It's never happened before.

US House Speaker voted out here from the Kentucky delegation.

This year is a little bit better than it was last year or the year before.

Some good news as Kentucky gets ready for another flu season and hear how this organization is helping women artists take flight.

Production of Kentucky Edition is made possible in part by the KET Endowment for Kentucky Productions, the Leonard Press, Endowment for Public Affairs and the Ket Millennium Fund.

Good evening and welcome to Kentucky Edition on this Wednesday, October the fourth.

I'm Renee Shaw.

Thank you for joining us this evening.

It's being called uncharted territory.

The U.S. House of Representatives and is in recess until next week.

And it doesn't have a leader after yesterday's historic vote to remove Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House.

We'll have the Kentucky reaction to this in just a moment.

Now, the vote was two six 2 to 10.

Eight Republicans joined all Democrats to oppose McCarthy.

Those eight are part of a conservative faction unhappy with the recent spending bill to keep the government open for 45 days.

All of Kentucky's congressional Republicans voted to keep McCarthy.

The one Democrat, Morgan McGarvey, voted against him.

Now we have reactions tonight from several members of the Kentucky House delegation.

Congressman Thomas Massie of the fourth District in northern Kentucky praised McCarthy during the House floor debate.

I can tell you this motion to vacate is a terrible idea.

As the only member who's serving here who took every chance to vote against Speaker Boehner and to vote against Speaker Ryan.

I can tell you that this chamber has run has been run better, more conservatively and more transparently under Mr. McCarthy than any other speaker that I have served under.

Congressman Massie says that Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio is his choice to replace McCarthy.

Now, here is a statement from Congressman Hal Rogers of Kentucky's fifth District.

He said, quote, The House made a monumental mistake by ousting Speaker McCarthy.

He showed immense courage and leadership by negotiating a deal to avoid a government shutdown, even at the risk of losing his gavel.

I am grateful for his service and quote Congressman Andy Barr of the sixth District in central Kentucky spoke on the Fox News Channel just after the vote.

He said this is a setback for the conservative agenda.

But today was a sad day for the conservative movement.

Today was a sad day for the Republican Party because every day that goes on we don't have a speaker is a day we don't have an impeachment inquiry.

It's a day that goes by where we can't pass conservative appropriations bills as a day that passes, that we aren't advocating for border security.

And in a narrow majority, Brat tactics matter.

And joining with Democrats to defeat conservative bills is not advancing the conservative cause.

The only Democrat in Kentucky's U.S. House delegation is Morgan McGarvey, who represents the Louisville area.

Third District.

He says this shake up couldn't come at a worse time.

But no business can take place until we have a new speaker.

And that's why I absolutely take no joy in the Republican dysfunction we're seeing right now.

We have to govern.

We have less than 45 days for the government to be funded and to remain open.

We just made progress on that last week.

And here we are going back to square one with the removal of the speaker.

So I'm here.

I stand ready to work.

My Democratic colleagues stand ready to work in the government responsibly instead of what we're seeing from the extremist Republicans.

U.S.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate minority leader, praised McCarthy in a statement.

Here's part of what he said.

Quote, Speaker McCarthy has my sincere thanks for his service to our nation and what is often a thankless role.

The speaker's tenure was bookended by historic fights, but as he reminded his colleagues when he took the gavel.

Our nation is worth fighting for in quote.

Now in Kentucky's News, we're counting down to Kentucky's general election.

The state's Republican candidate for governor continues to be pressed on his stance on abortion.

Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron participated in a conversation with Spectrum News One last night.

Spectrum says Governor Andy Beshear was also invited, but that he declined to participate.

Cameron was asked if he supports exceptions to Kentucky's Human Life Protection Act, which makes abortion illegal even in the case of rape and incest.

He once again said he would sign an abortion bill that had those exceptions if Kentucky was required to change its law.

Cameron then talked about needing stiff penalties for people who abuse minors.

I know a lot of this has originated because Andy Beshear has put on an ad on television.

