Let the word go out, from this day forward, that a lot of Kentuckians are sick and tired of having our hopes and dreams for a better Kentucky hijacked by a bunch of smug, small-thinking, self-centered Republicans who twist the system for their own political purposes.

We are mad as hell and we are going to do something about it.

Whenever one of the obstructionists is up for re-election, we are going to be there, fighting for his or her defeat. We are going to be there, campaigning for the restoration of integrity, decency, and concern for the common good. We are going to be there, soldiers in the war for progress instead of regression and stagnation.

These Republicans give politics a bad name. They rule by fear and intimidation, no better than a bunch of Mafia bosses. They are bald-faced liars and two-faced hypocrites who hide behind the flag, religion, and “family values.”

But their day is fast coming to an end. By turning their backs on Kentucky’s horse industry, by denying the commonwealth a badly-needed new revenue stream, and by their bullying tactics, they have forfeited their right to hold public office and have, in the process, begun a revolution.

The revolution will be staffed by all of us who love our horse industry, but also by our allies in other fields. We will be joined by tourism commissions and small-business owners and chambers of commerce who have Kentucky’s interests at heart. We will be joined by social workers, public defenders, and teachers who are tired of seeing important programs cut because of the revenue shortage.

It was bad enough when the head bully, Senate president David “Boss” Williams, defied the will of the people by leading the effort against having the expanded gaming issue put to a statewide referendum as the voters overwhelming said they wanted in electing Steve Beshear to replace Ernie Fletcher as Governor.

But a breaking point was reached in the special session when 10 Republicans on the appropriations committee prevented a slots bill that had been passed by the House from going to the Senate floor for a full debate.

Boss Williams had promised that if the House got a bill to the Senate, it would get a full and fair airing. He lied. Again. The only hero on the Republican side was Sen. Tom Buford, who voted in favor of sending the bill to the full Senate. He was a voice of reason who deserves praise for putting the interests of the public above the interests of the party that Williams runs like an old Chicago machine politicians.

The 10 Republicans – let’s call them the Slots Bill 10 – who kept the slots bill from the Senate floor deserve to be roundly defeated when they run for re-election. I understand a couple may retire, which is wonderful, but even they deserve to be closely scrutinized and called out as long as they’re still in office.

Read the Names of the Slots Bill 10 and more after the jump…

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On the way to Morehead last weekend, I stopped off to eat in my hometown of Mount Sterling. I bought a copy of the local newspaper, the Advocate, and right there on the front page was the news that a grand jury had been convened to investigate yet another cockfighting ring.

Now fighting roosters isn’t as repulsive as fighting dogs, the crime that put Michael Vick out of the NFL and into prison, but it’s still unacceptable in a civilized society. What’s the allure? Gambling, of course. Some folks just love to bet on roosters and watch them try to kill each other.

I’ve always resented the hateful stereotypes about Southerners in general and Kentuckians in particular. We’re not a bunch of ignorant, shiftless hillbillies who see nothing wrong with marrying our cousins. But you know what? We are a backward society and we prove it every chance we get.

Our state senate is controlled by a two-bit political hack who represents five of the most economically depressed counties in the commonwealth. Yet proudly, even smugly, he orchestrated the defeat of a proposal that would have helped Kentucky’s world-famous horse industry and provided a new revenue stream to put a dent in our huge budget deficit.

The proposal was to allow Kentucky’s race tracks to expand their gambling menus by adding slot machines. Period. Nothing more nefarious than that. But thanks to senate President David Williams and his Republican stooges in the senate, the bill didn’t even make it to the floor. It was DOA, as they say on the crime shows.

This turn of events was wildly celebrated in our neighboring states, where casino riverboats have been anchored for more than a decade. Every year untold thousands of Kentuckians cross our borders to bet hundreds of millions – up to a billion, according to one estimate – in the casinos based in Indiana, Illinois, and West Virginia.

Our neighbors use some of this Kentucky money to improve their schools and build new roads. They use the rest of it to increase the purses at their racetracks so that they may entice trainers and breeders from Kentucky.

