Odds and Ends

Some thoughts on different topics:

Horne:

Andrew Horne’s decision to drop out of the Senate Race is not all that surprising. Horne was obviously having trouble raising money. The reality is you can’t fight guys with millions of dollars by raising the money $25 at a time. Horne also made the mistake of other Louisville politicians by keeping his campaign almost exclusively in Louisville. That works if you are Jack Conway riding a democratic tsunami into office. But it doesn’t work when you are taking on Mitch McConnell.

As to the two remaining major candidates, Greg Fischer and Bruce Lunsford, you have one guy with a ton of money and no name recognition and the other guy with more money and name recognition. Lunsford will probably win the primary and loose to McConnell. About the best thing democrats can hope for is that both McConnell and Lunsford will spend millions and beat the crap out of each other.

When information isn’t

Ryan Alessi has a story at Pol Watchers that provides some information that appears to make a causal link but really doesn’t.

On a related note, the LetKYvote.com site was registered Jan. 16, 2008 by Ellen Call (not sure if that's the councilwoman from Louisville) in care of a company called Network Solutions out of Herndon, Va.

Network Solutions also was the company that registered the Bluegrass Freedom Fund's Web site, www.bluegrassfreedom.com, on May 22, 2007 during the governor's race.

The fact that both were registered at Network Solutions means nothing. I have no idea how many registrations Network Solutions has but I would have to guess millions.

Screw the IRS

From the Herald-Leader a story on the Versailles – Frankfort land deal:

Attorney General Jack Conway's office is reviewing a complex land deal in which the city of Versailles plans to issue $56.5 million in bonds to finance the sale of nine Frankfort office buildings between private businessmen.

The looser in this deal is the Internal Revenue Service. The City of Versailles gets a few bucks but the developers get most of the money. You see these bonds are free from Federal Income tax, which lowers the cost of borrowing a couple of percentage points. When you are talking multiple millions this adds up to real bucks.

This is not illegal yet, but it probably should be