Democrats’ continued attempts to discount any connection to the Jack Abramoff scandal have zero credibility. As the Associated Press reported this week, the Abramoff-related ties to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., include nearly $68,000 in political donations, four letters Reid wrote helpful to Abramoff’s clients and a fundraiser held by Abramoff’s firm. This is still an overwhelmingly GOP scandal, in part because the GOP holds all the power. But Democrats don’t deserve a pass and would do well to recognize they have a problem, too. The guiltless act isn’t working.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
New allegations that the Bush administration is putting ideology before professional competence. U.S. State Department officials appointed by President Bush are replacing key career weapons experts with less experienced political operatives, Knight Ridder reported. Many of these experts had clashed with U.N. Ambassador John Bolton (in photo) when he worked at the State Department, and their exodus means a loss of decades of experience in nuclear arms and chemical weapons. The official overseeing the shake-up defended it by saying “reorganizations are never easy.” But a group of State Department employees protested that “the process has been gravely flawed from the outset, and smacks plainly of a political vendetta against career foreign service and civil service (personnel) by political appointees.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
After Monday’s vigorous defense of the domestic spying program by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, it came as a surprise when the White House decided to brief the full House and Senate intelligence committees in closed-door sessions Wednesday and Thursday. That welcome show of outreach to Capitol Hill on the Bush administration’s part should lead to more efforts to ensure that any wiretapping is done legally, preferably with judicial approval — the way the president assured Americans two years ago that it was happening.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
The Winter Olympics start today, but I’m unlikely to watch that much of it; I’m not that interested in many of the events. Neither is Washington Post writer Paul Farhi, who notes in this column that most of the world can’t relate to these sports. “What the Winter Games are not is a truly international sporting competition that brings the best of the world together to compete, as the promotional blather would have you believe. Unlike the widely attended Summer Olympics, the winter version is almost exclusively the preserve of a narrow, generally wealthy, predominantly Caucasian collection of athletes and nations.” And he recommends that the name of the games be changed to “The European and North American Expensive Sports Festival.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
The State Board of Education and Education Commissioner Bob Corkins don’t think the Legislature needs to fully fund public education next year, as calculated by a legislative audit. They are recommending that the state spend $150 million more on schools, $250 million less than what the audit said was needed. As Corkins noted, their total likely isn’t much lower than the multiyear funding approaches being considered by Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and lawmakers. But would it satisfy the Kansas Supreme Court and the state constitution? Wichita attorney Alan Rupe, who’s representing midsize school districts in the funding lawsuit, told the Lawrence Journal-World that $150 million falls way short. “What Mr. Corkins is proposing,” he said, “is a ball that won’t stay on the tee.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
The proposed constitutional amendment to require Senate confirmation of nominees to the Kansas Supreme Court, which had a House committee hearing Wednesday, still appeals to lawmakers upset over the court’s recent actions on school finance and the death penalty. Some questions going forward, though: In light of the embarrassing pontificating and partisanship of the recent U.S. Supreme Court nomination hearings, do Kansans really want to copy that system? Doesn’t scrapping the nominating commission for a process in which the governor picks and the Senate endorses justices shove merit aside in favor of politics and cronyism? Also, given that lawmakers are putting a lot of stock in the conclusions of the recent legislative audit on school funding, which backed up the court’s ruling, why are we still talking about this payback proposal?
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Karl Peterjohn, executive director of the Wichita-based Kansas Taxpayers Network, is no convert to the downtown arena project. But he made a constructive suggestion this week to The Eagle editorial board, as he noted the public’s brief enthusiasm for the costly idea of building the arena over the Arkansas River: “The ‘wow’ factor we really need for this project is an anchor tenant,” he said. It’s true. Other cities’ new arenas are inextricably linked to the college or professional sports teams that will call them home. That issue needs far more attention in Sedgwick County’s case, and soon.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