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The Kentucky horse industry is in a state of emergency, and Governor Steve Beshear should recognize this hard, cold reality by appointing a blue-ribbon task force to seriously and swiftly come up with a plan to stop the bleeding and preserve the commonwealth’s signature industry.

The panel should NOT include the so-called leaders who have proven to be ineffective in their efforts to, first, have a statewide referendum on whether to legalize casino gambling, and, two, to allow Kentucky’s race tracks to add slots machines to their gambling menus.

Beginning with KEEP, every horse industry group needs to be re-energized with new leadership and new thinking. The old game plan has to be tossed and everybody needs to go back to the drawing board and come up with new approaches.

The state’s tourism industry, which so far has been a rather passive supporter of the horse-industry position, needs to become a fully invested partner. So do chambers of commerce, the business community, and economic-development groups. Coalitions must be formed because it’s obvious the horse industry can’t go it alone.

Any new plan must acknowledge, up front, that any efforts on behalf of expanded gaming will not succeed as long as David Williams is president of the state senate.  A baseball man once said that Willie Mays’ glove is where home runs go to die. So it is Williams. Due to his selfish, petty, narrow-minded leadership, the senate is where good ideas go to die.

When House Majority Leader Greg Stumbo’s slots bill didn’t even get out of committee in the senate, it was a big loss for the horse industry and every other area of our society – education, most notably – that would have benefited from slots revenue. Conversely, it was a victory, albeit a Pyrrhic one, for Williams and his Republican henchmen in the senate.

The biggest winners, of course, were the racetrack and casino operators in Illinois, Indiana, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. (Soon Ohio will join the list, now that its governor has decided to support slots legislation.) Now they can keep on raking in those millions of gambling dollars from Kentuckians who must leave the state to get their action.  Now they can keep on siphoning away our horses and stables because their purses, inflated by slots revenue, are far higher than what Kentucky’s tracks can offer.

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I can’t believe I missed the story about the hijacking. Surely it was in The Courier-Journal and the Herald-Leader. Surely Francene on WHAS or Sue on WVLK talked about it. It had to be on the evening news shows, didn’t it? But somehow I missed the story that our commonwealth has been hijacked by “The Bully of Burkesville” and his fanatical band of small-minded terrorists.

Stupid me. I was still operating under the illusion that we had elected Steve Beshear to be Governor of Kentucky partly because he pledged to let the people vote on whether or not to legalize casino gambling. But somewhere along the line, David Williams, the president of the state Senate, hijacked the state capitol and pulled off a bloodless coup that would be the envy of a Banana Republic dictator.

This is extraordinary considering that Williams derives his position and his power from five of the commonwealth’s most economically depressed and educationally challenged counties. His constituency of around 100,000 represents only a fraction of Kentucky’s 4.2 million population.

And yet, due to some quirks in our state constitution, the Senate president has the unbridled right  — if he chooses — to abuse his power, punish his political enemies, promote his own political agenda, and, essentially, hold the commonwealth hostage.

As we are seeing in the current special session of the General Assembly, an irresponsible and mean-spirited Senate president needs only the support of a few fellow Senators – spineless men who have no vision – to ruin our signature industry, thoroughbred racing and breeding, and, in the process, deny our citizens the revenue necessary to stay afloat in these mean and treacherous economic times.

At this moment in our commonealth’s history, Williams has emerged as a full-blown demagogue, the modern equivalent of former Louisiana Governor Huey “Kingfish” Long and his ilk. The great Kentucky-born author, Robert Penn Warren, never met Williams, but he knew him. He wrote about Williams in his classic novel, “All the King’s Men.” He just called him Willie Stark, that’s all.

My favorite definition of “demagogue” doesn’t come from a dictionary, but from H.L. Mencken, the immortal writer and satirist from Baltimore. A demagogue, Mencken said, is “one who will preach doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.”