And look, if you have seen the ad, there's a young lady that is sharing her story.

And I appreciate I know she was sharing that story with me in this statewide ad, and I appreciate her sharing it with me.

I cannot comprehend just how traumatic that experience was.

I think that if someone harms a child, if someone sexually assaults a child, and then we need to put them under the jail and as attorney general and as the next governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, I'm going to make that abundantly clear that we won't tolerate adults who take advantage of and abuse our minors.

We're going to put them under the jail.

And I will make sure to lead the charge with our legislature to fight for our children.

The Kentucky Democratic Party responded to Cameron in a statement.

Quote, Daniel Cameron responded to a rape survivor last night and told her and her fellow survivors that a court of law would have to force him to support exceptions for rape and incest.

Cameron stands on Kentucky's current law is clear.

End quote.

Boeing, the aircraft giant, is the latest company helping the Republican Party of Kentucky renovate its state headquarters in Frankfurt.

The Kentucky land turn reports that Boeing's political action committee gave $100,000 to the building fund on September the fifth.

Boeing joins Pfizer, Verizon, AT&T, Microsoft, Comcast and Delta Air Lines on the list of donors.

Donations totaled $2.7 million.

The Kentucky General Assembly passed a bill in 2017 allowing unlimited corporate donations to party building funds.

Public radio journalist Roland Barton joins me in just a few minutes to discuss this and other political news of the week.

They're considered the taxpayer dollar watchdog.

The state auditor of public accounts oversees more than 600 audits annually of state agencies, counties and public works.

The current data follower is term limited, and current state treasurer Alison Ball, a Republican and Democrat, Kimberly Rader.

They want the job.

You can learn more about each of them and why they're pursuing the office this Sunday on Connections.

I have a background that lends itself to that have an interest that lends itself to that.

You're right.

It is a divisive time.

It is a time of real polarization.

And I try to do things the right way and be a statesman and be an example of that.

So I think you need to be called into this because it is tough.

It is hard.

You need to feel like there's a higher purpose in doing it.

Yeah, it's a difficult season, but all the more reason why we need people who I think see this as public service.

Yeah, I was a prosecutor for four years, so I think that's a really good thing to remember.

Not only have I been treasurer, I've been a watchdog.

I'm ready to go in that role.

But I was a prosecutor and the honor roll has more of a prosecutorial type responsibility to it.

So I know how to investigate, make sure people are held accountable.

You know, I get excited about being fiscally responsible, protecting against waste and fraud and abuse.

So, you know, all those things go hand in hand to serve in that role as that watchdog on the back end.

It's what you learn when you don't have a lot is you learn to be resourceful.

And so we've been very resourceful with our campaign funds.

We have a 1993 RV that the campaign purchased that we that's what we use to travel around.

When we were in western Kentucky, we stayed at our state park campgrounds.

So we learned to be resourceful.

I think also, you know, I hold in my heart as far as serving as a teacher, serving as auditor, understanding what it's like to be a a Kim reader or really a fe reader.

My mother doesn't have power and needs someone to carry that responsibility for remembering the people who have no power and and want to want to do better, want to have more stability.

And the auditor can't fix all of those problems.

But what the auditor can do is work really hard to make sure that we're being a good steward of tax dollars and doing everything we can with the money we have.

You can watch my full interview with both candidates for State Auditor Sunday morning at 1130 Eastern, 1030 Central on Katie's Connections.

Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg says he has a plan to create and restore affordable housing in the city.

My Louisville home is a new strategy that aims to address the city's need for more than 31,000 units for low income residents, with new efforts to emphasize green energy and sustainability, the plan simplifies the city's Land Development code to remove regulatory obstacles and expands the Affordable Housing Trust Fund to support an annual $20 million for project funding.

It also provides financial incentives for the restoration of units that have been abandoned and vacated.

Speaking to reporters, Mayor Greenburg said the changes aren't exclusive to one area or housing type, but it's a win for the whole city.

And we're talking about housing of every type, single family housing, apartments, duplexes, every type of housing in every zip code, every metro council district, every neighborhood.

