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Last night voters in Louisville soundly defeated a ballot measure that would mandate a occupational tax for library funding.

Here’s an idea. Instead of implementing a tax on everyone in order to expand, why not implement some type of user fee on library patrons? You can help pay for it if you use it.

But maybe that’s why the “VOTE YES!” crowd wanted to mandate a tax on everyone that worked in Louisville.  What percentage of people in Louisville even use the library? Libraries are dying because a vast amount of information can be found on the World Wide Web.  Just a sign of the times.

It seems that Churchill Downs’ much publicized exemption to Louisville’s smoking ban is a goner.

The council exempted facilities leased, owned or operated by the Kentucky Horse Racing Authority. A group of business owners, the Metro Louisville Hospitality Coalition, filed a lawsuit challenging Churchill Downs’ exemption and asking that the ban be overturned as arbitrary and vague.

…

Mike Hatzell, the attorney for the businesses that sued, said the ruling validates their claim that the exemption — and possibly the entire ban — is unconstitutional. Hatzell hopes Louisville’s metro council will reconsider the ban and, if it allows smoking at Churchill Downs, it will also allow smoking at some restaurants and bars.

Insert your own tortured scream of “What about the children! Won’t someone please think about the CHILDREN!” here.

Yesterday, the Courier-Journal published an editorial berating the Bluegrass Institute’s position on school choice. Tne Bluegrass Institute’s communication director, Jim Waters, is the Commonwealth’s biggest cheerleader for introducing the concept of school choice. Here’s some of what the Courier-Journal had to say:

The institute’s latest missive says, “Don’t be surprised if Democrats wind up leading the charge for school choice in Kentucky. They have done it in other states.” The reference is to school-choice, tax credit and school voucher experiments in Arizona, Iowa and Wisconsin.

Will this prediction be as credible as the institute’s claim, in 2005, that it quickly would gather 100,000 signatures from supporters of legislation to let children attend schools of their choice, at state expense? Eighteen months later, that effort was still a failure.

So if the Bluegrass Institute is nothing but a puddle on the road to real education reform, why mention it at all? Well, it gives us a chance to contrast the group’s libertarian anti-government negativism against the fact-based report just released by the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center, which said, “Using 11 educational indicators we examine(d) Kentucky’s progress from 1992 to 2005 and conclude that we have made substantial progress, both in an absolute sense as well as relative to the nation.”

The reality of the situation is that both political parties in Kentucky would rather avoid experimenting with school choice because they may lose precious votes from Kentucky Education Association members during election time. The Courier-Journal unfairly dismisses the idea of school choice because of one organization’s failure to deliver on it’s promise to complete an overambitious petition drive.

The C-J editorial does point out this sobering fact:

While Kentucky may still “trails two-thirds of the states,” it’s no longer at the bottom of the educational ladder, in spite of all the obstacles to its climb.

So, does this mean Kentuckians should settle for the Commonwealth being behind in education that most of the states? At least the Bluegrass Institute is offering a possible solution, unlike most politicians and journalists in Kentucky.