When members of the House GOP caucus recently rejected their leaders’ proposal to put a brief moratorium on members’ requests for earmarks, the special spending projects often referred to as “pork-barrel,” it was following the lead of Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, who had “offered an amendment to strip the requirement for an earmark moratorium,” reported CQ Politics, characterizing Tiahrt as a “staunch defender of earmarks.”
Good for Rep. Jerry Moran, R-Hays, for continuing his fight to reform the outdated U.S. trade policies with Cuba, and especially to free up agricultural and food exports tightened under the Bush administration. In a letter sent last week to President-elect Barack Obama, Moran wrote: “Reform of U.S. trade policy with Cuba can facilitate new markets for U.S. goods and provide a means for our country’s democratic principles to reach Cuban citizens. Development of more practical trade rules will also deter Cuban purchases from other more oppressive governments like Venezuela or China. This is especially the case with nonluxury items like food and medicine.”
As we said in an editorial last week, you know the budget outlook is bad in Kansas when there is talk of closing prisons and canceling road construction. Cuts will be necessary, but they also won’t be enough. What is a conservative Legislature to do?
Well, House Speaker Melvin Neufeld, R-Ingalls, recently offered a surprising sign that at least one tax increase – the 75-cent-per-pack cigarette tax pushed by the Kansas Health Policy Authority – might fly at last.
“There’s a good chance it might pass this year, ” Neufeld told the Kansas Health Institute News Service. The thing is, he wants the dollars “dedicated to Medicaid,” freeing general fund money for other existing obligations. That would disappoint the health reformers who’ve pushed for such a hike to help bring more Kansans off the uninsured rolls.
There are good reasons to argue that Kansas should spend more promoting itself to tourists and building its $5.6 billion tourism industry. This just isn’t a very good time to make the argument, which is why the interim legislative Joint Committee on Economic Development recently declined to endorse a bill that would beef up the state’s $4 million annual tourism budget by $2 million a year and set up a new agency to market Kansas attractions. “My apologies to the tourism industry,” Chairwoman Karin Brownlee, R-Olathe, said after the panel voted against advancing the bill. One good thing came of the discussion, though: the panel’s stated support for Commerce Secretary David Kerr’s offer to better emphasize tourism by making the state’s tourism director a deputy secretary who reports to Kerr.
Some liberals aren’t waiting to see the entire Obama Cabinet to declare it a disappointing flashback. In the Nation, William Greider writes that Obama’s “lineup for key governing positions has opted for continuity, not change,” and even seems “designed to sustain the failing policies of George W. Bush.”
While acknowledging the remarkable economic circumstances of the moment, Grieder writes: “His victory, it appears, was a triumph for the cautious center-right politics that has described the Democratic Party for several decades. Those of us who expected more were duped, not so much by Obama but by our own wishful thinking.”
Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, the GOP’s most prominent African-American and a candidate to chair the Republican National Committee, calls the reports of the death of the GOP greatly exaggerated and offers a six-point plan for victory: Return to timeless Republican principles. Organize in every state. Appeal to the forgotten middle class. Build a broader coalition. Stop the blame game. Use new communication tools.
Since sounding the welcome alarm in a column about the media fawning over President-elect Barack Obama – “we seem to have crossed a cultural line into mythmaking,” he wrote – Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz has begun a feature called Obama Adulation Watch. The first two entries:
“Many women recoil at the thought of baring their arms in sleeveless dresses or blouses, but not Michelle Obama – half of the fabulously fit new first couple.” – Associated Press
“Experts: Obama Poised to Re-Brand America” — Huffington Post
In the Washington Post, Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac made the provocative suggestion that the New York governor choose Bill Clinton to fill the U.S. Senate seat to be vacated if Hillary Clinton becomes secretary of state: “In a stroke, the appointment would provide Sen. Clinton’s indefatigable husband with a fitting day job, serve the interests of a state beset by a meltdown in its most vital economic sector and offer a refreshing reverse twist on a tradition whereby deceased male senators, representatives or governors are succeeded by their widows.”
Alan Colmes (who will give up his sidekick gig on Fox News with Sean Hannity at the end of the year) wonders on his blog whether conservatives will attack President George Bush for his 14 latest pardons. He explains that conservatives “never stop talking about the Clinton pardons. I wonder if any of these will bother them. I mean, it’s not like these crooks were as bad as Marc Rich (in photo). All they did was drug offenses, tax evasion, wildlife violations, bank embezzlement, hazardous waste, food stamps, and the theft of government property.” Colmes gets to the real suspense, too: “whether Bush might decide to issue pre-emptive pardons before he leaves office to government employees who authorized or engaged in harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”
“If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed,” conservative columnist David Brooks wrote, joking about all the graduates of those two schools who will be key members of Barack Obama’s administration. But Brooks added that “as much as I want to resent these overeducated Achievatrons . . . , I find myself tremendously impressed by the Obama transition,” calling the team Obama has announced so far “more impressive than any other in recent memory.” Said Brooks: “He’s off to a start that nearly justifies the hype.”