Housing is not an over there problem.

It's a right here problem.

And we need a solution that works right here in Louisville, all across Louisville, public feedback on the plan is open until November, with the final version set to be released on December 1st.

A new development after the Jefferson County Schools bus fiasco.

Louisville Public Media says JCPenney has reassigned Chris Perkins, who oversaw the transportation plan that caused those long delays and an overhaul on the first day of school.

While it remains unclear if Perkins is reassignment as linked to the bus route problems, the district frequently reassigned employees who are under investigation.

The Board of Education is in the early stages of investigating what went wrong on that first day.

In the meantime, former CPS middle school superintendent Rob Falk has been named chief operations officer until an official replacement is chosen.

Time now for a midweek check in of some major political news this week.

So far with Rylan Barton, who's the managing editor of Kentucky Public Radio.

Good to see you.

Good to see you, Renee.

So let's start with the governor's race, of course.

What else would we start with?

Daniel Cameron made a solo appearance on Spectrum News last night.

The governor, Andy Beshear, declined to participate, although he was represented there with some clips and some quotes that the host chose to insert during the conversation.

Abortion once again came up, and he is still saying what?

I mean.

I think it's been changing a little bit.

It's been evolving.

So this is the first time that he kind of publicly confirmed his new stance, which is that if forced to by a court order, essentially, then, yes, he would support exceptions for rape and incest.

So this is stances evolved a little bit over the course of the campaign.

Early on when asked, you know, did he support Kentucky's near-total ban on abortion?

Would you support any exceptions to it?

He said he supports it as is so really like not supporting exceptions for rape and incest.

He's kind of softened his stance after Governor Beshear released this ad last month featuring a young woman who was raped when she was very young as a as a pretty teenager and and and senator, you know, really slamming Attorney General Cameron for not supporting cases, you know, abortions in case cases of rape and incest, including this one.

It was it was interesting to see how Cameron kind of has developed his stance during this during this interview with on Spectrum one last night, because, you know, he was really trying to lean into that and and call out this particular situation by name and saying that, well, this is an example where, you know, we need to be sympathetic.

But the way in which he's kind of expressing his sympathy was, you know, we need to put that person, you know, the the sexual abuser in this case under the jail leading into a you know, a tough on crime.

Let's go after the you know, the people who are doing bad deeds rather than, you know, really talking at all about about the exception to abortion or about the pregnancy.

And he's leaning into that.

I'm the pro-life, pro-life candidate without really being specific about that.

As specific as we've gotten is that if forced, you know, by a court order or if the legislature passes a bill, including exceptions, then he would sign that.

But that's where we've arrived.

It has really evolved over the course of the year.

And we could go back to the first ad about abortion, the Beshear campaign or those in his court launched from the prosecute her and Jefferson County, where she ends by saying, you know, Daniel Cameron favors rapists and then victims rights.

So maybe he was trying to make a connection there of victims rights, like I'm your victims rights person.

Right.

I'm going to be hard on crime and still keep my pro-life position firmly in place.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And and what's so interesting about this is that this is a real split in how Democrats and Republicans have kind of run on abortion in recent years.

And that Andy Beshear, the Democrat, is going on the offensive on this on on kind of enshrining some semblance of of reproductive rights, of abortion rights, access, whereas Democrats, including Beshear in the past, have really kind of tried to not talk about this too much, tried to remain silent on it a bit.

But I think last year's vote on the anti-abortion amendment, which Kentuckians rejected during the general election, has kind of emboldened reproductive reproductive rights activists a little bit and Democrats to lean in to that issue in Kentucky.

So Beshear also had a busy day yesterday, I guess you could say, because he released his infrastr Yeah, this was a kind of sweeping plan calling for a clean water infrastructure, calling for a state development to attract more companies to come into Kentucky, also broadband.

A lot of these are pretty similar to efforts that both Beshear and the Republican leaders of the legislature have agreed to in recent years, especially during the COVID years, when there's a lot of federal money flowing through the state that could be spent on these sorts of projects.

