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I spoke with Teri Blanton, one of coal country’s chief critics of this massive giveaway, a few months ago at kentuckyforum.org.

I also spoke with Jefferson Poole on the subject recently.

• The Advocate-Messenger [Danville]
• Business First of Louisville [Louisville]
• Central Ky News-Journal [Campbellsville]
• Corbin News-Journal [Corbin]
• Corbin Times-Tribune [Corbin]
• The Courier-Journal [Louisville]
• The Crittenden Press [Marion]
• The Daily Independent [Ashland]
• The Daily News [Bowling Green]
• Floyd County Times [Prestonsburg]
• Franklin Favorite [Franklin]
• Georgetown News Graphic [Georgetown]
• Glasgow Daily Times [Glasgow]
• The Gleaner [Henderson]
• Grant County News [Williamstown]
• Grayson County News Gazette [Leitchfield]
• Greensburg Record-Herald [Greensburg]
• The Hancock Clarion [Hawesville]
• Hardin County Independent [Elizabethtown]
• Harrodsburg Herald [Harrodsburg]
• Henry County Local [New Castle]
• Herald Ledger [Eddyville]
• The Journal-Enterprise [Providence]
• Kentucky Kernel [Lexington]
• Kentucky New Era [Hopkinsville]
• The Kentucky Post [Covington]
• Kentucky Standard [Bardstown]
• Lebanon Enterprise [Lebanon]
• The Ledger-Independent [Maysville]
• Lewis County Herald [Vanceburg]
• Lexington Herald-Leader [Lexington]
• The Louisville Cardinal [Louisville]
• The Messenger [Madisonville]
• Messenger-Inquirer [Owensboro]
• Morehead News [Morehead]
• Mountain Advocate [Barbourville]
• The Murray Ledger & Times [Murray]
• News Democrat & Leader [Russellville]
• The News-Enterprise [Elizabethtown]
• The Oldham Era [La Grange]
• The Paducah Sun [Paducah]
• The Paintsville Herald [Paintsville]
• Richmond Register [Richmond]
• Russell Register [Jamestown]
• Tribune Courier [Benton]
• Sentinel-News [Shelbyville]
• Sentinel-Echo [London]
• Union County Advocate [Morganfield]
• The Voice-Tribune [Louisville]
• The Winchester Sun [Winchester]

David Adams, the blogger at Kentucky Progress, hastily dismisses a bill pre-filed by Senate President David Williams as terrible “borrow and spend” legislation. Adams links to a bill description at Kentuckyvotes.org that is woefully inadequate and throughly misses the main point of the legislation:

Introduced by Sen. David L. Williams on January 8, 2008, to expand the bureaucracy relating to construction of public facility projects.

However, when one examines the summary of the legislation at the Legislative Research Commission’s Web site, they will actually realize what the main intent of this legislation is:

Create a new section of KRS 175B to allow a public infrastructure authority the same ability as is granted the Department of Highways to enter into a partnership with a private entity to construct or operate a project under this chapter; create a new section of KRS 175B to allow an authority to place tolls on a project and set out procedures for collection and distribution of tolls; create a new section of KRS 175B to exempt authorities of taxation and make bonds of the authority tax exempt;

Kentucky’s roads and bridges are not in good shape. After the tragedy in Minnesota, elected officials are realizing that something different must be done in order to maintain roads and bridges. States, such as Indiana, have embarked on innovative public-private partnerships that allow private companies the repair, maintain, build and operate roads , while paying state governments money in order to lease those roads. The recent Indiana public-private partnership agreement resulted numerous benefits for Indiana taxpayers. Last year, Reason Foundation scholar Geoffrey Segal outlined some of the benefits:

Indeed, the contractor has pledged to spend more than $200 million on capital upgrades in the first three years of the deal and upwards of $4.4 billion during the life of the lease, bringing the total value of the lease to more than $8 billion.

Further, the large cash payment enables the state to earn interest, increasing the value of the lease even more. Indeed, the state will retire more than $225 million in debt and stop paying interest, but it will begin earning interest on the cash payment while it is spent down on other transportation projects.

This is significant because the Toll Road rarely, if ever, turned a real profit when capital expenditures were included. Assuming the Toll Road did turn a profit, its return on investment would have been less than 1 percent, while debt obligations were paid at much higher percentages. Clearly, the state is better off with the cash, earning interest rather than paying it.

In fact, Indiana can expect to earn upwards of $800 million in interest, bringing the value of the lease to around $9 billion.

Beyond the obvious fiscal implications, there are significant benefits to the Indiana commuter as well. The deal enables new capacity to be put in place many years faster. It means getting Interstate 69 financed and built by 2015 rather than 2035. Countless other projects will not have to wait for money to become available – it will already be there. Projects to strategically connect the state, enabling greater mobility of goods and people, will become realities.

This bill, if passed, could be a good development for Kentucky’s commuters and taxpayers. For example, look at Louisville, a recent article in the Courier-Journal found, of the three main Ohio River bridges in Louisville, one bridge was rated “structurally deficient” and another was rated “functionally obsolete.” A public-private partnership could revitalize theses aging bridges and even could result in a new bridge being built over the Ohio River without taxing the taxpayers. A toll is a great way to help pay for repair or new bridges. The people that use the bridges will pay for them, rather than a taxpayer in Pikeville who never ventures to Louisville.

David Adams should support such a bill. Any true conservative would realize that this bill could get the ball rolling for much needed bridge and road repairs in the Commonwealth without breaking the bank. Hopefully, Mr. Adams will research this issue further and inform his conservative readership of the benefits of this bill, rather than neglectfully dismissing the bill without researching the matter.

