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10.9.2020, No. 25
“If the stakes were any higher…” — from Wax Fang’s new song “The Holy Fire,” with urgent strings by Louisville Orchestra musicians
FIVE.
1. LEO has a story about a new coalition called Louisville Operating Venues Safely, or LOVS. Antz Wettig, who co-owns Zanzabar, said, “I’m really thankful…because we all talk each other through hard times. I don’t think it started out to be like this, but I think it turned out to be a support group.”
2. In a Jacobin interview about the Louisville protests, Robert LeVertis Bell, who lost against Jecorey Arthur in the Democratic primary to represent the Russell neighborhood on Metro Council, said, “There are so many guns at the park. A lot of the protesters carry guns, and the 3 Percenters come through every so often and antagonize people with their guns. The Boogaloo Boys come through with their guns. And of course, there’s the police and their guns. It feels like a war zone sometimes, with the number of people walking around with guns.”
3. This Spectrum News story explores how “candidates for public office in Kentucky are using the plight of coal and its current and retired miners to attract voters, proving once again those hard, black rocks are political gold in Kentucky.” Mitch McConnell and his Democratic challenger for U.S. Senate, Amy McGrath, “have flooded Kentuckians’ mailboxes, social media pages, televisions and radios with coal-related advertisements about miners’ pensions, black-lung lawsuits and overall support for the coal industry and its employees.”
Though this New York Times piece, about coal’s accelerated decline, mostly takes place in Arizona, “Friends of Coal” Kentucky — McConnell country — can surely relate: “‘We’re going to put our miners back to work,’ Mr. Trump promised soon after taking office.
“He didn’t.
“To some degree, Mr. Trump was defeated by powerful market forces, primarily, low natural gas prices that made coal a less attractive fuel for power plants and the increasing economic viability of renewable energy sources like solar and wind. The pandemic made matters worse, slowing coal sales as energy consumption in the United States dipped.”
According to the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, 6,612 people worked in Kentucky’s coal industry in 2016. By 2019? The number was 3,449.
4. Today is your last chance to request an absentee ballot.
McConnell, who is currently running for his seventh consecutive term, had his smallest margin of victory in 1984, the first year he won. Not including any third-party candidates:
1984 McConnell: 49.9% of the vote; Walter “Dee” Huddleston: 49.5%
1990 McConnell: 52.2%; Harvey Sloane: 47.8%
1996 McConnell: 55.5%; Steve Beshear: 42.8%
2002 McConnell: 64.7%; Lois Combs Weinberg: 35.3%
2008 McConnell: 53%; Bruce Lunsford: 47%
2014 McConnell: 56.2%; Alison Lundergan Grimes: 40.7%
In ’84, McConnell ran his famous “Hound Dog” ads, which launched his ascendency and effectively ended Huddleston’s political career. In one spot, a pack of bloodhounds search for Huddleston, who was “running away from his record.” I had Emilia, my first-grader, and her brother Miles, who just turned four, watch the ad.
Emilia: “Why did the dogs even want to chase the man? That would be scary! Why are they in a cornfield? And now why are they in a restaurant? Dogs in restaurant!”
Miles: “Are you gonna write whatever we say?”
Me: “Sure.”
Miles: “Woof!”
5.
For Miles’ birthday last weekend, my family stayed in a cabin at 12-acre Progress Park in Buechel, just off Bardstown Road. (Next time, we’ll try out one of the Airstream campers glampers.) We had the whole park, including the playground, to ourselves for two days. “I’ve missed slides,” Emilia said. A canoe oar in water, logs popping and hissing in a firepit. For a second I forgot what year it was.
The Eye Care Institute supports this newsletter, and has since I started writing it six months ago. A huge thank you to them.
And now, the “Five. Oh! Too…” version of an eye exam:
Can you read this? Wait, you can? Whoa. You must have super vision or something.
Can’t read it? Maybe get your eyes checked.
OH!
A little something from the LouMag archive.
Back in April 1995, “Mitch and the Machine” profiled Mitch McConnell, who in his second term as a U.S. senator from Kentucky was “gearing up to be a kingmaker in Kentucky and a big wheel in Washington.” One source said, “Now that Republicans are in the majority, McConnell flatly declares reform shouldn’t be on the agenda at all.” Janet Mullins, a Louisvillian who worked on McConnell campaigns before moving on to George H.W. Bush’s White House, said, “Oh, he’s nothing if not well-prepared and methodical. When he decides what he wants, he makes a plan, and he realizes that every step is a step along the way to making it happen.” The chair of Kentucky’s Democratic Party called him the “meanest junkyard dog in the Republican Party in Kentucky.” Also from the story: “As chairman of the Ethics Committee, he says his long-term goal is to elevate the standing of Congress in the eyes of the public.”
McConnell was already thinking about retaining his seat in ’96. “Then you’re not an aberration,” he said. “You’re a trend.”
Read past newsletters here.