It should not have taken a catastrophic hurricane to get Congress to stop buying Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs for Medicaid and Medicare patients. But this week’s action, as part of post-Katrina legislation to help the poor and unemployed in hard-hit states, will serve the budget deficit by saving $690 million over five years. States can still subsidize these drugs on their own in cases deemed medically necessary, but as Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said, “taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for certain lifestyle prescription drugs through Medicare and Medicaid.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
I respect politicians and commentators who try to be intellectually honest and consistent, even if it means going against a societal goal they support — such as limited-government conservatives who don’t change their stripes when the issue is abortion or gay marriage. Richard Cohen has a good column in Thursday’s Washington Post about how, even though he is pro-choice, he disagrees with the Roe decision.
Cohen writes: “The prospect of some women traveling long distances to secure an abortion does not cheer me — I’m pro-choice, I repeat — but it would relieve us all from having to defend a Supreme Court decision whose reasoning has not held up. It seems more fiat than argument.”
He concludes: “A bad decision is a bad decision. If the best we can say for it is that the end justifies the means, then we have not only lost the argument — but a bit of our soul as well.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
The Sedgwick County Commission deservedly has taken heat for dropping the idea of holding a casino advisory vote because anti-gambling area legislators objected. With Harvey, Sumner and Marion counties now planning such referendums before the Legislature reconvenes, the Sedgwick County commissioners formally told the state Wednesday that any state expansion of gambling shouldn’t exclude Sedgwick County. But as argued in our editorial in Thursday’s Eagle, that wishy-washy resolution is unlikely to carry the same weight in Topeka as a public vote, especially among our anti-gambling local lawmakers.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
President Bush is making another attempt to shore up his conservative base. He declared this week that his goal is eventually to expel “every single” illegal alien from the United States, The Washington Times reported. That seems to be a big change from his past calls to relax immigration rules and provide companies with needed labor. But conservative pundits are leery. Michelle Malkin reported on her blog that Bush “wasn’t referring to deporting all illegal aliens. He was in fact only referring to those OTMs (‘Other than Mexicans’) caught at the border. Most of them are given a notice to appear and released into the U.S. and never heard from again. He pledged to end that ‘catch and release’ by adding new detention space.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Good for Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., for pushing for the release of documents from Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers’ time as White House counsel, an effort pitting him and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., against many other Republicans. “I would like to see them review the policy documents that she was a part of — not the legal documents (from) when she was in the (counsel’s) office but the policy documents — and really consider what of those they can release,” Brownback told The Hill newspaper.
The Bush administration’s argument for keeping the papers under a blanket of executive privilege would be more persuasive if Miers had a wealth of other legal writings. But it’s unfair to ask the Senate to gauge her nomination with little more to go on than her effusive “thank you” notes.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
A correction in James Taranto’s “Best of the Web” column for The Wall Street Journal: “The evangelical Christian who has supported Harriet Miers’s nomination is Pat Robertson, not Pat Roberts, as we said in an item Friday (since corrected). Our apologies to Sen. Roberts of Kansas.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
You can blame Hillary Clinton for a lot of things (standing by her man, spearheading that misbegotten health care overhaul, coining the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy”). But the postseason record of the New York Yankees? Yet bloggers have begun talking of the “Carpetbagger Curse”: The Yankees last won the World Series in 2000, just days before she was elected New York’s junior senator, and the team has folded each fall since. Wonder if the Yanks would start living up to that $203 million payroll again if she moved back into the White House.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
The suspense of waiting for Plamegate prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to indict somebody must be getting to the beltway media. How else to explain this week’s Associated Press story detailing the contents and organization of Karl Rove’s garage, as dutifully noted when his wife raised the door last week? Here’s a photo. Then again, who am I to cast doubt on the news judgment of the AP? After all, I saw fit to pass the story along.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
