Give it up for Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear: He knows how to get some attention.

Well, at least the gamblers attention. And those people are way cool.

Guv Beshear wants to restrict his state’s residents access to some of the most popular gambling web sites - 141 of them to be exact - and give Kentucky control of their domain names. Why’s he doing this?

To protect horse racing … well, that’s what he says: Kentucky has a state lottery but, unlike bordering states like Indiana and Tennessee, no casinos. And there lies the real problem (although he doesn’t talk about it here).

“Unlike casinos that operate on land or on riverboats in the United States, these operations pay no tax revenues, provide no jobs and yield no tourism benefits,” Beshear said at a Monday afternoon Capitol press conference. “They are leeches on our communities.”

A hearing is scheduled for Thursday.

Can this work? Who knows, but Beshear bears a ton of the blame here: His main issue in challenging then-Governor Ernie Fletcher in ‘07 (a race Beshear won easily) was bringing casinos to Kentucky, namely to race tracks like Churchill Downs and struggling Turfway Park near Cincinnati. Then he didn’t get a plan to the legislature until halfway through the session, and the legislation didn’t even make it past the House floor.

This reeks of utter, amazing desperation. Ah, politics in the blue grass.