Eddie-torial Comments

Back to the Blog in 2004!
(Or where the hell have you been?)

Personal

Well, I’m back if anyone is actually looking. I’ve been away from this blog so long that most folks probably thought I had joined the thousands of aborted blogs littering cyberspace. Ah well!

Just like my life too. I actually got a mention in Journalista and listed on a couple of blogrolls, and then totally went to pot. But, I do have a good excuse. No I wasn’t being lazy or procrastinative, or unproductive at all. Nosiree.

I was recovering.

Yes, recovering. It was right around my birthday last time I posted, which was also Election Day. As I mentioned in that last blog, any time Election Day falls on my birthday, the Republicans win. I don’t know why. I think it’s one of the ways the cosmic forces which guide the universe get their kicks. When I was 16, the people of this fine country gave me Ronald Reagan as a birthday present. For my 39th, my fellow citizens of the Commonwealth of Kentucky gave me Ernie Fletcher.

And since then, what have we seen happen in our fine state?

Well, the Louisville paper, the largest in the state was required for a while to submit any questions they wanted the governor to answer to him in writing in advance. The C-J being known as a bastion of the “liberal press” in Kentucky (in other words, they think and ask the hard questions), it was felt they weren’t being fair to the new gov. The C-J had such a fun time with the whole idea, that Fletcher had to drop the whole thing. They’d put their questions in writing by running them in the editorial section. It seems he didn’t like the idea that the voters could read the questions he was trying to dodge.

The man who campaigned on “restoring ethics to government” and “getting rid of the special interests” appointed lobbyists and corporation heads to his transition team, to “oversee the changeover to the new system” for the cabinets and departments who regulate the businesses these dudes own and lobby for!

Finally, the man who promised to restore fiscal credibility to state government has given all his new cabinet secretaries raises! This may actually be a violation of state law, since the Republican-controlled legislature (whose gridlock delaying tactics are more responsible for the budget mess than anything else) rammed through a law forbidding the governor from giving raises to his top staff. The fear was the outgoing gov would give pay hikes to his top people during his lame duck days. Their story now is that they think what the new gov has done is perfectly legal. Some laws were only meant to apply to Democrats.

But other state workers had raises they had received months earlier yanked. A budget-saving measure, see? Except that the handful of people who got tapped for the salary rollback is going to have almost no effect at all on the budget. Can taking a raise away from six or seven people in an entire CABINET make that much of a difference?

It’s taken a while to get used to the whole deal, let me tell you. So. Of course, blogging just hasn’t been in the stars for me.

Okay, so I was really just being lazy. I fell out of the habit and took my sweet time getting back into it again. Happy? I think the other story sounds better.

More later as our labor, environmental, and civil rights laws are weakened.