So especially on that water point, it's about $500 billion that he's proposing for clean water infrastructure, which is mimics a proposal that came through the last budget a couple of years ago.

So I think he's, again, trying to lean out of politics on these on these types of issues, saying that these are, you know, beyond partizan differences.

These are things that everybody can agree to.

And and I mean, the record does show that that's something that Republicans have gotten behind in the legislature, too.

So another topic is Boeing is landing a pretty good deal with the Republican Party of Kentucky by finding or helping to finance the building we want to be very specific about.

This is not for any kind of campaign or person or cause, but for the actual maintenance and and upkeep of the Republican Party headquarters located in Frankfort.

This story, broken by Tom Loftus.

Tell us about this.

Yeah, Tom's been keeping a good eye on this particular fund.

So a couple of years ago, the legislature passed this law that removes the limit on how much companies or entities can donate to the building fund for four parties.

And yeah, this fund has become the Republican Party building fund.

It's become a real a place for a lot of companies to donate to.

So Boeing is one they donated about $100,000 to to that fund.

Recently Pfizer donated about a million $1,000,000 to it recently.

Also AT&T with $200,000.

It's a it's a lot of big companies who are consistently lobbying in Kentucky and and, you know, wanting particular bills passed around here.

They've been so they've been putting a lot of money into the Republican candidates, into the Republican Party's building fund.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party's building fund has really been languishing, according to Tom Story, the third building fund that has less than $2,000 of receipts expenses over the last three months.

And it had like $340,000 on hand as of September 30th.

So they've not been doing as well.

Obviously, a lot of this is because Republicans are mainly in power in Kentucky when it comes to the legislature.

Most of the statewide offices, you know, congressional seats are, you know, the only statewide Democratic official is Governor Andy Beshear.

And yeah, so that's that's where all the money has been going into that Republican Party building FUND Yeah, well, we'll have to leave it there for today.

But thank you so much for your time.

We always appreciate it.

Thanks, Renee.

It windfall comes the autumn leaves, football season and flu season.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, the exact timing and duration of flu season varies, but flu activity ramps up in October, peaks between December and February and can last as late as May.

University of Kentucky immunologist Massoud.

He stopped by our studio earlier today to give us some advice on how to best protect ourselves.

More in tonight's look at medical news.

What are your expectations this flu season?

Well, I'm actually a little bit reassured by the numbers because our flu activity this year is a little bit better than it was last year or the year before, which is great.

But our vaccines have already rolled out.

They were available about two weeks ago.

So I think, you know, let's just get vaccinated and get ready.

But based on the current numbers, it's looking like not a very scary season ahead of us.

Well, good.

So we'll keep our fingers crossed.

It's still early because we are literally recording the first cases as we speak.

But this is our typical season, October to March.

Okay.

Because I do remember this time last year we were telling a much different story about that.

So what explains the change?

Well, I would say that we've been out of our COVID protocols for a while last year and even a little bit of tail the year before, people were just, you know, letting their guards down, getting out of masking as a regular basis, going back to school, going back to in-person activities.

And so with, you know, as you know, with flu, it's a seasonal vaccine.

And so we only have immunity for whatever is circulating that year.

And most times it's our best guess for what's going to be circulating that year.

And so I think the the the harder seasons that we've had were really related to the fact that we had just come out of hiding or hibernation.

The code, the COVID induced hibernation that we've had and more people mingling for the first time in months and people really being happy to return to in-person classes and have Thanksgiving dinner and and all the things that they missed out on for a couple of years.

So I think that that's that and the and the waning immunity from not being exposed to flu from not gathering with others where the two driving forces and you would highly recommend that folks don't gamble right.

That they get their flu vaccine unless some health condition would cause you not to.

And would there be a reason why someone is ineligible for a flu vaccine?

Yeah.

So there's there's a couple of reasons not to be eligible to flu vaccine.

And one of them is egg allergies, because we still grow our flu vaccines and eggs.

