My Old Kentucky Podcast — Episode 3

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My Old Kentucky Podcast

7 min readSep 14, 2016

Matt Bevin [maybe] calls for bloodshed if Hillary Clinton wins:
“Somebody asked me yesterday, I did an interview and they said, “Do you think it’s possible, if Hillary Clinton were to win the election, do you think it’s possible that we’ll be able to survive? That we would ever be able to recover as a nation? And while there are people who have stood on this stage and said we would not, I would beg to differ. But I will tell you this: I do think it would be possible, but at what price? At what price? The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood, of who? The tyrants to be sure, but who else? The patriots. Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren. I have nine children. It breaks my heart to think that it might be their blood that is needed to redeem something, to reclaim something, that we through our apathy and our indifference have given away.”

Does this constitute “calling for violence”
Is this a big deal/will it be a big deal with the KY electorate?

Resources:

UK v. Kentucky Kernel

How it started:

In April, a Kernel staff member asked for records related to a sexual misconduct investigation involving UK entomology professor James Harwood . UK denied the request and the Kernel appealed to AG’s office. (Harwood denied sexual harassment allegations but resigned as part of a settlement agreement with UK)
Beshear issues an AG opinion ruling against UK
He said: should be released with names and identifiers redacted
AG opinions are not binding on courts. They are persuasive authority.
Beshear said in his decision that “there is no means by which to assess the seriousness of the allegations or the appropriateness of the terms of settlement.”

UK sues in Fayette Circuit Court

UK sues the newspaper (UK can appeal AG’s opinion but can’t name Beshear in suit)
UK spokesman: “We believe strongly that this case is about the protection of the confidentiality and privacy of victim survivors of sexual assault”
Investigation was “preliminary, so not public record, says Capilouto (But Harwood already settled and resigned?)
And it had a conclusion. They found enough evidence to send to Sexual Misconduct board for a hearing, but Harwood resigned before that

Beshear makes a motion to intervene

Also asking to be able to inspect documents they withheld (didn’t let him do that when Kernel appealed to AG)
THIS IS RARE

Kernel raising funds to defend suit (12,000 so far)

Kernel ended up getting the records, but UK not confirming authenticity of the documents

Victims wanted them released
Received them from a confidential source
Five total victims reported incidents of sexual harassment and assault.
Inappropriate touching at conferences
Inappropriate touching and comments at social events
Touched both male and female students inappropriately
Other students witnessed and corroborated
Harwood denied everything, chalked it up to “this person came forward because she didn’t think her dissertation went well” and “this person came forward because I questioned his research…”
Spanned from 2012–2015

Clash at Board of Trustees meeting last week

Linda Blackford on Twitter
A former executive editor of the C-J heavily criticized UK
Attorney Mark Bryant said UK’s actions were emblematic of secrecy and noted the national criticsm the school has received
Eli Capilouto stressed federal privacy laws and victim protection and read two letters from the victims (Which contained one’s first name, so much for protection)

Issues:

Violation of FERPA?
Employee misconduct =/= confidential education records?
Public deserves to know because what about the next school he works at
I think this is a bad move. This is about transparency.
“Trust us” is a poor precedent to set

Resources:

Opioids Addiction in Kentucky

During the last week in August, a terrible tragedy occurred when more than 75 people overdosed on heroin. The epicenter of this tragedy was Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, but it reached east, to the Huntington/Ashland area and into Indiana. The heroin was cut with fentanyl (the drug that killed Prince) and carfentanil (elephant tranquilizer). This was a tragic event, and it is part of an already large and growing problem in Kentucky.
In an Op-Ed in the Middlesboro Daily News, Andy Beshear called drug abuse the single greatest impediment to Kentucky’s economic growth. Vickie Yates Brown Glisson (Bevin’s Health and Family Services Secretary) said Kentucky was on the “forefront of a growing national problem” when it comes to opiate abuse.
There isn’t a lot of good data (that I can get to) about the rate of deaths directly due to opioids, but there is a good report from the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy about drug overdose fatalities. This report gives rates of death per 100,000 people by county. The national average in 2014 for this rate was 14.7. The median number for Kentucky counties is 19.5, and the rate for the state is 27.1–84% larger than the national rate. Not all of these deaths were due to opioids, but the report makes clear that heroin is the state’s “drug of choice”.
There are counties all over the state that have a rate higher than the national average, but the c ounties with the highest death rates are in northern Kentucky, and along the CSXT rail line between Lexington, Hazard, and Pikeville.

There are at least three problems here: addiction, overdoses leading to death, and increased distribution.
Addiction has been a serious problem in Kentucky for a long time looking backwards. Heroin became a major problem after the crackdown on illegal pill usage put in place by Attorney General Jack Conway (there is a great C-J piece on this from May 2014 that we’ve linked). As pills got more expensive and less accessible, people turned to heroin, which is cheaper and often more dangerous.
Overdoses are maybe more prone to happen with heroin than with pills because the entire process, from harvest to sale, is illicit and prone to corruption (It’s less likely — though not impossible — for Oxys to be laced with fentenyl).
Distribution is more of a national or international story, but it appears as marijuana has been decriminalized or legalized across some of the US, Mexican cartels are replacing marijuana with heroin.
Kentucky sought to address all three of these issues in a law passed during the last legislative session with Senate Bill 192: “The Heroin Bill”:
The law gave an immediate $10 million to the state’s addiction treatment system and increased continuous funding by $24 million
To deal with overdoses, the state permits needle exchange programs in jurisdictions that allow them and increases the availability of naloxone, which counteracts overdoses (however, it doesn’t work particularly well with heroin that has been laced)
To deal with distribution, the state has made importing heroin a crime punishable by ten years in prison, and reduced parole for those who sell heroin.
The funding to deal with addiction treatment has gone to several different places: some of it has been used in the department of corrections to provide treatment of incarcerated people and to pilot a program for naltrexone (a drug that reduces high from opioids). Some of it has been used to fund the “Rocket Docket” for drug users.
Another big issue that people have raised in the addiction treatment category is MAT: medication assisted treatment. Joe Sonka wrote a long piece about this recently for Insider Louisville, and there was another long-form piece in the Huffington Post about MAT in Kentucky last year. If you are interested, you should read them.

Resources:

QUICK HITS

Tensions on the rise between UofL and UofL Foundation — UofL threatened to sue it’s foundation if the foundation did not agree to forensic accounting of it’s books. The foundation has been trying to negotiate an exit for it’s chair and former President James Ramsey. The UofL foundation cancelled a meeting for this week.
http://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/2016/09/12/u-l-foundation-trustee-meeting-likely-dead/90284832/
Former KRS Chart Tommy Elliott is now non-voting member — Judge Phillip Shepherd ruled that Tommy Elliott can only be a non-voting member of the KRS board. He failed to attend several meetings after being giving his seat on the board. Keep in mind, Matt Bevin kept armed personnel to try to keep him from staying on.
http://www.state-journal.com/2016/09/08/judge-rules-former-ousted-state-pension-chair-can-stay-but-not-vote/

My Old Kentucky Podcast — Episode 3

Written by Robert Kahne