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Whenever I hear Jody Richards on the radio stuttering, stammering and burbling about the latest controversy in the General Assembly I think his speech often resembles the old cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn, a loudmouth rooster that was always full of hot air.

It was just last month that Speaker Richards, supposedly looking out for KY taxpayers’ best interests, said that he would not allow a Special Session that would address energy incentives for a liquid fuel coal plant. Here’s what Richards said on the house floor:

“I take the unusual step of rising to address this body on a simple but important question: has the governor justified calling the General Assembly into special session at a cost of $60,000 per day to the Kentucky taxpayer?” he asked rhetorically. “Anyone who has followed events since the governor first threatened to call a special session knows that the answer to this question is a clear, resounding and unequivocal, ‘No.’”

Richards said it was “simply not good stewardship of the taxpayer money,” he said, sparking applause at 4:25 p.m.

He argued that the revelation that the plant Fletcher’s administration has been referring to is a coal-to-natural gas facility, which Richards said undermines the governor’s argument that the project could help reduce dependence on foreign-produced oil.

It would “not produce a single gallon of transportation fuels.”

“When gubernatorial politics are taken out of the equation, we all know that the legislature will be able to timely address this and all other important issues when we convene the regular session in January,” he said.

A month later both the House and the Senate reconvened and passed a bill which would handout millions of dollars to Peabody Coal in order to bring the liquid coal plant to KY.

Richards changed his tune:

“It is a comprehensive energy bill, it really is not a coal bill at all,” Richards, D-Bowling Green, said. “This bill, the more I read it, the more I see about the green aspects of it … it’s in many ways an environmental protection bill.

Richards said Thursday that he was optimistic a plan could get done. The proposal addresses issues about capturing carbon emitted from the coal gasification process, and emphasizes use of renewable resources, Richards said. “This is all about a new direction for energy in Kentucky that emphasizes renewable energy,” Richards said.

If this is Kentucky’s protector of the taxpayer, then we’re in big trouble.

An interesting op-ed appears in the Courier-Journal today about the failure of the War of Drugs.  Here’s a snippet:

Thirty-six years and hundreds of billions of dollars after President Richard M. Nixon launched the war on drugs, consumers worldwide are taking more narcotics and criminals are making fatter profits than ever before. The syndicates that control narcotics production and distribution reap the profits from an annual turnover of $400 billion to $500 billion. And terrorist organizations such as the Taliban are using this money to expand their operations and buy ever more sophisticated weapons, threatening Western security.

In the past two years, the drug war has become the Taliban’s most effective recruiter in Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s Muslim extremists have reinvigorated themselves by supporting and taxing the countless peasants who are dependent one way or another on the opium trade, their only reliable source of income. The Taliban is becoming richer and stronger by the day, especially in the east and south of the country. The “war on drugs” is defeating the “war on terror.”

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama has been getting as much of a free ride for his opinions and proposals as I’d anticipated. He’s visiting Lexington, Ky. today where he will not be asked about anything significant.

Dan Griswold at the Cato Institute recently skewered the young Senator with some trade-related logic. It seems that as President Obama would be perfectly willing to ask every American to pay a tax or tariff on foreign-made T-shirts in order to preserve ridiculously few low-paying textile jobs. Essentially, it’s a tax on the poor for the sake of the poor.

I’m sure Sen. Obama’s proposed t-shirt tariff will play well in the home of Fruit of the Loom, but its practical effects will be the opposite of his intention.

It’s a sad day when wine-makers go rogue.

That’s exactly what is happening in France’s southern Languedoc region. The CRAV, or Comité régional d’action viticole has bombed grocery stores, a winery, and two agricultural ministry offices among other targets.

Before you start thinking this is a Boston Tea Party style action for freedom and liberty, think again. These wine producers are finding it difficult to compete with lower priced imported wines from Spain and Italy, and want the French government to place high tariffs on these imports to make their own high-priced wines less sour to consumers.

The British wine magazine Decanter reported in May that:

The activist wine group CRAV has issued a one-month ultimatum to Nicolas Sarkozy threatening ‘action’, and possibly deaths, if the new premier does not help the struggling southern French wine industry.

In what may well be the precursor to the most violent period of its recent history, the Regional Committee for Viticultural Action (CRAV) told Sarkozy he had one month to honour his electoral promises of supporting the wine industry or ‘the whole industry will be targeted’.

On a pre-recorded cassette delivered to TV channel France 3 on Wednesday evening, five balaclava-clad men – ’somewhere in the Languedoc hinterland’, according to the report – read out a statement addressed to the new president.

They said that if in one month nothing has changed and that wine prices have not gone up, they will go into action.

‘If Sarkozy does not support the interests of the wine industry, he will be entirely responsible for what happens,’ said their spokesman. ‘We are at the point of no return.’

You can watch the video of winemakers gone mad at the BBC.

We hear a lot of comparisons between Canada’s seemingly idyllic government run health care system and our own hellish nightmare of a scheme in which doctors are free to feed us into wood chippers if they wish.

Well, that’s how it is often reported.

Now comes a fascinating study of 310 Americans living in Canada, and their thoughts on the different systems. As it turns out:

After the numbers were crunched, 74 per cent rated the U.S. system as good or excellent, compared with 50 per cent who said the Canadian system was good or excellent.

The Canadian Globe and Mail has the whole story. It’s an excellent little synopsis of some of the arguments back and forth.