An Indepth Analysis of News and Trends Affecting West Kentucky 

Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman - Sarah Palin scares the woo out of political insiders. Attack of the 50 Foot Woman For insiders in both parties, Sarah Palin is the fifty foot woman. She strides across Fox News, crushing the airwaves with her chirpy pronouncements. She sells books in cities that most beltway insiders couldn’t find even with GPS. Her popularity is a source of alarm and confusion.  From the Sunday and Monday talk shows, one would think that the bad weather that hit the East Coast was a snowstorm conjured up by Palin. See the full story ... Mary Potter

SB 87, will put KLC and KACO squarely under Open Meetings and Open Records law. The bill should be named Sylvia and Bob's bill (for the former heads of KLC and KACO) Transparency bill passes Senate unanimously FRANKFORT — Two bills aimed at making government and quasi-governmental groups more accountable to the taxpayers passed the Senate unanimously yesterday.   Senate Bill 40, sponsored by Sen. Damon Thayer, R-Georgetown, would require all three branches of government to put their spending records online as a searchable database by January 1, 2011. The databases would be updated monthly, with information in the state’s electronic accounting system would be updated weekly. The information would include the amount and description of the spending, along with any documentation available electronically.   “This puts Kentucky’s checkbook online,” Thayer said of the bill, known as the Taxpayer Transparency Act of 2010.   Senate Bill 87, also sponsored by Thayer, extends the same requirements to the Kentucky League of Cities and the Kentucky Association of Counties, both funded by dues and insurance premiums from local governments. In addition, SB 87 requires an annual audit of each group’s finances, with the state’s Auditor of Public Accounts given access to the findings.    See the full story ... Legislative Update

HB 43 passes House - no texting while driving House leaders moved ahead with plans to come up with several workable budget scenarios for our Appropriations & Revenue committee to review and choose from as the budget process moved forward. Creating a workable plan under current revenue and spending constraints will admittedly be hard. But we believe it is doable, and that we can come up with ways to let certain state functions move forward despite dwindling state dollars.  Presently, we are looking at a $395 million deficit in 2011 and a $750 million deficit in 2012.   See the full story ... Rep. Reginald Meeks, 42nd House District

All is Well…All is Well…Lets Outsource R&D Swine Flu has not gone away. However, some drug companies may be repositioning themselves to find a better marketplace than with the tired old scary flu. It seems that the more “hip” drug lords are looking to their bottom lines to beat a path into the emerging markets for new frontiers of new profitable diseases to find cures for.      See the full story ... Ivan Potter

The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant The story is told of a king’s chief servant who owed the king millions of dollars (in what that country used for currency). The servant wasn't making his payments... ...Fast forward to 2009, big banks facing the collapse of the mortgage market, seeing their stocks tank and Wall Street plunging into a fiery pit of doom,  go to the federal government and beg for mercy... See the full story ... Mary Potter

Here we go again KU and LGE filed a request with the Kentucky Public Service Commission asking for a 136 billion dollar rate increase to meet for the most part the "growing demand" according to the press release reprinted after the jump. Read it and spin around and around. The rate increase request was filed before the Obama Administration announced an end to coal subsidies. Believing that continuing to subsidize coal and their biggest customers - the utilities in order to keep rates low just got a bit harder. See the full story ...

Paul Reed Smith at Whitehaven in Paducah on his last visit home. Paul Reed Smith honors his love of public radio with gift to MSU’s WKMS NPR station MURRAY, Ky. — Paducah native Paul Reed Smith’s interest in public radio and in honor of his education at St. Mary’s School System in Paducah, led him to donate a substantial gift to WKMS. His lifelong love of public radio and his strong belief in education caused him to pull those two loves together. WKMS is Murray State University National Pubic Radio station. See the full story ... Dana Howard

Will Senator McConnell oppose budget items that benefit Kentuckians? Obama's budget allocates millions for Kentucky The budget sent to Congress by President Obama includes $221 million for continued clean up and dismantling of buildings at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant.  Funds are also allocated for clean up at Bluegrass Army Depot and reinforcing Wolf Creek Dam. There's also money for Kentucky families in the form of tax credits for childcare and working families. For more of James Carroll's report in the Courier Journal,  follow the link..  See the full story ...

Artist's drawing of new bridge over Kentucky Lake Recommended Highway Plan presented to General Assembly Some highlights of the recommended plan:   $1.9 billion through FY 2016 for the Louisville-Southern Indiana Ohio River Bridges Project. The total assumes $1.44 billion of “innovative financing” to be determined by a Kentucky-Indiana bi-state authority. The total also includes $231 million from sale of Grant Anticipation Revenue Vehicle (GARVEE) bonds this year and in FY 2011. A $300 million sale of state road bonds, of which about $155 million would be available for new projects. The rest would be used to finish state projects from a bond sale in 2009.  $112 million from a second sale of bonds to support “BRAC” projects associated with the realignment of Fort Knox.  $330 million for new bridges over Lake Barkley and Kentucky Lake. $301 million through the coming biennium, and $611.1 million through FY 2016, for bridge replacements statewide.  See the full story ...

A hole in the center of high speed rail plans - KY & TN High Speed Rail - Detours Around Kentucky There’s a big fat hole in the vision of high speed rail in America map. It’s called Kentucky and Tennessee. That hole became evident to the nation this week when the Obama Administration’s award of millions of dollars to study high speed rail was awarded to other states. The best that Kentucky and Tennessee could do was an attaboy to Georgia for their application.  See the full story ... Mary Potter

NOAA map as of Thursday afternoon. Pink means "run for your life" Snowstorm heads for narrow band of Kentucky counties See the full story ...

Extension Agent Melissa Goodman put together a sweet workshop. Disaster and Desserts: an emergency preparedness workshop One year after an ice storm swept in and brought life to a standstill for a time, over thirty Hickman County residents gathered on Tuesday evening at the Farm Bureau meeting room for an event whimsically entitled “Disaster and Desserts”. Sponsored by the Cooperative Extension Office, the event brought the sweet of homemade goodies, the bittersweet of the anniversary of the beginning of the storm and the spice of ideas to keep families safe if or when another disaster strikes. County Extension Agent Melissa Goodman put together a program that began with Judge Pruitt’s recollection of last year’s storm and his explanation on how Hickman County will respond to a future disaster.  See the full story ... Mary Potter

Mr. President - Dr. Elizabeth Warren is the woman to get your economic team moving in the right direction. An open letter to President Obama Dear Mr. President – By now, the talking heads in Washington, New York and Boston have chewed to rags the story of Republican candidate Scott Brown’s win of Sen. Ted Kennedy’s seat. The reminder that electoral seats belong not to parties, but to the electorate, should be a point well taken. The loss in Massachusetts is not the first time a politician and his/her party have forgotten that there are no “safe” open seats.    I don’t want to talk about Massachusetts and how hilarious I find it for Fox News to be saying “Thank God for Massachusetts”. All politics is local, MA pol Tip O’Neill famously said. It’s also subject to severe and continuing memory loss.   No, what I want to talk about is your Cabinet, Mr. President. Specifically, the presence in the Cabinet of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. I watched Mr. Geithner’s face last week when you made your stern comments about Wall Street. Frankly, he looked like he was in desperate need of a barf bag.  See the full story ... Mary Potter

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Welcome to the 2010 Session  See the full story ...