Which, of course, is what Williams is doing in the special sessions in regard to the proposed legislation about allowing slot machines at our state’s race tracks. Yesterday, asked about the slots bill, Williams imperiously said, “You can stick a fork in it – it’s dead.” He also threatened to renege on his promise to give the bill a full and fair hearing in the Senate, saying he might adjourn the Senate instead.

Is this leadership or what? Here in the state where Lincoln was born, it makes you want to weep, doesn’t it?
One more time, let’s review the facts:

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Nobody asked me, but…

If the NCAA is serious about cleaning up big-time college athletics – and sometimes I wonder if it is – it should adopt a rule similar to the “trainer insuror” rule in thoroughbred racing. The rule stipulates that if an illegal medication is detected in a horse’s system, the trainer is automatically held responsible. Period.

This eliminates a lot of lying, denying, finger-pointing, and buck-passing. Even if the trainer is innocent personally, he’s held responsible for his employees and his horses. There’s no such thing as getting off the hook because of something a groom or veterinarian or unknown party did. The buck stops with the head guy.

And so it should be in college sports. If NCAA rules violations are found in a program, the head coach automatically is held responsible. Coaches may become masters of the practice of “plausible deniability.” If violations are found, assistant coaches or the athletics departments take the rap. But the head man skates, free to take another job and leaving somebody else to clean up his mess.

For reference, consider the cases of Eddie Sutton and Hal Mumme. And, yes, consider the cases of John Calipari at UMass and maybe at Memphis.

For every violation found in his program, the head coach should be forced to sit out a year. No exceptions, no appeals. If the head coach knows for certain that he’s going to be the guy held accountable and might have to sit out two or three years, I guarantee a lot of cheating would magically disappear.

Sure, I think it would be smart for Southern Cal to hire Bob Knight. Who better to clean up the mess left by Tim Floyd? You can bet that Knight wouldn’t have anything to do with slimey street agents like the ones who directed O.J. Mayo to Southern Cal.

But you know what? It’s gotten to the point in big-time college hoops where integrity and decency are almost considered liabilities for a head coach. To win today, the thinking goes, you must have a coach who knows how to operate in the “gray area” where the flesh peddlers ply their trade.

Translated, most of today’s college presidents and athletics directors aren’t opposed to cheating. They’re just opposed to getting caught.

*****

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I wish I could look forward to the special session of our General Assembly with something more than fear and loathing, but I can’t. I have no confidence whatsoever that our Senators and Representatives have the intellectual prowess and the moral courage to do the right thing when it comes to helping our signature horse industry and generating new revenue for our financially-strapped commonwealth.

As in horse racing, past performances mean something and should be studied diligently before one places a bet, and I see nothing in the PP’s of our legislators to suggest that the majority of them have been able to grasp the importance of what’s at stake, much less muster the gumption to put the good of the commonwealth ahead of their overweening need to get re-elected.

The pundits already are promoting the special session as a sort of lightweight (I can’t in good conscience say heavyweight) title bout between, in this corner, wearing the bland beige trunks, the darling of Dawson Springs, Governor Steve Beshear, and, in that corner, wearing the military ensemble of a Banana Republic  dictator, the “Bully of Burkesville,” Senate President David Williams.

Due to an unfortunate quirk in our system, you see, the President of the Senate has come to have just about as much power and influence as the Governor. This might be acceptable if Williams were a statesman and a visionary. But he’s not. He’s an egotistical gasbag of Limbaughian proportions. His idea of leadership is just say no to anything and everything unless he can figure a way to take credit for it.

Strutting and preening as he revels in his obstructionism, Williams hasn’t discouraged speculation that he will run for either Jim Bunning’s U.S. Senate seat next year or the Republican nomination for Governor in 2011. Either is a scenario for which Democrats should get on their knees and pray. Because, then, finally, everyone outside Williams’ six-county fiefdom – especially those who live in the state’s largest cities – would have the opportunity to vote against him and send him to the retirement he so richly deserves.

