A November SurveyUSA poll co-sponsored by KWCH-TV, Channel 12 in Wichita, suggested there were some circumstances under which Kansans would prefer a Democrat for president in 2008. If so, that would be news, as 1964 was the last time the Democratic nominee won Kansas. This month reliably red Kansans had a change of heart, however, telling the pollster that they would prefer Republicans Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee or John McCain to Democrats Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. A McCain-Clinton face-off would be the most lopsided, 58 to 35 percent; the closest would be Romney-Obama, 44 to 43 percent.
Look out. It’s time for our annual Weeper Awards, which recognize extraordinary achievement in the area of public fiascoes, flops and foolishness. This year’s honors include the “Bum Steer†Award to Wild West World owner Thomas Etheredge (in photo), the “With Governors Like These†Award to Kathleen Sebelius for her promotion of Kansas wines and the “Illustrated Man†Award to Paul Morrison for his “L.C.†tattoo.
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has choked up lately when talking about soldiers killed in Iraq and his religion, Associated Press reported. But such displays of emotion are unlikely to hurt his campaign and may, in fact, help it by making Romney seem more authentic.
The same likely couldn’t be said if Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton got misty-eyed.
Guys have been tearing up all along and people think it’s marvelous,†said Pat Schroeder (in photo), who got grief for crying 20 years ago as she announced that she would not be a presidential candidate. But it’s still politically taboo for women politicians, particularly those running for top offices, to shed any tears.
And then people complain that Clinton seems too cold.
The presidential election is a little less than a year away, but the nation is already weary of the hopefuls. Pollster Scott Rasmussen finds that many voters find the candidates just barely more likable than distasteful, with candidates Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani scoring 45 percent favorable/54 unfavorable and 44 percent favorable/49 percent unfavorable, respectively.
Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: “It’s not just a matter of winning, but a question of what kind of tone will emanate from Washington in 2009. . . . Without a serious majority, the next president — whoever he or she may be — will walk into the White House hobbled. If it’s a 51-49 vote, almost as many people who elected the next president will have a stake in undermining the new commander in chief’s success.â€
Many Americans are making year-end charitable donations, and two former New York hedge-fund analysts are hoping to help with that. The two left six-figure incomes to start GiveWell, applying their skills to evaluating charities on productivity numbers and effectiveness. Their findings are posted online to help potential investors weigh which organizations will be the best stewards of donations.
Their efforts have received mixed reviews from the philanthropic community, which questions the accuracy of gauging charities just by numbers. Nonetheless, not only does it give investors a clear view of where their money is going, the service adds an element of accountability in a hard-to-regulate climate of giving.
Past presidential hopefuls have spent large amounts of time and energy targeting demographics such as families and specific minorities. As Mary Sanchez of the Kansas City Star points out, however, candidates should take notice of single women, who account for more than a quarter of potential voters.
A study by Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner Research predicted that unmarried “women may play the same role for Democrats in 2008 that white evangelicals played for George Bush and the Republicans in 2004.â€
The key to these women’s hearts would be promises to lighten their financial load in a real way. Single women often bear the same collection of bills and financial concerns as married couples, yet with just one income and fewer options.
Sanchez writes, “As anyone can attest who has ever watched a bargain-seeking woman plow through a sale rack, women will go to great lengths if they know the effort will bring value to their lives. Candidates who convince women their platforms are worth the effort just might earn a valuable token of an unmarried woman’s love: her vote.â€
State utility regulators made the correct ruling last week in approving Westar Energy’s proposal to produce wind power but denying its request to add 1 percent to its rate of return. Kansas needs to take advantage of its wind energy potential, but Westar stockholders don’t need to make additional profit.
Westar was wise in deciding to proceed with the first phase of its project, and it also should do the second phase. Westar’s stockholders will still make money, and our state and nation will benefit from harnessing the wind.
On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal that what millions of Americans simply want is a reasonable person for president.
“We are grown-ups, we know our country needs greatness, but we do not expect it and will settle at the moment for good,†she wrote. “We just want a reasonable person. We would like a candidate who does not appear to be obviously insane. We’d like knowledge, judgment, a prudent understanding of the world and of the ways and histories of the men and women in it.â€
Noonan’s reasonable list included Democrats Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson, and Republicans Mitt Romney, John McCain, Duncan Hunter and Fred Thompson.
Check out Richard’s cartoon year in review. Topics include gas prices, Holcomb, Paul Morrison, Carlos Mayans, gambling and much more.
When someone recently suggested in Opinion Line that retired KBI Director Larry Welch be named the state’s new attorney general, we checked to make sure that he had gone to law school (University of Kansas, class of 1961). Turns out, though, that we need not have bothered: Remarkably, neither the state’s constitution nor state law says the attorney general must be an attorney. Fortunately, the governor thinks a law degree and legal credentials are essential to the job. “That will be a key requirement the governor has while searching for the right person who can restore faith and integrity in the office of attorney general,†Nicole Corcoran, spokeswoman for Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, told Harris News Service.
A group of leading scientists and academic leaders is calling for at least one presidential debate next year focusing on issues of science, technology, medicine and the environment.
It’s a great idea. Mike Huckabee, for instance, has said he doesn’t believe in Darwinian evolution. How would that stand be reflected in public policy or research funding?
With a revolution under way in everything from renewable energy to stem cell research — and with some accusing the Bush administration of waging a “war on science†— it’s important for the candidates to let voters know where they stand on the complex scientific and ethical issues facing the nation.
See the group’s Web site at sciencedebate2008.com.
