KyKurmudgeon

Every scandal deserves its own name, a la the FBI’s Operation BOPTROT investigation that snared legislators and lobbyists in the early 1990s or former Gov. Ernie Fletcher’s BlackBerry Jam hiring mess.

Frankfort’s current scandal also stems from the Fletcher administration. An FBI investigation of Transportation Cabinet activity during Fletcher’s one term in office has led to the indictment of former cabinet Secretary Bill Nighbert, road contractor Leonard Lawson and Brian Billings, one of Lawson’s employees.

According to the indictments, former cabinet official James Rummage obtained confidential cost estimates for proposed road projects and provided them to Lawson either directly or through Nighbert. The indictments allege that Lawson gave Rummage a total of $20,000 in cash and funneled money to Nighbert through an Eastern Kentucky utility management company.

So, what to name this scandal? Well, a phrase Herald-Leader contributing columnist Larry Webster used in a recent column about the investigation seems to have caught on with some folks in Frankfort. Webster opened that column by saying, “The phrase ‘rummage sale’ takes on new meaning.” Now, I’m hearing Capitol hallway references to the scandal being a “Rummage Sale.”

Sounds highly appropriate to me. Anyone have any better ideas?

During state Rep. Greg Stumbo’s time as attorney general, his office issued an opinion saying the General Assembly could authorize expanded gambling, including casinos, in Kentucky without a constitutional amendment. Now back in the House, Stumbo Wednesday released a draft of legislation that would authorize video lottery terminals at racetracks. Taxes generated from the machines would be earmarked for a variety of purposes including but not limited to education, enhanced purses at the tracks and to offset repeal of the state’s share of the personal property tax on motor vehicles and motorboats.

A few comments:

First, Stumbo should drop the VLT bull and rewrite the proposed bill to call these gambling devices by their real name: slot machines.

Second, lay person that I am, I agree with the legal reasoning of the opinion on expanded gambling issued while Stumbo was attorney general. But whether the opinion was legally correct doesn’t mean diddly. With more than 80 percent of Kentucky voters wanting the right to vote on a constitutional amendment on expanded gambling, lawmakers would be committing political suicide if they authorized slots prior to passage of such an amendment.

Third, Stumbo knows this. He knows his proposal may generate some discussion but isn’t going to pass. But he also knows that, by grabbing a few headlines just days before this Saturday’s 128th Fancy Farm Picnic, he will garner more attention there, where he and his potential rival House Speaker Jody Richards are expected to be pressing the flesh even if they’re not on the speaking program. Remember, it was on the eve of the 2005 picnic that prosecutors in his office gave the ”corrupt politic machine” filing to Franklin Circuit Court in the BlackBerry Jam investigation of hiring practices in former Gov. Ernie Fletcher’s administration.

So, Stumbo knows one other thing as well. He knows timing.

Gov. Steve Beshear could not win legislative approval of his proposal for executive branch ethics reform, but he has called a press conference at 2 p.m. Tuesday at which he is expected to announce that he will implement some or all of his proposed reforms by executive order.

Among other things, his initial proposal would have required more frequent disclosure of contributions to any legal defense fund established by an executive branch official. Former Gov. Ernie Fletcher formed a legal defense fund to help pay the legal costs he accrued as a result of the BlackBerry Jam investigation into his administration's hiring practices, an investigation that led to his indictment on misdemeanor charges. Fletcher later cut a deal with former Attorney General Greg Stumbo's office to get those charges dropped. The current reporting requirements for a legal defense fund allowed Fletcher to keep the names of donors and the amounts they donated secret until after he left office.

In addition, Beshear's original ethics proposal called for the governor, the attorney general and the state auditor to select nominees for the Executive Branch Ethics Commission on a rotating basis. Currently, the governor has sole authority for appointing the panel's members.

Other changes in the governor's original proposal would expand the scope of the ethics commission to cover more executive branch officials and strengthen the rules on conflicts of interests and the acceptance of gifts.

Even though he lost his bid for re-election, former Gov. Ernie Fletcher has a presence in this year’s General Assembly. It takes the form of legislation that would make it more difficult or impossible for future governors to repeat some his more egregious abuses of power.

