Commentary

Last year, 2025, was the 75th anniversary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) affordable rural housing programs. If a spring 2025 plan to reorganize the entire Department is implemented, those and many other USDA programs would be sharply reduced or eliminated.   But is that plan – USDA’s Agency Reduction in Force and Reorganization…

The vice mayor’s re-election website deleted the word “activist,” the Civil Rights plank, and the Environment plank, demoted housing from a promise to a noun — and replaced them with a pledge to avoid drama. The record says the website is the honest one.

For 107 years Lexington’s thoroughbreds ran at the Kentucky Association course on Race Street — the ground that launched Isaac Murphy and gave America its oldest stakes race. Then the Depression killed it, a housing project rose on its grave, and a handful of horsemen gambled everything on a non-profit called Keeneland.

On the night Fayette’s school board locked in four more years of Demetrus Liggins, a board member lectured skeptical parents that “sometimes transparency is a choice.” Eighteen months of receipts later, we know whose choice it was.

Lexington’s single biggest source of local political money is a horse farm. Its growth boundary — the nation’s first, drawn in 1958 — is what that money is defending. A documented, bilateral look at the homebuilders and the horse farms fighting over where to draw the line, traced dollar by dollar through the campaign-finance…

The same low ground along Wolf Run that flooded out Kilrush Drive in June 1992 was bought up, demolished and left as a mowed city greenway for fifteen years — until a permaculturist asked to plant it. How a drowned Lexington street became Kentucky’s biggest food forest.

Two candidates for a single Kentucky Court of Appeals seat have raised about $649,000 — real money for a race with no party label and almost no coverage. Read the filings and the maxed-out checks sort into two networks: the appointed incumbent funded by the plaintiff’s bar, labor and the Beshear circle; the challenger…

Between the summer of 1869 and the fall of 1870 — barely fifteen months — mobs in Madison County, Kentucky killed at least seven Black people. The county had a courthouse at Richmond, a college at Berea founded on the principle of racial equality, and, for that stretch, a Klan that rode more or…