Gubernatorial candidate Sen. Jim Barnett, R-Emporia, likely made a shrewd move in picking Sen. Susan Wagle, R-Wichita, as his running mate. Winning the GOP primary often requires attracting conservative voters, and Wagle is a leading conservative in the Statehouse. If he wins the GOP nomination, however, Barnett will then have to convince moderate Republicans that he’s not too conservative; otherwise they may jump parties as they did in 2002, when they helped elect Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Justice Department officials have repeatedly said that there are safeguards that prevent the government from misusing its surveillance powers. But the FBI has been using “national security letters” to secretly review records of thousands of U.S. residents and visitors who are not suspected of being terrorists or spies, The Washington Post reported. Such secret reviews don’t require the approval of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. What’s more, the Bush administration quietly changed long-standing policy to allow this information to be stored in government data banks, even when the citizens or companies are innocent of any wrongdoing.
Last month, a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit also revealed that the FBI has had hundreds of potential violations related to secret surveillance operations, including conducting clandestine surveillance on some U.S. residents for as long as 18 months at a time without proper paperwork or oversight, The Post reported.
Where are the safeguards?
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
U.S. senators cast their vote for mega-farms by voting against the Grassley-Dorgan amendment to the budget reconciliation bill. The amendment would have capped farm subsidies at $250,000 and closed the loopholes that have allowed mega-farms to collect giant payments — often in excess of $1 million.
Senators — who were forced to cut $3 billion from the agriculture budget — should have saved money by approving these needed subsidy reforms instead of slashing funds for important conservation programs.
Posted by Melissa Cooley
When it comes to health care in the United States, you don’t get what you pay for. Americans pay more but get more confused and error-prone treatment than people in other Western countries, according to a new survey — the largest of its kind.
“This provides confirming evidence for what more and more health policy thinkers have been saying, which is, ‘The American health care system is quietly imploding, and it’s about time we did something about it,’” Lucian L. Leape of the Harvard School of Public Health, told The Washington Post.
Posted by Melissa Cooley
Partisanship is so rampant these days that whenever somebody dares to trample the red-blue line, it’s a treat. Like when Judge Samuel Alito’s thesis adviser at Princeton, professor emeritus Walter Murphy, praised the latest Supreme Court nominee by saying: “I confess surprise that a man so dreadfully intellectually and morally challenged as George W. Bush would want a person as intellectually gifted, independent and morally principled as Sam Alito on the bench.” On the same theme, check out this Los Angeles Times story about the high praise many left-leaning former colleagues and clerks of Alito have for him. Of course, all of the above may give his conservative champions some pause.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Kenton Keith knows plenty about the Middle East, having spent much of his 33-year foreign service career there and served as U.S. ambassador to Qatar under the first President Bush. While in town last week to speak to the Wichita Committee on Foreign Relations, the University of Kansas graduate told The Eagle editorial board that a U.S.-led solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict would take wind out of the sails of the insurgency in Iraq. Keith spoke of the much-maligned Al-Jazeera TV network, based in Qatar, as an “amazingly wonderful thing,” in that it presents multiple points of view — including Israeli ones — to a wide Mideast audience. He said it does not go unnoticed by Muslims that U.S. casualties in Iraq are tallied daily and Iraqi dead go entirely uncounted, as if they don’t count as human beings. And, he said, “the way you deal with terrorism is not to kill all the terrorists but to isolate them within their societies.” Meaning our 500-pound bombs aren’t the best means to our desired end.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
According to Advertising Age, U.S. workers will waste a grand total of 551,000 years reading blogs this year. That’s 35 million workers spending an average 3.5 hours, or 9 percent, of the workweek on blogs.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