For instance, House Bill 5 proposes to amend the state constitution to bar a governor from issuing the kind of blanket pardon Fletcher granted to all members of his administration during the BlackBerry Jam hiring scandal. It would also prohibit a governor from pardoning himself.

House Bill 134 would expand the state Personnel Board from seven members to nine by adding two additional classified (merit) employees. It would also require that any changes in the selection method for job classifications be approved by the board.

House Bill 250 is a comprehensive reform of the executive branch ethics law. Among other things, it would give the state auditor and attorney general a say in who gets appointed to the Executive Branch Ethics Commission. It would also require any official who sets up a legal defense fund to file regular reports with the commission. (Reporting requirements for legal defense funds are also addressed separately in House Bill 47.)

Then, there is House Bill 446, which would prohibit an administration from spending more than half of the highway contingency fund in the first six months of a fiscal that begins during a gubernatorial election year. That is in response to the Fletcher administration spending all but $307,000 of the $65 million budgeted for this fiscal year before leaving office in mid-December.

This and that before taking a long holiday weekend:

1. Throughout this year’s gubernatorial campaign, Gov. Ernie Fletcher bragged about the great budgetary balancing act his administration has performed during his term. A particular point of emphasis in that portion of his campaign spiel was in Medicaid, where he claimed the reforms his administration initiated had solved an inherited "deficit."

Only after the election did Kentuckians learn that the Medicaid "deficit" didn’t stay solved. This week brought word that the Medicaid program needs another $112 million in state money to leverage federal matching funds and fill a $389 million shortfall in the current budget year.

Oh, by the way, a few other state agencies are finding themselves running short this year, to the tune of about $20 million.

Meanwhile, state revenue forecasts are shrinking as the budgetary demands for fulfilling commitments to higher education, teachers’ salaries, the state’s pension programs and assorted other areas of government grow.

Under the best of circumstances, crafting a budget proposal is a difficult task for an incoming governor simply because of the short time between Election Day and the deadline for submitting a spending plan to the General Assembly. With current fiscal circumstances obviously being less than optimal, Gov.-elect Steve Beshear has some unpleasant decisions to make in the next couple of months.

And I wouldn’t bet on the Medicaid shortfall being the last surprise Beshear will find during the transition of power in the Governor’s Office.

2. At first, I thought it a bit odd and somewhat less than "newsy" that Beshear would call a press conference just to announce a Web site where people can register for non-merit positions in the new administration.

But I attended anyway. (We media grunts tend to do that with governors - and perhaps even more so with new governors - just in case they say something that does qualify as "news.") And I came away with the impression that the Web site announcement was just an excuse for Beshear deliver a "lesson learned" message about the Fletcher administration’s hiring scandal.

Beshear owes his election to the hiring investigation, or at least to Fletcher’s bumbling responses to the probe. But if the lesson from it is truly learned, the governor-elect will continue to enjoy some beneficial effects from it throughout his term. The outcome of the scandal, and particularly the state Personnel Board’s reinstatement of Mike Duncan to his job in the Transportation Cabinet, should help immunize him from the kind of political pressures that led the Fletcher administration to politicize the hiring and firing or merit system employees.

After all, Democrats can’t want their governor to wind up in his own BlackBerry Jam, can they?

3. Although Beshear has said he wants Democrats to retake control of the state Senate next year, it might be wise of him to avoid being overtly involved in that fight during the upcoming General Assembly session.

Yes, he is the leader of his party now. But he’s also a governor who wants to get at least some of his agenda through a Republican-controlled Senate, and Senate President David Williams has made it clear that task will become infinitely more difficult if Beshear is at the same time recruiting opponents for Republican senators. And Williams doesn’t make idle threats.

So, if Beshear wants to have some successes during the first session of his term, he might want to leave legislative candidate recruitment to the Democratic caucuses in the respective houses and to Jennifer Moore and Nathan Smith, the new chair and co-chair at party headquarters.

Of course, after the session, there’s nothing stopping Beshear from helping his party’s candidates raise money. That’s to be expected from any governor.

