Sen. Sam Brownback took 10 privately funded trips last year, more than the rest of the Kansas delegation combined. All total, Brownback’s trips cost more than $21,400 — $10,000 of which was for a charter plane and helicopter flight to religious broadcaster Pat Robertson’s 75th birthday party.
Such travel could be banned under reforms Congress is considering following the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. But prospects of passage aren’t good — the measure is stalled in the Senate, and some GOP House members oppose the travel ban. Big surprise.
Congress also needs to change rules that allow its members to lease vehicles for their private use and stick taxpayers with the tab. Last year, taxpayers paid $1 million to lease vehicles for 136 House members — including Rep. Jim Ryun, R-Topeka, who leased a Chevy Trailblazer at a cost of $7,348. Pay for your own car.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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The McClatchy Co. is purchasing Knight Ridder, our parent company. This is good news. The Eagle also isn’t among the 12 Knight Ridder newspapers that McClatchy intends to resell — really good news. McClatchy, which owns such papers as the Minneapolis (Minn.) Star Tribune and the Sacramento Bee, has a reputation for caring about journalism and local communities, not just about making money. It believes that good journalism is good business.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
When does sectarian violence constitute a civil war? That’s the subject of vigorous debate these days, amid stories from Iraq of government death squads and mass kidnappings and killings. In Senate testimony Thursday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged the growing sectarian violence but suggested that it’s premature to call it a civil war. “There is a high level of tension in the country, sectarian tension and conflict,” Rumsfeld said, but it’s not yet a civil war “by most experts’ calculation.” But one such expert, Stanford University scholar Larry Diamond, says in The New Republic that “by one common social science definition — at least 1,000 dead (with at least 100 on each side) from internal hostilities in which one side tries violently to change the state or its policies — Iraq’s civil war began in the first year of the ‘postwar’ era.” Whatever you call it, it’s bad and getting worse.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
President Bush is big on exercising his presidential power in many areas, but so far he’s used his precious veto power only as a threat — in the cases of 133 bills he disliked, most recently any that would have shut down the now-dead Dubai Ports World deal.
Bloomberg reported that on March 20, in fact, Bush will pass James Monroe to become second only to Thomas Jefferson among U.S. presidents in the length of time without using a veto. But who knows? Maybe if Congress gave him the line-item veto authority he asked for last week, Bush would start wearing out the veto pens. It could happen.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
This legislative session is about more than the tasks at hand. It’s also positioning the parties for the fall campaigns, including the mother of them all — Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’ still-unannounced re-election bid. There’s another race under way, too — to succeed retiring House Speaker Doug Mays, R-Topeka. The Topeka Capital-Journal did a helpful primer on the unofficial contenders: Rep. Mike O’Neal (in photo), R-Hutchinson; House Majority Leader Clay Aurand, R-Courtland; House Appropriations Committee Chairman Melvin Neufeld, R-Ingalls; and House Taxation Committee Chairman Kenny Wilk, R-Lansing. Watch what they do and say this spring. It will help determine who ascends in December.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
LEGISLATURE APPROVES BACKYARD COCKFIGHTS FOR WICHITA; Only Additional Gaming Allowed in State’s Largest City
WATERWALK DEVELOPERS MAKE BID FOR WICHITA EAGLE; Deal Could Take a Decade or More to Complete
CORKINS ENROLLS IN ALL-DAY KINDERGARTEN; Ed Chief Vows to Learn More About the System
BUSH DECLARES UNITED ARAB EMIRATES THE 51ST STATE; Last-Ditch Effort to Salvage Dubai Ports Deal
Posted by Randy Scholfield
