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.
