Though she is not heavily covered by major media outlets, Darlene Price, is running for U.S. Senate to be part of the Commonwealth’s Congressional Delegation.  Major media outlets have largely ignored Darlene Price, as well as Maurice Sweeney, the only black person running for U.S. Senate to represent Kentucky.

Price and Sweeney are running against Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway, Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, and Kentucky Lt. Governor Daniel Mongiardo.

However, according to the Kentucky Secretary of State’s website, neither Sweeney, Conway, Grayson, nor Mongiardo are officially running. Candidates are required by law to register with the Kentucky Department of State when running for political office. Below are the candidates the Kentucky Secretary of State currently have listed as running for U.S. Senate:

It is assumed that Sweeney, Conway, Grayson, and Mongiardo have actually filed, but Kentucky’s Secretary of State, Trey Grayson, the ex-officio Chief Election Officer of the Commonwealth simply hasn’t listed the information for the general public.

To view a complete list of what is presumably all candidates running for office, click here. 

United We Stand – Kentucky’s LGBTI News™ will continue to report news about candidates mainstream media organizations are ignoring.

On December 25, 2009, a man attempted to set off explosives on Detroit-bound airplane. Kentucky’s U.S. Senate candidate Darlene Price, a former special agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and author of “BorderGate, the story the government doesn’t want you to read,” released the following statement about the event today:

Immediately following the terror attempt aboard the aircraft, Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano announced: “The system worked.”  The suspect was able to bring explosives on board a flight from Europe to the U.S. and only failed in his “mission” because his bomb didn’t explode but “the system worked.”  Really?  This is a clear failure not only of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), but of the entire Department of Homeland Security (DHS) of which TSA is a component.  These agencies have long been suffering from incompetent management.    The promotion systems in these agencies is the “good old boy” crony system.  The ‘”best and the brightest” are rarely promoted into management positions.  When better qualified agents/inspectors dare to file any type of legitimate complaint or grievance in an attempt to solve this problem, they are immediately silenced– usually with a phony investigation by the Internal Affairs Department (IA).  The retaliation for anyone in these federal agencies who dare to speak truth to power is swift and painful.  I know this firsthand.

Moreover, if an agent/inspector observes any behavior from his/her superiors that would cause a breach in our national security, they risk their careers if they dare to report their managers, even though DHS regulations and some federal laws require them to do so.  There are thousands of government Whistleblowers who have repeatedly given spine-shivering testimony about the gaping holes in our national security to both houses of Congress.  I have testified before them in Washington myself.   The Whistleblowers are neutralized and nothing gets fixed.

Two of the best government watchdog organizations on Capitol Hill are The Government Accountability Project (GAP)  and The Project on Government Over-site (POGO).  Both have been trying for years to get real Whistleblower protection to no avail.  Until agencies like DHS and TSA are no longer allowed to investigate themselves and use IA as the “goon squad” on folks who try to file legitimate complaints, we all remain at risk.

I believe these agencies and others do not have the manpower or the assets to really accomplish their missions.  We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Iraq and Afghanistan trying to fight a tactic: terrorism.  You cannot wage a war against a tactic.  While we have focused on military plans since 9-11, we are bleeding money away from greater investments in intelligence, improving infrastructure, and law enforcement techniques.

Most of the actual Al Qaeda terrorists who have been caught and brought to justice have been apprehended through the use of interagency intelligence such as Interpol and cooperative law enforcement and not “boots on the ground” military.  The regular military (army and marines) were not trained to conduct an intelligence gathering manhunt.  They are very good at what they are trained for, but it is not this.

Had our elected officials on Capitol Hill listened to the countless government employee and military whistleblowers over the last 20 years, and had placed into effect even a few of the recommendations from GAP and POGO, maybe 9-11 wouldn’t have happened.  Hindsight is 20-20, but they’re still not listening.  Many counterterrorism experts and top military officials agree that we are not making any real progress in our fight against Al Qaeda by escalating the war in Afghanistan.

“Make wars unprofitable and you make them impossible,” Franklin D. Roosevelt said.  There are a lot of big corporations making tons of money off of these two wars.  Not coincidentally, they are also large contributors to the campaigns of our elected officials on Capitol Hill. This places many in government in a terrible bind and it is not unfair to ask if some of our elected officials are voting the  interests of the funders of their campaigns in the name of national security.  If we don’t fix CRONY CAMPAIGN FINANCING, none of the above will ever get fixed.  It’s time the people take back their government from those who own it now.

The legal bribery of lobbying is the disease.  The rest (wars, threats to national security, substandard education, substandard healthcare etc.) are merely symptoms that will never be cured until we turn our legislatures back to a system of governing, and not a system of “quid pro quo”.