemo and any other 'big' blog and help make this a national story. I don't think this is getting national attention, and it should. TELL THE OTHER BIG BLOGS ABOUT THIS STORY!