Williams has been foisted upon us by the residents of Clinton, Cumberland, McCreary, Wayne, and Whitley counties. Their total population of around 100,000 is only a small fraction of Kentucky’s total population of 4,269,245. Yet they get to dictate our state’s future policies through the power Williams wields as president of the Senate. Sadly, instead of choosing to wield his power judiciously and fairly, Williams has used it to stymie legislation that might actually lead to progress.

Maybe he’s determined to bring the rest of Kentucky more in line with the dear hearts and gentle people who are his constituents. They are, by and large, poor and undereducated. According to a recent census, four of Williams’ six counties rank among the nation’s 100 worst counties in terms of median household income. They are: McCreary, 23rd; Wayne, 45th; Cumberland, 61st; and Whitley, 76th.

They hate the status quo, but they’re even more afraid of change. Fear is rampant in the commonwealth, walking hand-in-hand with ignorance and prejudice.  And demagogues like Williams play upon that fear instead of trying to replace it with courage. On the issue of casino gaming, for example, he opposes in on the grounds that it would surely bring the criminal element into Burkesville and Tompkinsville and Monticello, and turn a lot of decent citizens into degenerate gamblers.

With Williams, it’s all about the bogeymen and never about what we know for sure about expanded gaming:

1.    Many of our rival states, most notably Indiana, West Virginia, and Illinois, are using some of the revenue from expanded gaming to beef up racetrack purses, which is enabling them to hurt our Kentucky racing product by drawing horsemen who have to go where they have the best chance to make a living.

2.    Every year Kentuckians cross our borders to gamble an estimated $1 billion at casinos and racetracks in our neighboring states. Those states use those Kentucky dollars to build roads,  improve schools, and pay for health programs – including programs to help addicted gamblers.

3.    Gambling has been a way of life in Kentucky for more than 150 years. Lottery tickets may be purchased in every one of our 120 counties. Bingo has been a staple in many church parishes. But most importantly, expanded gaming has been a part of our cultural landscape for more than 10 years, or whenever the first riverboat was opened just across the river. It is not as if gambling interests are raiding Kentucky. THEY ARE ALREADY HERE AND HAVE BEEN FOR YEARS.

4.    State government already has slashed almost every important social program, denying thousands of Kentuckians the legal, medical, and social help they need, because we don’t have enough revenue coming in, and yet hypocritical organizations such as the Family Foundation continue to oppose slots at racetracks on moral and religious grounds. The reality is that instead of standing up for “family values,” as they pretend, they are tacitly promoting family problems and misery.

What’s so hard to understand about any of this? Our rival states are raping us and we’re letting them do it instead of fighting back. They’re robbing us our signature industry and we’re surrendering without firing a shot. Last time I checked, horses were a $9.3 billion in industry in Kentucky, the third-highest revenue-producing industry in our state. The industry has more than 165,000 employees, making it our second biggest private employer. It generates more than $951 million in state and local tax revenue.

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The room in the funeral home was silent and empty yesterday morning, and Tommy Jolly’s silver trumpet sat on a stand near the casket. Around the room, there were easels with pictures of Tommy with Brenda Lee, probably the most famous singer he ever backed, and many of the various Louisville groups with which he played.

You probably don’t think you knew Tommy Jolly, but you probably did. If you remember the Rascals of Ragtyme from the old Louisville Redbirds baseball games, you knew Tommy Jolly. If you ever danced to the music of Soul, Inc., the Sultans, or Cosmo & The Counts, you knew Tommy Jolly.

He was the tall guy with the Van Dyke beard, blowing the horn. He was a musician’s musician, really, because he could play just about any instrument you put in his hands. When the Monarchs went to Nashville to record “Look Homeward, Angel” in 1964, they took Tommy along on the plane.

He got sick as he could be going down and back, because he didn’t like planes, but at the recording session he played the French Horn beautifully. He had never played the French Horn before. Didn’t matter. Tommy Jolly never met an instrument he didn’t like.