4. Before I started writing editorials/columns/blog entries and realized the best job in journalism is being paid to be an opinionated SOB, my last assignment as a reporter was covering the 1979 gubernatorial race between John Y. Brown Jr. and Louie Nunn. I gained respect for Brown during that campaign, and I thought he did a decent job as governor.

But try as I might, I can’t think of any way to describe his decision to skip the inauguration of Beshear, his opponent in a contentious 1987 gubernatorial primary won by Wallace Wilkinson, as anything but the act of a sore loser.

5. Enjoy your Turkey Day. I’ll be back Monday.

Today’s column:

FRANKFORT — Gov. Ernie Fletcher lost any chance for re-election during a span of about 15 hours in late August 2005.

On the evening of Aug. 29, Fletcher held his little Pardonin’ Pep Rally in the Capitol Rotunda to announce that he was granting immunity from prosecution to all of his aides and friends in the BlackBerry Jam hiring scandal.

The next morning, the governor, who initially pledged to seek the “unvarnished truth” about hiring practices in his administration, instead exercised his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself during a two-minute, 18-second appearance before the special Franklin County grand jury investigating allegations of merit system abuses.

Subsequent events — including his indictment and the deal he cut to get the charges against himself dismissed — provided extra nails for Fletcher’s political coffin. But his future had already been determined before the indictment and deal.

His approval rating essentially remained flat-lined below 40 percent, occasionally dipping into the 20s, from August 2005 right up through this campaign. Nothing he did moved the numbers, not even the shameless, desperate pandering to bigotry and intolerance that Kentucky voters witnessed in the closing days of this gubernatorial campaign.

A governor who issues a pre-emptive blanket pardon to protect his cronies and then takes the Fifth himself cannot expect a majority of voters to forgive and forget come time for re-election. What he can expect is to get booted out of office, and emphatically so.

Fletcher and some of his closest advisers may well go to their graves believing he was the victim of a political witch hunt.

But Fletcher was not done in by Attorney General Greg Stumbo, whose office conducted the investigation; nor by the grand jury members he publicly vilified and insulted until they had no reason to show him leniency; nor even by the media that chronicled the hiring scandal.

Fletcher did himself in, with lots of help from his close advisers, by deciding during the course of that first week of the hiring probe that the “unvarnished truth” be damned.

Instead of cooperating, slapping a few hands and putting this episode quickly behind him, he opted to fight the investigation with every means at his disposal; issue the blanket pardon once the indictments started piling up and former Transportation Cabinet official Dan Druen appeared ready to deal with prosecutors; try to work out a “Who do we throw under the bus?” deal with Stumbo; stack the state Supreme Court to get a ruling in his favor; and, in effect, cop a plea to get rid of his own indictments.

All he accomplished with the variety of tactics he employed over the course of the 18-month investigation was to make himself look desperate to keep the truth hidden. And such desperation creates the perception of guilt.

Simply put, the course of actions Fletcher and his advisers came up with in response to the investigation bordered on political lunacy. Through his own ineptitude and that of his staff, he took what should have been a two-week story and turned it into his personal political obituary.

I missed Monday’s gubernatorial debate on Kentucky Educational Television. But I noticed in news coverage of the event that Gov. Ernie Fletcher tried to pass off the alleged "hit list" that was a key piece of evidence in his BlackBerry Jam hiring scandal as being some kind of "promotions list."

That prompted me to pull out my copy of the "hit list," which allegedly was drafted by former Transportation Cabinet official Dan Druen. It’s a memo on the subject: "Draft of Preliminary Personnel Actions; Terminations, Reversions, and Reassignments. It lists 32 names, nine under the heading "Completed Actions" and 23 under the heading "Pending Actions."

Of the completed actions, four of the people were listed as having been terminated, another had retired after  an involuntary transfer and the others had been transferred or demoted. Of the 23 pending actions, nine people were recommended for termination or firing, one was recommended for involuntary transfer and all but a couple of the others were recommended for reassignment.

Does that sound like a promotions list?

By the way, I learned today that investigators found the "hit list" in a box of documents the Transportation Cabinet turned over to Attorney General Greg Stumbo’s office shortly after the hiring investigation began in May 2005. It was one of the reasons Stumbo said early on that there appeared to be "smoking gun" proof of violations of the law protecting merit system jobs from political discrimination. The list became a public record after it was included in court filings during the investigation.

