Maybe now people will stop believing that thousands of illegal immigrants are receiving public assistance in Kansas. Unfortunately, dispelling the myth cost taxpayers millions of dollars and cost thousands of citizens their health insurance.
Kansas Medicaid director Andy Allison told state lawmakers this week that it cost the state $1 million to comply with new federal requirements that Medicaid recipients provide proof of citizenship, and that 20,000 eligible Kansans lost their health insurance because they had difficulty producing the required documentation. So how many illegal immigrants did the state catch in this crackdown? One.
Other states have had similar results. In fact, Kansas actually did better than Colorado, which spent $2 million and didn’t catch a single illegal immigrant seeking benefits.
“State taxpayers are picking up the dollars-and-cents costs of a failed federal policy,” complained Senate Majority Leader Derek Schmidt, R-Independence.
Barack Obama is abandoning his earlier pledge to accept public financing of his presidential campaign if the GOP challenger did likewise. It’s easy enough to understand why Obama chose to do it: He is a fundraising machine and is particularly effective at raising small donations from people who have never given to a political campaign before. Obama also contends that he needs the extra money to combat attacks by 527 groups, which aren’t subject to campaign donation caps. Still, Obama appears hypocritical in saying that he supports public financing and then deciding he doesn’t want its restrictions applied to him.
This week’s McClatchy investigative series in The Eagle about prisoner abuse and wrongful detention at Guantanamo and other facilities should shock and outrage Americans, we argued in Wednesday’s editorial.
As the articles amply document, many of these supposed “terrorists†and “worst of the worst†were nothing of the sort. They were low-level criminals, or Taliban foot soldiers, or innocent villagers swept up in the fog of war.
The beatings and harsh treatment many detainees faced in Afghanistan, Guantanamo and other sites produced little of intelligence value, say former intelligence officials, but they did succeed in turning many prisoners and their families into avowed enemies of America.
The series and editorial have sparked some predictable cries of “Why should we care about these people?â€
But if you care about the Constitution and living in a nation of laws — if you think this nation is better than its enemies — then you should care about the Bush administration’s cynical and secretive torture policies and end runs around the law.
Those responsible for these abusive policies, from the White House on down, should be held accountable.
Writer Tony Horwitz suggested a tongue-in-cheek (or maybe tobacco-in-cheek) way for Barack Obama to attract more lower-income white voters: start smoking again. He noted that “there’s a close correlation between states with high rates of white smokers and those where Mr. Obama polled worst in the primaries. . . . Bottom line: small-towners in the Rust Belt and Appalachia don’t cling to guns and religion so much as they do cigarettes.†Horwitz added: “Bumming a smoke on the rope line, soiling the sleeve of his pristine suit with cigarette ash and interrupting the flow of his soaring oratory with a smoker’s hack would go a long way toward dispelling his effete image.â€
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto has sent off each presidential candidate with a haiku. Here are two long-awaited ones:
“She was sure to win
“Then sure to lose: either way
“Inevitable†(Hillary Clinton)
“He kept his promise
“And announced he had pulled out
“Though not of Iraq†(Ron Paul)
Maybe now people will stop believing that thousands of illegal immigrants are receiving public assistance in Kansas. Unfortunately, dispelling the myth cost taxpayers millions of dollars and cost thousands of citizens their health insurance.