America isn’t the only country dealing with immigration concerns. The World Bank recently discovered a trend of developing countries seeing higher rates of immigrants from even poorer countries.
The bank found that some 74 million migrants move from countries of extreme poverty to countries just slightly better off economically in hopes of providing for their families, sending back a collective $18 billion to $55 billion a year.
“South-to-south migration is not only huge, it reaches a different class of people,†said Patricia Weiss Fagen, a Georgetown University researcher. “These are very, very poor people sending money to even poorer people, and they often reach very rural areas where most remittances don’t go.â€
Per an Associated Press report: “U.S. House members spent $20.3 million in tax money last year to send constituents what’s often the government equivalent of junk mail — meeting announcements, tips on car care and job interviews, surveys on public policy and just plain bragging.â€
In addition to allegedly meeting up for secret sexual encounters, soon-to-be-former Attorney General Paul Morrison also spent an incredible amount of time talking on the phone with his mistress. According to the Topeka Capital-Journal, phone records show that Morrison placed at least 480 calls this year from his personal and work telephones to numbers assigned to former employee Linda Carter. Those calls totaled more than 10,700 minutes in the first 10 months of this year, or an average of 35 minutes a day. Between July 11 and Oct. 10, Morrison placed 61 calls that lasted a total of 4,000 minutes, for a daily average of two hours.
If our attorney general had this much time to fool around, maybe we don’t need to replace him.
President Bush and Hillary Clinton are the most admired man and woman in America — though that’s not a surprise. They’ve shared the titles for six straight years, and the sitting U.S. president has been the most-admired man every year since 1981. Ten percent of Americans surveyed named Bush as most admired. Former President Bill Clinton was second with 8 percent, and Al Gore had 6 percent. Hillary Clinton was named by 18 percent of those survey, the 12th time she’s been in the top spot. Oprah Winfrey was a close second with 16 percent.
Illinois has become the most recent legal battleground on prayer in schools. In October, a state law went into effect mandating a moment of silence in school each day, causing one student to bring suit, saying she attended school to learn, not pray.
On the other hand, there can be even nonreligious benefits to a moment of silence, such as helping students refocus. “My one friend was really angry because he liked having that moment to think about his life. He’s going through a tough time. His parents are getting divorced. His brother’s not very nice to him,†said the student bringing suit. “It’s hard, because I understand he has rights. But so do I.â€
The Kansas Republican Party is denying claims that it is attempting to suppress Democratic voters. The issue arose after the state GOP sent out an e-mail boasting that it had “identified and caged more voters in the last 11 months than the previous two years.†The word “caged†can refer to an underhanded technique used to challenge the validity of voters’ registration. But state GOP executive director Christian Morgan said that, in this context, “caged†meant that the GOP was confident that voters were “locked in†to vote for Republican candidates. State GOP chairman Kris Kobach mocked Democratic conspiracy theorists: “Wait until they hear about our new Star Trek teleporting machine to instantly send all Republican voters to the polls.â€
Wichitans dismayed by how long it’s taking to make Kellogg a freeway can no longer feel better by pointing to Boston’s Big Dig.
Properly known as the Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel Project, the Big Dig highway project, budgeted at $2.6 billion in 1982, finally will see active construction end on Dec. 31, at a cost of $14.8 billion, plus a corruption scandal and the life of one motorist. “It never should have taken so long. It never should have been so expensive,†said former Gov. Michael Dukakis.
Many would say the same about Kellogg construction, which was approved in 1990, was once expected to cost $156.6 million and remains unfinished. The current phase alone, from the Kansas Turnpike to just west of Armour, is expected to cost a little more than $150 million and be finished by the end of 2009, according to Mike Jacobs, special projects engineer for the city.What’s taking so long? “It’s really the funding stream to be able to pay for it. It’s not the construction or the design,†Jacobs told The Eagle editorial board. A local sales tax funds Kellogg construction, which also has benefited from state and federal money over the years.
Next up for design: the eastern stretch from Cypress to 127th Street East, just west of the K-96 interchange; the western portion another two miles out to 135th Street West. “I would hope to have those designs finished in about three years,†he said.
But there is no completion date or final price tag for Kellogg, which means more work zones and public investment ahead.
Alan Cobb of Americans for Prosperity-Kansas made an excellent point on Thursday’s Opinion pages: that taxpayers deserve to know how much taxpayer-funded cities, counties and school districts pay to directly lobby leaders in Topeka. But it’s pretty rich for Americans for Prosperity to be grandstanding about an issue of openness in government, given its exploitation of weak state laws allowing it to spend lavishly to influence voting, lawmaking and policymaking without any disclosure of its own backers and expenditures. Yes, AFP’s issue is public dollars. But when leaders and citizens are being lobbied by anybody to act a certain way, they need to be able to consider the source. That necessitates fuller disclosure, which Kansans aren’t getting in the case of AFP and other issue-advocacy groups.
The assassination today of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto shows again how Pakistan — our ally in the war on terrorism and a nuclear-armed country — is volatile and extremely dangerous. The 54-year-old Bhutto returned to Pakistan from an eight-year exile on Oct. 18, and she narrowly escaped an assassination attempt that very day. Though Bhutto had much popular support in Pakistan, she was hated by Islamic extremist for her support of the war on terror, and she was a fierce critic of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
Bhutto’s assassination raises new concerns about the stability of Pakistan. Meanwhile, American military official acknowledged earlier this week how our more than $5 billion in U.S. aid to Pakistan has largely failed to bolster the Pakistani military effort against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Instead, Pakistan has spent much of the money to purchase weapon systems aimed at India.
