Al-Qaida has been allowed to establish significant training bases in the lawless tribal regions of Pakistan, according to a New York Times article, which cited feuding counterintelligence agencies, a risk-averse policy and the Bush administration’s shift of focus from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 as reasons for the continued failure to catch Osama bin Laden.
Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Robert Gates last week expressed “real concern” about the rising violence in Afghanistan and blamed Pakistan for failing to put pressure on militants in the tribal areas.
“Our enemies will test the new president early. Remember that the truck bombing of the World Trade Center happened in the first year of the Clinton administration. Sept. 11 happened in the first year of the Bush administration.” — Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., sowing fear, along with support for the “tested” John McCain, on CBS’ “Face the Nation“
“Here is the difference between McCain and Obama — and Obama had better pay attention,” columnist Richard Cohen wrote. “McCain is a known commodity. It’s not just that he’s been around a long time and staked out positions antithetical to those of his Republican base. It’s also — and more important — that we know his bottom line. As his North Vietnamese captors found out, there is only so far he will go, and then his pride or his sense of honor takes over. This — not just his candor and nonstop verbosity on the Straight Talk Express — is what commends him to so many journalists.
“Obama might have a similar bottom line, core principles for which, in some sense, he is willing to die. If so, we don’t know what they are. Nothing so far in his life approaches McCain’s decision to refuse repatriation as a POW so as to deny his jailers a propaganda coup. In fact, there is scant evidence the Illinois senator takes positions that challenge his base or otherwise threaten him politically.”
It was bad enough that seven state surplus computers offered for sale were found to still contain confidential information such as Social Security numbers and personal data about Medicaid recipients. Worse, the surplus property program had used inmate labor until January 2007, mostly female inmates from the Topeka Correctional Facility. A spokesman for the Kansas Department of Administration assured the Topeka Capital-Journal that the computers were never turned on when the inmates were around, but nothing about this investigation inspires much confidence — including assurances that it won’t happen again.
It may look and sound like a political ad and, now, even have been coordinated with a candidate’s campaign, but its backers aren’t subject to Kansas campaign finance laws if the ad doesn’t explicitly tell people for whom to vote. That’s according to a frustrating advisory opinion issued by the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission. The panel can’t do anything about “issue advocacy groups,” which can spend as much as they want with no disclosure of donor lists or expenditures, until the Legislature does. “That’s the law and it will be until Kansas changes it,” said Carol Williams, executive director of the commission. In any case, get ready for more such ads and mailers this year.
The legal challenge of a 2004 in-state tuition law reached the finish line Thursday, as the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case. The law has been allowing about 200 eligible kids of illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition at Kansas’ public colleges and universities — and better their lives and the state’s economy in the process. The rejections at the federal district court and appellate levels were based on the plaintiffs’ lack of “standing” to sue, so no court has yet passed judgment on the law itself. But it’s good to know this case has run its course.
Kansans don’t seem to be warming to the Sebelius administration’s exhaustive efforts to block a coal-fired power plant expansion near Holcomb. Though one survey last November found that 62 percent of Kansans strongly agreed with the administration’s initial decision to deny the plant’s air-quality permit, 48 percent of the 500 Kansans surveyed earlier this month by Rasmussen Reports said the state should allow the plant to be built, compared with 32 percent against the plant.
Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion in the handgun-ban case explored the historical context for the Second Amendment’s language on gun ownership. In the process, Scalia quoted from abolitionist Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner’s famous 1856 speech about “Bleeding Kansas”:
“The rifle has ever been the companion of the pioneer and, under God, his tutelary protector against the red man and the beast of the forest. Never was this efficient weapon more needed in just self-defense, than now in Kansas, and at least one article in our national Constitution must be blotted out, before the complete right to it can in any way be impeached. And yet such is the madness of the hour, that, in defiance of the solemn guarantee, embodied in the amendments to the Constitution, that ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,’ the people of Kansas have been arraigned for keeping and bearing them, and the senator from South Carolina has had the face to say openly, on this floor, that they should be disarmed — of course, that the fanatics of slavery, his allies and constituents, may meet no impediment.” Three days later, in reaction to that speech, S.C. congressman Preston Brooks attacked Sumner and beat him with a cane into unconsciousness.
City leaders were right that the new downtown arena would spawn economic activity — it’s already happening.
This is from an adult entertainment classified ad in The Eagle for an escort service: “Arena workers get $10 discount.”
“Bush is a stubborn man,” columnist David Brooks wrote. “Well, without that stubbornness, that unwillingness to accept defeat on his watch, he never would have bucked the opposition to the surge.
“Bush is an outrageously self-confident man. Well, without that self-confidence, he never would have overruled his generals.
“The fact is that Bush, who made such bad calls early in the war, made a courageous and astute decision in 2006. More than a year on, the surge has produced large, if tenuous, gains. Violence is down sharply. Daily life has improved. The Iraqi military has been given time to become a more effective fighting force. The Iraqi government is showing signs of strength and even glimmers of impartiality. Iraq has moved from being a failed state to merely a fragile one, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it.
“The whole episode is a reminder that history is a complicated thing. The traits that lead to disaster in certain circumstances are the very ones that come in handy in others.”
