Democrats, liberals and ‘moderate’ republicans (AKA, RINOs), are backing Paul Davis for Kansas governor against Sam Brownback. They received a surprise over the weekend about Davis. Their fair-haired boy, isn’t as clean-cut as they had presented to the political public.
Davis tangled in 1998 drug raid at Kansas strip club
By Tim Carpenter, Saturday, Sept. 20, 2014, timothy.carpenter@cjonline.com
Paul Davis, democrat candidate for Kansas Governor.
Democratic governor nominee Paul Davis was swept up 16 years ago in a law enforcement raid on a Coffeyville strip club based on an informant’s tip about alleged drug dealing, documents showed Saturday.
Davis, a single 26-year-old rookie attorney not yet elected to public office, was briefly detained with others inside the club by officers of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department. Davis wasn’t accused of wrongdoing, but the raid resulted in arrest of nightclub owner Marvin Jones in connection with trafficking methamphetamine.
In a story initially reported by the Coffeyville Journal, a series of documents obtained under the Kansas Open Records Act placed Davis at a venue called Secrets in August 1998.
“I was taken to a club by my boss — the club owner was one of our legal clients,” Davis said in a statement. “While we were in the building, the police showed up. I was never accused of having done anything wrong, but rather I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Confirmation of the incident emerged as statewide polling affirmed Davis maintained a 4-point lead over Republican incumbent Sam Brownback in a three-person race that includes Libertarian Keen Umbehr.
The Brownback campaign declined comment on disclosures published by the Coffeyville newspaper, but an official with the Kansas Republican Party condemned Davis.
“Davis’ behavior, whatever he was doing to or with that woman in the ‘VIP room’ while his client was dealing meth in the bar, demonstrates a total lack of judgment and is the kind of behavior that Kansans will find totally unacceptable in someone who wants to be governor,” said Clay Barker, the party’s executive director.
Law enforcement documents containing narratives of the raid indicated Davis had been found by an officer in a back room with a topless woman. Both were ordered to the floor while officers secured the building. Davis, according to the reports, told the officer he was an attorney for the club’s owner.
Davis, elected to the Kansas House a dozen years ago, had apparently traveled to the southeast Kansas club in 1998 with a law firm colleague James Chappell.
The Davis campaign distributed a statement Saturday from Independence Police Chief Harry Smith, who helped lead the raid at Coffeyville. He said Davis had been “questioned briefly and released.”
“At the time of my encounter with Paul, he was totally cooperative and was not involved in any wrong doing,” Smith said. “Paul was only one of 20 or more people present in the club when the raid was conducted.”
In addition, Davis accused the Brownback campaign of raising public awareness of the 1998 episode to distract voters.
“I’m not at all surprised Sam Brownback and his allies are digging up all they can to distract Kansans from the fact they remain down in the polls,” Davis said. “Kansans deserve better than a desperate smear campaign.”
Davis used the standard liberal tactic when caught with their pants down—blame their opponent. But, it the shoe had been on the other foot, Davis and his backers would have been screaming through the root about Brownback.
Erick Erickson’s Red State website dug a bit deeper into the incident. When the drug bust started, the cops found Davis alone with a stripper, who wore only a g-string, receiving a lap-dance. You can read about the incident here.
Regardless, it’s all Brownback’s fault. Sound familiar?
Hypocrites!
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An end of franchises? Maybe.
A story appeared this week about the federal government’s attack on small business owners. Unions, particularly the SEIU, is supporting the government in this attack.
Earlier in the summer, the NLRB, as part of an attack against McDonald’s, declared that franchise employees were to be considered employees of the McDonald’s parent company, not of the franchise holder. When the unions were pressuring McDonald’s to raise their minimum wage to $15/hr, the franchises were not affected. They were employees of separate, small businesses, not employed by McDonald’s.
Not so, said the NLRB!
Sorry, Unions: Franchises Are Real Small Businesses, Too
Stephen Moore / @StephenMoore /
If the Obama Administration has its way, Ronald McDonald may soon have to wipe that grin off his face as he stands beneath the Golden Arches. One of the most successful models for expanding small-business ownership in America is under full-scale attack from unions and the White House.
The political strategy is to fundamentally change the legal relationship between locally owned stores like McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD), Popeyes (NASDAQ:PLKI), Taco Bell (NYSE:YUM) and their multibillion-dollar parent companies.
No longer would franchisees be legally classified as independent contractors to the parent company. The left wants the employees of each of the hundreds of thousands of independently owned franchise restaurants, hotels, retail stores and others to be considered jointly employed by both the independent franchisee and parent.
This change would overturn a 30-year legal precedent for how the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) deals with franchisees.As of now, entrepreneurs can purchase and run their own stores. Likewise, the parent company is sheltered from legal risks associated with the actions on the part of the independent franchisees. Furthermore, regulations such as ObamaCare that apply to large businesses do not affect smaller franchise operations.
With this change, parent companies with deep pockets could also be targets for shakedowns and lawsuits any time that there’s a grievance with a locally operated store.
Legal experts worry that the franchising model could become extinct. The stakes are huge because by the end of this year, the more than 770,000 of these independently owned franchise stores nationwide are expected to employ more than 8 million workers.
More than 31,000 automotive businesses, more than 155,000 fast-food restaurants and nearly 90,000 real estate businesses are part of this model.
The first serious assault against franchising came in June, when the city of Seattle, at the urging of the Service Employees International Union, enacted a $15-an-hour minimum-wage law applying to businesses with more than 500 employees.
The catch here is that the law applies to franchise businesses if the parent company and all its stores employ more than 500 workers. So a local Wendy’s (NASDAQ:WEN) restaurant with only 20 or 30 employees is considered a big business.
Venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, a member of the mayor’s minimum-wage committee, explained the reasoning in an email: “The truth is that franchises like Subway and McDonald’s really are not very good for our local economy.”
He blasted franchise agreements as “economically extractive, civically corrosive and culturally dilutive.”
Then in July, the franchise model took another hit when the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel ruled that McDonald’s. can be held legally liable for labor violations because the parent company is a “joint employer” in all its thousands of stores. If this rule, now under legal challenge, were to stand, it would have huge consequences. The parent company could be liable if a McDonald’s store in, say, Rockford, Ill., violated overtime pay or workplace discrimination laws.
The column continues for several more paragraphs at the Daily Signal website. Former US Solicitor General Paul D. Clements Is representing the industry and claims the NLRB is vacating decades of settled labor law in their declaration against franchise owners.
If you are a franchise owner, would you be surprised to find yourself declared a “big business” by the feds? Your 20-employee operation would have to stand side-by-side with companies like GM, AT&T, or Apple. Suddenly, you would have to compete with them in the tax, regulation, and financial arena. Want to guess how long you’d last?
No, I didn’t think so. It’s another federal, statist-sponsored attack against capitalism.