President Bush reportedly plans to use his speech to the nation tonight to announce that he’s sending perhaps 10,000 National Guard troops to the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border to help the Border Patrol curb the flow of illegal immigrants. This surely will play well with voters of all political perspectives, especially with the conservatives in his own party who support deporting all 12 million undocumented residents. But do Americans really want to see the U.S. border effectively militarized and the National Guard federalized? Aren’t these patriots, many of whom have done multiple tours in Iraq, due some time at home?
The hope also is that Bush won’t shy away in his speech from the other, more tricky part of comprehensive immigration reform — what to do about those who are here contributing to the U.S. economy, paying taxes and bettering their lives.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Steve Kraske, political correspondent for The Kansas City Star, gave Gov. Kathleen Sebelius a B-minus for the 2006 legislative session, noting the passage of her top goals of a multiyear schools plan and the tax cut on new business machinery and equipment. But he noted, “Sebelius finds herself at the end of her term with nary a signature achievement. By that I mean a policy initiative of some sweep that she brought to the dance and passed, although she tried on several health-care issues.”
Sebelius, a Democrat, has always been hampered by a GOP-controlled Legislature. But she’s got to run on something substantive of her own making in the fall re-election campaign. Saying she’s one of Time magazine’s top five governors will only go so far with some of the Republicans who crossed over to her in 2002.
How would you rate Sebelius’ latest performance?
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Sixty-three percent of Americans find the National Security Agency program tracking domestic phone calls acceptable, a Washington Post-ABC News poll last week revealed. But columnist Eugene Robinson argues that it is the administration’s “bald-faced lie” about the program — not the program itself — that should be Americans’ biggest concern:
“The big deal is that now we know that the administration — I’ll say ‘apparently,’ although if the report were untrue I think the president would have denied it — is keeping track of the phone calls of millions of citizens who have nothing at all to do with terrorism. Bush has tried to convince us that the overwhelming majority of Americans are not affected by domestic surveillance, but now we know that the opposite is true: The overwhelming majority of us are.
“The president’s claim, in his brief statement on the report, that the government isn’t ‘trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans’ is as disingenuous as Bill Clinton’s claim that he ‘didn’t inhale.’”
Posted by Melissa Cooley
Newsweek notes how much criticism President Bush is getting in popular music this days, from the likes of Pink, Neil Young, Pearl Jam, Merle Haggard, Dashboard Confessional and Paul Simon. “I am a citizen who cares about what happens to this country,” explains Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder (in photo), “and right now things are really bad.” So far, no enduring anthems have emerged from this trend on a par with Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” or John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance,” though.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
If Kansas Education Commissioner Bob Corkins (in photo) gets his way, Kansas will see a lot more charter schools in the future. But will they really improve education in the state? A recent New York Times editorial pointed out that on the whole, charter schools aren’t outperforming public schools across the nation. And some states’ programs are so poorly administered and monitored that they are having a negative impact on student achievement. If Corkins presses on in his support of charter schools, he should listen to the Times’ advice: “To salvage the charter movement, the states will need to abandon the strategy, now discredited, that consists largely of giving public money to what are basically private schools and then looking the other way.”
Posted by Melissa Cooley
President Bush has made history for putting diverse people in high places within his administration, most of all for tapping first Colin Powell and then Condoleezza Rice to be secretary of state. But the diversity doesn’t go as deep in this White House as it did in Bill Clinton’s, as this Washington Post story notes. Last year, Bush’s political appointees were 37 percent women and 13 percent racial minorities, compared with 47 percent and 24 percent in the same categories during Clinton’s fifth year. It’s a good reminder for all CEOs who want their companies to look like their communities — diversity should be more than a veneer just for show.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