“Laws and rules have been adopted to prevent the hijacking of the Justice Department to advance a partisan or ideological cause. But that’s exactly what the Bush administration did,†columnist Jay Bookman wrote, noting how “the campaign to turn the Justice Department into an enforcement arm of the Republican Party extended even to its hiring of legal interns.â€
Bookman wrote: “According to a new report by the Justice Department’s inspector general — a Republican, by the way — the Bush approach ‘constituted misconduct and also violated the department’s policies and civil service law that prohibit discrimination in hiring based on political or ideological affiliations.’
“In other words, those appointed to enforce the law instead knowingly violated it to advance partisan interests.â€
Per a New York Times article: “According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been ‘massively scaled back this year.’ Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007.”
A pro/con on Wednesday’s Opinion pages debated why this is happening. Cal Thomas blamed the decline in coverage on the liberal media not wanting to report good news. But Frank Rich noted that there isn’t much reporting on the bad news either, and he argued that the public has made up its mind on Iraq and is more interested in “Cindy versus Michelle, not Shiites versus Sunnis.”
Concluding that “ownership and operation are flexible concepts,” the Kansas Supreme Court today gave the green light to the 2007 expanded gambling law and the four destination casinos planned around the state. That will be a huge relief to developers and locals in Sumner County and elsewhere who’ve been proceeding under the assumption that the law was constitutional. It also should be some comfort to state lawmakers looking for a cash source to offset declining state revenue. But even the court acknowledged the ambiguity of the setup: Under the state constitution, the state must control the “ownership and operation” of the casinos, yet they will be managed by private contractors.
In addition to offshore drilling, another energy issue that John McCain and Barack Obama differ sharply on is ethanol. McCain wants to eliminate the multibillion-dollar government subsidies that the ethanol industry receives, and he wants to remove the tariff imposed on imported ethanol made from sugarcane. But Obama supports the subsidies and the tariff. Obama says that ethanol production “helps our national security.†It also helps Archer Daniels Midland, the nation’s largest ethanol producer, which is based in Obama’s home state of Illinois.
The mocking “I’m Voting Republican†video was designed to provoke by its British-born writer and director, and it certainly has, topping 2.5 million views in its two weeks on YouTube. Among the so-called testimonials: “I’m voting Republican because I think new drugs should be made available immediately, whether they’ve been properly tested or not. If the major pharmaceutical companies’ bottom lines are healthy, then I feel healthy, too.†“We need more minorities in prison.†“Because sometimes the Constitution is just one big inconvenient headache.â€
On the Web site of the conservative newspaper Human Events, L. Brent Bozell III counted the video among liberal smears: “This video clearly isn’t meant to be factual, just vicious.â€
Don’t waste time trying to reimburse Sedgwick County’s general fund for any bit of time someone on the county payroll spent related to the downtown arena, as County Commissioner Kelly Parks wants. Of course county employees — including commissioners — are involved in the massive project. Who expected otherwise? But the time is not excessive and is not worth haggling over. As Commissioner Tim Norton noted, regardless of which budget is charged, it’s all taxpayer money.
The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board did good work identifying the causes of the explosion last year at the Barton Solvents chemical storage unit in Valley Center and in making safety recommendations to the industry and government regulators. The board determined that the explosion resulted from a buildup of flammable vapor-air mixture inside a storage tank that was ignited by a spark from a measuring float inside the tank. The tank explosion then set off a chain reaction of explosions in other tanks, which likely could have been prevented if the tanks hadn’t been so close together and had been better ventilated.
Though this explosion was large and required widespread evacuations, it was fortunate that no one died and that the chemical plume went straight up instead of spreading out over the town, lead investigator Randy McClure told The Eagle editorial board. Here’s hoping that the lessons learned in this accident can help prevent other explosions and the loss of life in the future.
The debate about whether gun ownership really is a right protected by the U.S. Constitution was finally settled today. The Supreme Court overturned a 32-year-old ban on handguns in Washington, D.C., and in doing so judged that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to own guns that isn’t tied to “a well-regulated militia.
“The decision is big, though how far-reaching is still unclear. The National Rifle Association plans to challenge gun control laws in other cities. Some people are concerned that the ruling could lead to the removal of other gun restrictions, though Justice Antonin Scalia said the ruling shouldn’t “cast doubt on long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons or the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.”
“If an American first lady, or would-be first lady, described herself as a ‘tamer of men’ and had a ‘man-eating’ past filled with naked pictures, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, sultry prone CD covers, breaking up marriages, bragging that she believes in polygamy rather than monogamy, and having a son with a married philosopher whose father she’d had an affair with, it would take more than an appearance on ‘The View’ to sweeten her image,” columnist Maureen Dowd wrote about French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. Yet Sarkozy’s third wife is charming not only the French public and world leaders such as President Bush, but also helping raise Sarkozy’s low approval ratings. Said one political observer: “He has stopped behaving like a twit since the marriage.”
How low is world public opinion of President Bush? Former Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Hu Jintao are more trusted than Bush to “do the right thing regarding world affairs,†according to an international survey coordinated by the Project on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. Not that authoritarian leaders Putin and Hu rated high in trustworthiness; they just scored better than Bush.
Al-Qaida has been allowed to establish significant training bases in the lawless tribal regions of Pakistan, according to a New York Times article, which cited feuding counterintelligence agencies, a risk-averse policy and the Bush administration’s shift of focus from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 as reasons for the continued failure to catch Osama bin Laden.