We're still looking for new technology.

But really, other than that, we should we should all be getting vaccinated.

We should not take a gamble because flu is still one of the main causes for sending young children, especially those under the age of one and older people so older than 60 years of age and pregnant women to the intensive care unit every year.

So if you had a recent flu vaccine and you felt a little off kilter a few hours later or the next day, should you be concerned about that?

I'd say that's your immune system getting to work there, seeing the antigen and all those pieces are getting activated and happy and making all those antibodies and your other immune cells are making cytokines and just just preparing themselves to respond.

So you're building your immune memory.

So I would not be concerned about that.

And it's a fully inactivated vaccine.

So you cannot get the flu from getting the flu vaccine, right.

That was my next step.

Right?

It's not a live it's not a live virus.

It's not even live attenuated.

It's it's a it's a dead vaccine.

Compose Arts is an organization that champions women composers and visual artists.

Their current project is support the work of composer Angela Rice and artist Lindsey Kaiser, and their collaboration on an illustrated musical called The Royal Red Bird.

MOORE And this week's look at art and culture we call Tapestry.

Angela Rice.

She composed this beautiful children's musical fable.

It's an hour and a half musical fable about a red bird that the lead character saved from his blinds.

And it happened to have been the royal red bird who possessed all the melodies of Birdland, over 10,000 melodies.

And so his life was blessed from then on.

So it's a wonderful lesson about one small act of kindness can change the world.

I saw the whole scene.

I saw the whole scene play out.

And then the way I write music is I just write it spontaneously.

I wrote that story from the beginning to the end in one swoop.

The text, the lyrics came with the melody at the very same time.

Just live stream like watching a movie and I can sing and see the pictures and write the words and write the melody at the same time.

The first time she asked me to illustrate, I said, No way.

I don't.

I would love to.

It's a perfect position, perfect art project to work on with you because I love nature and the whole theme takes place in birds land, But I just didn't feel like I had time and I had this Plan B career I was working on and patent law and it was very serious work.

And but then I had a dream and I woke up and I saw all the illustrations completely finished from the dream and the pathway forward to actually making them.

So I would get up at 5 a.m. and paint until seven and we did that.

I went back to Angela, we worked out the details and two years later we had a finished book in print and that was this time last year.

The first time again, this is a world premiere.

I really wasn't aware of the gender problems until I was going to Lincoln Center and heard that a woman was going to have a production in 2016 and she was the first woman composer performed there in 103 years.

And that I read that women composers, especially in New York City, will just give up.

Even though they were talented, they realized that they would never, never make it.

I didn't believe that I could make it.

As an artist, you're kind of always told it.

The arts is just too impossible.

I was ironically supporting myself as a muralist when I went through law school at night, but I still didn't believe in it.

With the with the support of my board, we got to Lincoln Center and seven years as a woman artist in Kentucky, and it took all that effort just to put into me.

But now that I've made these accomplishments, it's it's time to go.

It's time to open it up and help other women because we are underserved all over.

We're looking for talented women composers and visual artists in the States, and we're looking to educate the next generation of young women composers and artists.

The arts, to me, are our chance of really exploring our potential.

And I think for many artists, it's okay to have another job, it's okay to have other things.

But when there's an organization like Compose Arts that can really support you and your efforts, you can really do your highest level work.

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

We think about domestic violence in marriages.

We don't think about it in dating violence, I would say.

Tomorrow on Kentucky Edition, we'll look at the YMCA camp teaching teens how to stay safe in their relationships.

We hope you'll join us for that story and so much more tomorrow night at 630 Eastern, 530 Central for Kentucky Edition, where we inform, Connect and Inspire.

We hope you'll connect with us all the ways you see on your screen.

Facebook X, formerly known as Twitter and Instagram, to stay in the loop.

And you can watch us on the PBS video app and send us a story idea at Public Affairs at KET dot org Thank you so much for watching today and we hope to see you right back here again tomorrow night.

I'm Renee Shaw.

Take really good care.