He died Friday morning, far too young at 63, and a friend, Emmy Downes Lynch, sent in this tribute from Hilton Head. S.C. It pretty well sums up the kind of guy Tommy Jolly was. Even when he was sick, he still hit the right note.

“My mother, (whom he loved) passed away two years ago today,” wrote Ms. Downes, “and it was Tommy who played the beautiful trumpet solos at her funeral. He wasn’t feeling well that day and when I said “Tommy, you don’t have to this”, he said “Sometimes you do what you can’t”. He played from his car at Cave Hill because he wasn’t physically able to stand or sit nearby the grave. I’m told that’s the last time he played his trumpet.”

Yeah, that was Tommy Jolly for you. The only thing he loved more than music was family and friends. He never cared about money or material things. His whole life, he never had what musicians call a “real job.” You know, one where you have to go to an office every day or drive or truck or sell cars. All Tommy ever did was play music. He barely scraped by, but that was good enough.

The music bug bit Tommy hard at Durrett High School, when he and his buddy Leon Middleton formed a group called The Squires that played on Sunday afternoons at the VFW Post on Longfield Avenue, near Churchill Downs. Their pay was whatever was in the hat after it was passed around the joint.

After the Squires, Jolly moved from one group to another, one gig to the next, always, like the great basketball players, making the players around him better. He was easy to laugh and slow to anger, the sort of guy who played not for fame or for money but for the pleasure of it.

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The thread that ties together the Billy Clyde Gillispie and John Calipari messes in University of Kentucky basketball are the incompetence and duplicity of President Lee Todd and Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart. The university’s Board of Trustees should call an emergency meeting to grill Todd and Barnhart. If they’re not satisfied with the answers, change may be in order.

Todd and Barnhart hired Gillispie without thoroughbly checking him out and let him get away with not signing a formal contract. They did sign a letter of understanding that gave Gillispie the safeguards he needed — $1.5 million a year if he were fired without cause — but didn’t give UK the safeguards it needed in case Gillispie proved to be the wrong guy, which, of course, he did.

So now the letter of understanding is the crux of the $6 million lawsuit that Gillispie filed against the UK Athletics Association in Dallas. He and his attorneys say it is a binding legal contract, and it may be hard to prove them wrong. On May 28, UK filed a countersuit in Franklin Circuit Court. UK’s only out seems to be a clause that says the terms of the letter are contingent upon Gillispie signing a formal agreement.

But how could Todd and Barnhart let Gillispie go two years without signing a contract? Even in the sordid world of big-time college athletics, this is a first. And Todd and Barnhart look like a couple of clowns for letting Gillispie play them as he did.

In the Calipari case, Todd and Barnhart knew that the NCAA had informed Memphis on Jan. 16 that it was investigating Calipari’s program for rules violations that apparently involved point guard Derrick Rose, who led Memphis to the NCAA title game as a freshman in 2007-’08.

Rose was not mentioned by name, but the NCAA said its allegations involved a player who participated only in that one season, and Rose is the only player who fits that bill. The connection between Rose and Memphis was “Worldwide Wes,” a notorious and nefarious flesh peddler who ingratiates himself with many of the nation’s best prospects.

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It’s no big deal that the weasel Billy Clyde Gillispie filed a lawsuit against the University of Kentucky Athletics Association in Dallas, seeking millions in damages on the grounds that he was wrongfully terminated.

What is it with these clowns from Texas? Didn’t Claude Bassett try to sue UK after doing everything he could to ruin the football program? I believe Gillispie’s lawsuit has about as much merit as Bassett’s and won’t amount to much except for the aggravation of it all.

But the news coming out of Memphis tonight is about as bad as it gets. According to a report on the Memphis Commercial-Appeal website, the NCAA is investigating John Calipari’s former program at Memphis for some serious potential rules violations.

And just like that – poof! — the big pink cloud that has been hovering over Lexington since Calipari’s hiring has turned decidedly dark and threatening. All that talk about Calipari’s sensational recruiting class will be drowned out by the I-Told-You-So crowd who opposed his hiring because of his shady reputation as a recruiter.

