Bluegrass Beacon: Legislators boost, judge busts liberty
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Editor’s note: The Bluegrass Beacon column is a weekly syndicated statewide newspaper column posted on the Bluegrass Institute website after being released to and published by newspapers statewide.
This edition of “Liberty Boosters and Busters” is brought to you by reasonable Kentuckians who reject racism, bigotry and censorship with every fiber of their freedom-loving beings.
Liberty Booster: The attorney general’s office decided in favor of the Bluegrass Institute Center for Open Government in its appeal challenging a Jefferson County school board meeting at a private law firm on the 28th floor of an office building in downtown Louisville on a Sunday afternoon in April.
Assistant Attorney General James Herrick ruled the meeting – held to discuss applicants for the district’s then-vacant interim superintendent’s position – violated the law requiring public agencies to conduct meetings “at specified times and places convenient to the public.”It’s also likely the building was locked that day as it was on a subsequent Sunday when some of my colleagues at the institute tried to enter – an experience Herrick referenced in his ruling.
Liberty Buster: U.S. District Judge Danny Reeves allowed Eric Conn, the eastern Kentucky lawyer who pleaded guilty to engineering one of history’s largest Social Security fraud campaigns, to remain free on home incarceration – despite warnings against doing so by an FBI agent and witnesses claiming Conn had crossed 140 borders in eight years and had vowed to run before going to jail.
Conn ran, and likely is now sipping martinis and hanging out on the beach of some country with women for whom he previously claimed to have provided “English lessons,” and with whom the U.S. has no extradition treaty.
Yet Reeves, the judge, forced Sam Girod, an Amish farmer from rural Bath County, to remain in jail for months without bond while awaiting trial before handing him a harsh six-year prison sentence for the “crime” of mislabeling homemade herbal skin salves containing such dangerous (sarcasm dripping here) ingredients as chickweed and peppermint and not acquiescing to the Food and Drug Administration’s ideological thuggery.
Prosecutors, gung-ho though they were to destroy this man and ridicule his way of life, failed to produce a single victim harmed by Girod’s concoctions.
Yet Reeves permitted Conn, a wealthy white-collar criminal whose fraud resulted in 1,500 people losing their benefits and at least one person committing suicide, to remain out of jail.
He also handed a weak six-month sentence to Charlie Andrus, a former chief regional Social Security judge who pleaded guilty to conspiring with Conn to retaliate against the whistleblower in the campaign defrauding the program of $550 million.
Reeves in an unrelated case allowed a former University of Kentucky employee who swindled the school out of $200,000 to avoid prison altogether with a sentence of probation, calling it “sufficient punishment.”
Yet farmer Girod, who’s harmed no one and had no criminal record when his nightmare began, languishes in a Pennsylvania prison more than 400 miles away from his home.
An appeals-court reversal or presidential pardon would go a long way toward highlighting the insufficiency of this judge’s contemptible inconsistency.
Liberty Boosters: Gov. Bevin and Frankfort’s Republican legislative leaders for planning to tackle pension and tax reforms separately.
Claims that tax reform is critical to generating revenue wrongly blame Kentucky’s public pension woes on insufficient support from taxpayers or poor returns on investments or, at the very least, station the cart before the horse.
The retirement systems’ funding levels continue to fall even though the commonwealth’s current budget poured an additional $1.2 billion into them.
Also, investment returns for the past 30 years have, on average, exceeded more than 9 percent in the Kentucky Retirement Systems and 8 percent in the Teachers’ Retirement Systems.
At the core of the pension crisis is a structural weakness rather than lack of dollars.
Stop the digging by fixing the systems’ benefit structures.
Then, looking for more dirt to fill the hole becomes an exercise in productivity rather than futility.
Jim Waters is president and CEO of the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, Kentucky’s free-market think tank. Read previous columns at www.bipps.org. He can be reached at jwaters@freedomkentucky.com and @bipps on Twitter.