So, it turns out Fletcher’s folks in Transportation essentially ratted out themselves when they let the "hit list" be included with the other documents. That is so typical of the ineptness that so often has been the trademark of this administration.

Today’s column:

Although they’ve popped up a few times on the KyKurmudgeon blog, the phrases “Boy Governor” and “Kiddie Korps” last appeared in this column in September 2006.

It’s not that Gov. Ernie Fletcher and the folks around him found a magical pill to cure what some prominent Republicans have called their “political ineptitude.” They’ve continued to make their share of missteps during the intervening 13 months. But their recent stumbles haven’t plumbed the depths of juvenile silliness that earned them their nicknames. Besides, the original Kiddie Korps left the building long ago.

But last week, Boy Governor and a new group – call them the Kampaign Kiddies – returned to form when they accused Democratic gubernatorial candidate Steve Beshear of violating the state constitution’s ban on same-sex marriage because his campaign finance report listed contributions from same-sex couples.

As usual, though, BG and his KK didn’t follow their absurd “guilt by association” reasoning to its logical conclusion. Had they done so, they might have realized how the argument could be turned back on them.

For if the acceptance of contributions from same-sex couples constitutes ironclad proof that Beshear supports same-sex marriage, the same flawed logic must lead you to the conclusion that the use of a convicted felon in one of his anti-casino ads constitutes ironclad proof that BG endorses embezzling.

But hey, we already knew BG is soft on crime, including felonies, from his blanket pardon of aides and cronies indicted in the BlackBerry Jam hiring investigation. And that brings us to another recent BG/KK moment.

Someone – in the administration, in the campaign or among Fletcher’s apologists – decided it would be a really neat idea to file a complaint against Attorney General Greg Stumbo with the Executive Branch Ethics Commission, a complaint alleging that Stumbo and his aides violated ethics laws by pursuing the hiring investigation.

Then, that same someone decided it would be an equally neat idea to leak the complaint to various members of the media.

Let’s examine the brilliance of pursuing this strategy on behalf of a governor who was indicted by a special grand jury, who saw 14 members of his entourage indicted in open court and 14 other indictments returned under seal, who pardoned the world in regard to the hiring investigation and who cut a deal with Stumbo to get the charges against him dropped.

Modern political campaigns being what they are, this negative side of BG’s record will be fodder for the opposition. We saw such ads in the primary; we’ve seen more in the general election. There is nothing BG and his KK can do about that except to fight back with their own ads and hope the public tunes out all the negativity.

But by filing a complaint against Stumbo, BG and his KK brought the hiring investigation back into the news with fresh headlines and stories rehashing the whole scandal in the closing days of the campaign, reminding Kentuckians of BG’s greatest failings just before they go into the booth to vote up or down on his re-election. (The administration’s persistence in attempting to depose whistle-blower Doug Doerting has also kept the hiring scandal in the headlines during the campaign.)

Only in the insular world of Boy Governor and his Kampaign Kiddies would it be considered a smart political move to do something that prompts new stories about an old scandal.

In the real world, it was just another political blunder by folks who are masters of that particular craft.

State Rep. Bill Farmer, R-Lexington, has prefiled a bill that would designate "cornhole" as the official state game. That prompted one wag to wonder if that title didn’t already belong to "noodling out of season."

After reading today’s story about Attorney General Greg Stumbo’s job approval/disapproval numbers in The Courier-Journal Bluegrass Poll, I had to compare them to the same poll’s numbers on Gov. Ernie Fletcher to see who emerged from that 18-month BlackBerry Jam hiring investigation with the better public image.

On the approval side, Stumbo had a slight edge - 47 percent to Fletcher’s 42 percent overall, 10 percent to Fletcher’s 8 percent in the "strongly approve" category.

But on the disapproval side, it wasn’t close. Stumbo’s disapproval rating stood at 26 percent (11 percent "strongly disapprove") compared to Fletcher’s 48 percent (25 percent "strongly disapprove").

Obviously, Kentuckians aren’t buying Fletcher’s "witch hunt" excuse in any significant numbers. If they were, Stumbo’s negatives should be higher.