So far Calipari has not been accused of anything. However, the NCAA has asked that he be present at a hearing early next month to answer questions about how an unnamed player qualified to get into school and who paid the travel expenses for one of his hang-around guys.

It’s easy to read between the lines. The charges say the player competed only in the 2007-’08 season, the one when the Tigers advanced to the NCAA Tournament title game before losing to Kansas in overtime.

So that limits the suspect list to one — Derrick Rose, the then-freshman point guard who vaulted into the NBA draft after only one season in college and was made the No. 1 overall pick. The NCAA apparently suspects that somebody took Rose’s SAT test for him.

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Here are 10 things I’m wondering about as we head into summer:

1.    Isn’t it time the Louisville Bats dropped the color scheme of the Milwaukee Brewers, their former parent team, and adopted the colors of the Cincinnati Reds, their parent team now and for the foreseeable future? It also wouldn’t bother me at all to see Buddy Bat morph into Louie Ville. Or Silly Slugger.

2.    The folks who run the Frazier Arms Museum, (Frazier International History Museum) or whatever it’s called now, must have something against attracting new customers. It’s well and good that they’re honoring old Fontaine Ferry Park. But they need to liven it up by having a Gypsy Village Night featuring the Monarchs. For those of you not old enough to remember Gypsy Village, it was the open-air pavilion at Fontaine Ferry , where  dances were held on summer nights.  Bring in the Monarchs for a night of old-time rock n’ roll, block off Main Street in front of the museum, and you’ll have a real stroll down memory lane. (In the interest of full disclosure, I am working on a book about the Monarchs that will be published in November to commemorate their 50th anniversary. However, I get nothing from the band except the pleasure of hearing them play.)

3.    Had Churchill Downs treated its horsemen with more respect during the account-wagering negotiations, the track might not have so many short fields today. By treating the horsemen with contempt, the track forfeited tons of loyalty and goodwill. If I were running the track, I’d be doing everything possible to make amends, especially with the “little” stables that have supported the track for decades.

4.    The Karen Sypher extortion trial is scheduled to begin on June 29. I wonder if the lawyers and the government are working on an out-of-court settlement even as we speak. If not, then I guess we’ll all finally learn the nature of her relationship with Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino.

5.    Jeff Brantley, one of the Cincinnati Reds’ radio and TV analysts, recently said he didn’t think Bats’ left-hander Matt Maloney had big-league stuff. I’ve seen Maloney pitch in parts of three seasons and I think he’s wrong. In fact, I expect to see Maloney throwing in Great American Ball Park before the summer’s done. I wish Jim Kelch, the Bats’ play-by-play man who does stints with the Reds, would get Brantley to elaborate.

6.    Owner Jess Jackson’s ego is the main reason Rachel Alexandra ran in the Preakness. I expect it’ll be the same reason she runs in the Belmont Stakes. If she’s healthy and showing no signs of stress, I wouldn’t blame him, either.

7.    Lesson from the Jeremy Jarmon case at UK: No scholarship athlete should ever put any pill in his or her body, or take any injection, unless it has been approved by the team trainer and/or doctor.  All over-the-counter medications must be cleared before taking. No exceptions. Period.

8.    It’s obvious that the University of Louisville has the best overall sports program in the Big East. Record-breaking seasons by the mens and womens basketball teams have been followed by championships in golf, baseball, and softball. I’m probably overlooking some others. Kudos to athletics director Tom Jurich and his staff.

9.    I wish the metro government would take the old River Road Country Club and turn it into a nine-hole golf course and teaching academy for junior players. We don’t need any more soccer fields. But we do need a place where we can put young people on the right road by teaching them to play the hardest and most ethical game of all.

10.    I am really looking forward to the Bob Dylan-Willie Nelson-John Mellencamp concert on July 8 at Slugger Park. Dylan and Nelson are American icons who should be experienced at least once in person even if you don’t particularly care for their music. (But how could you not? And that’s all I’m going to say about that.)