Gov. Kathleen Sebelius made national news last year when she complained about Kansas National Guard equipment shortages. Much of the equipment had been sent to Iraq and wasn’t available to respond to disasters here, such as the Greensburg tornado. So what is the equipment status these days? “Fair but guarded condition,” Maj. Gen. Tod Bunting (in photo with Sebelius), the state’s adjutant general and Guard commander, told the Lawrence Journal-World. “We’re better than we were.” The Kansas National Guard has a few more helicopters than it did last year, though they are older and the Guard barely has enough of them, Bunting said. It continues to be significantly short on trucks and Humvees, and also doesn’t have the radar equipment it needs to train soldiers.
Today’s Opinion Line in The Eagle includes this comment:
“You know it’s an election year when Republicans act ‘compassionate’ and are pro-small government again.”
That made us wonder: How might you bloggers end a sentence beginning with those words: “You know it’s an election year when . . .”?
The floor is yours.
In an essay in the Nation, John Nichols assesses how Barack Obama’s 50-state strategy is going, in light of the latest Rasmussen poll putting John McCain ahead of Obama 52 to 32 percent among Kansas voters. Kansas was seen as a symbolic state, Nichols says, but now doesn’t look any more likely to turn blue in 2008 than it has since 1964: “If Obama could make it there, he could make it anywhere — or so the theory went. As it happens, Obama is not making it in Kansas.
“So perhaps now we can acknowledge the limitations that Obama has imposed on his own candidacy and get serious about the contest that is beginning to take shape — a contest that will end, predictably enough, with most red states backing McCain, most blue states backing Obama, and a handful of purple states tipping the balance.”
Sedgwick County Manager Bill Buchanan’s proposed 1-mill property-tax cut as part of his 2009 budget plan may be unusual but it’s not unprecedented, as he told us Thursday. In the wake of the county’s 2.1-mill increase in 1997 for the most recent jail expansion, he noted, the county adopted budgets in 1998, 1999 and 2000 reducing the levy by 0.5 mill, 1 mill and 0.1 mill, respectively. Of course, even when the mill levy goes down, it’s often offset by rising property valuations.
John McCain’s Thursday interview with reporters in Kansas City, Mo., was relocated from the train museum in the basement of Union Station to his Straight Talk Express bus for fear of what the media would make of a nearby painting of two horses’ backsides. “We thought about covering it up,” one GOP flack told the Kansas City Star. “But then you guys would just ask what’s behind the curtain.”
Gov. Kathleen Sebelius made national news last year when she complained about Kansas National Guard equipment shortages. Much of the equipment had been sent to Iraq and wasn’t available to respond to disasters here, such as the Greensburg tornado. So what is the equipment status these days? “Fair but guarded condition,” Maj. Gen. Tod Bunting (in photo with Sebelius), the state’s adjutant general and Guard commander, told the Lawrence Journal-World. “We’re better than we were.” The Kansas National Guard has a few more helicopters than it did last year, though they are older and the Guard barely has enough of them, Bunting said. It continues to be significantly short on trucks and Humvees, and also doesn’t have the radar equipment it needs to train soldiers.
