Friday, October 11, 2002
GOP leaders are asking former governor Marc Racicot (R-flouncing weenie) to run in his place, but he said that he didn't want to do the same thing as Democrats did in New Jersey. Translation: he's two years removed from Montana, he ran the state into the ground while everyone else did well, and he'd also get whupped at the polls.
Can't they find any more recruiting violations in the University of Kentucky basketball program? This stopped being interesting since they seem to have lost interest in the substance of Tina Conner's charges against Paul Patton, or if there even is any.
Monday, October 07, 2002
The Lexington Herald-Leader reports that Tina Conner had made a complaint to the governor's office about crude comments by a state trooper in a Paducah restaurant and in her office in Clinton. The head of constituent services then arranged a meeting between Conner and the then-Kentucky Police Commissioner Gary Rose...
The special meeting arranged for Conner is not the way complaints about a trooper typically are handled, according to Rose and the current internal-affairs commander, Capt. Steve Simpson.
"It's very unusual that somebody would come directly to the commissioner and complain," Simpson said.
Stories like this make me say "Hmpf". It sounds to me like Conner was getting some from the governor and demanding favors from his office.
An AP statehouse reporter in the Lexington Herald-Leader has a few more details. For example, one of Tina Conner's claims is that during the relationship, Governor Patton's office had tipped her in advance of state inspectors coming to Birchtree Healthcare. However, according to the Cabinet for Health Services, inspections are planned in regional offices, not in Frankfort, and the schedule is closely guarded. In other words, not even the governor should know when inspectors would come. (Emphasis on 'should'. Law enforcement, invited by Health Services Secretary Marcia Morgan, is trying to determine if someone might have leaked a schedule to the governor's office.) Birchtree Healthcare was in Clinton in Hickman County, which is along the Mississippi River, about 300 miles from Frankfort.
More on Birchtree: Conner had been complaining that it wasn't getting its fair share of Medicaid funding - which Health Services agreed with. However, it took a call from the governor's office to get everything straightened out, as the tracking system was pretty FUBAR. Is that 'sex-for-favors'? Conner says yes; the actual evidence is inconclusive.
There was also some reporting on phone calls between the governor's office and Conner, who wasthe Patton administration's contact person for Hickman County for five years. Also not surprising, seeing as how Conner had a legitimate beef about Medicaid funding, and constituent complaints would be funnelled through her.
There's a lot that has to be proved to make a case for sexual harassment. I'm not sure that the evidence is there. But then, Bill Clinton was sued by Paula Jones on even less evidence. That case may have been different because the Jones case was pure political motivation. The Patton-Conner case appears to be less so.
Paul Patton, the governor of Kentucky, is being sued for sexual harassment by someone he had a two-year fling with. The complainant, one Tina Conner, owns a nursing home called Birchtree Healthcare. In her complaint, she claims that Governor Patton gave her nursing home and construction company state assistance. She also claims that after the relationship ended, Patton sent regulators to Birchtree Healthcare, who dinged it for dozens of violations. The nursing home has now filed for bankruptcy after losing most of its patients.
First of all, about the giving state assistance to the nursing home. Big fat hairy deal. Every nursing home should be getting assistance in the form of Medicaid funding. As for the violations, Ed Wilson, director of long-term care at Kentucky's Cabinet for Health Services, is quoted that the violations cited by state regulators were "very serious care issues. These weren't paper deficiencies that could be corrected by filing a paper."
In other news, Conner really bolsters here credibility in my eyes (snicker) by talking to an aide to Gennifer Flowers.
Have to start consulting the Louisville-Lexington papers for more.
via Hesiod.
Talk about an easy campaign promise for Bill McBride: Vote for me and I won't make your inbox unusable, unlike my opponent.
Jeb hacks claim that it wasn't really a campaign ad. Their proof? Well, they said so, which is probably good enough for gullible Hoosiers(*) that would actually vote for that spamming crook.
* "Hoosier" in the St. Louis sense, which is not "Hoosier" in the Indiana sense.