“U.N. officials said they desperately need $7 billion to help people cope with disasters, but they’re having a hard time getting people to send rescue money. Here’s what the U.N. should do: Invest in bad mortgages, run a bank into the ground, give yourself a bonus, get some spa treatments and, in no time, the government will send you $750 billion.” – Jay Leno
“I heard today that the federal government was raising, like, $40 billion to bail out Citigroup. . . . Honestly, when you think about it, who doesn’t really feel sorry for credit card companies?” – David Letterman
“According to some statistics the government released yesterday, Mexican immigration to the United States has dropped 42 percent over the last two years. And you have to hand it to President Bush. He knew that the way to stop people from sneaking into the country, it’s not to build a fence or a wall, it’s to make this country very undesirable. Most illegal immigrants come here to make money, but now we don’t have any money anymore. That’s No. 43 for you, always thinking ahead.” – Jimmy Kimmel
“You know the White House turkey? Turned down the pardon. Said all his money’s in the market. Nothing left to live for.” — Leno
Kansas was inexplicably counted among things U.S. schoolchildren are taught to think of as bad in the “Ten Random, Politically Incorrect Thoughts” written by Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution. In his rambling thought No. 10, Hanson wrote that “the following things and people for some reason must be bad, or at least must in public company be said to be bad (in no particular order): Wal-Mart, cowboys, the Vietnam War, oil companies, coal plants, nuclear power, George Bush, chemicals, leather, guns, states like Utah and Kansas, Sarah Palin, vans and SUVs.”
Thanksgiving wishes to all you bloggers. As our editorial Wednesday noted, worries may seem to outnumber blessings in many Wichita-area homes over this holiday season. Still, there many reasons to be thankful. And struggles can sometimes focus the mind and heart on what really matters – such as our loved ones, faith and traditions.
Though it’s no deal-breaker, it turns out there is a constitutional problem with President-elect Barack Obama’s apparent choice of Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., as secretary of state. “The Constitution forbids the appointment of members of Congress to administration jobs if the salary of the job they’d take was raised while they were in Congress,” reports MSNBC’s First Read blog. Not that past presidents have cared much about this roadblock, which, for example, Bill Clinton faced in nominating then-Sen. Lloyd Bentsen to be Treasury secretary. Usually, Congress just returns the salary of the Cabinet post in question to its level prior to the raise the nominee voted on, though some scholars say that maneuver still doesn’t clear the constitutional bar.
The Oracle of Omaha has made the reasonable suggestion that the Big Three automakers’ CEOs put their own money where they want taxpayers’ money to go, by investing a significant portion of their own net worths in the Detroit-based companies. Warren Buffett said last week that he would tell the executives, “We’ll give you more upside, but you’re going to lose if we lose.” Buffett, a member of President-elect Barack Obama’s economic transition team, also said that bankruptcy is the less preferable of two choices for the industry. “The other one is to have the president of the United States sit down and say, ‘Look, we’ve got $25 (billion) or $50 billion, if the outcome is going to be a successful American auto industry, and we need a business plan that will work. You can get it in bankruptcy, or you can get it from me.’”
“Nineteen months after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., declared the war in Iraq ‘lost’ and just nine months after Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., asserted the war has been a ‘failure’ because it had not brought political change leading to reconciliation, it can now be said conclusively that both were wrong,” wrote columnist Cal Thomas. “One of the great military reversals in history is close to achieving victory. That is contributing to stability in Iraq, along with reconciliation between warring factions.”
Still, as Thomas acknowledged, that stability and reconciliation is fragile, as evidenced by more bombings this week.
President-elect Barack Obama’s plan to keep Wichita native Robert Gates as defense secretary is wise, as Gates will provide valuable continuity during a time of two wars. Besides, Gates has earned bipartisan respect for his pragmatic, mature leadership during his two years as defense secretary. Rare for the Bush administration, Gates holds people accountable for failures, such as when he fired officials responsible for the conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He also has championed strengthening and better utilizing America’s “soft power,” such as by expanding the U.S. foreign service – which matches Obama’s foreign policy approach.
No foreign leader was more loyal to President George W. Bush than British Prime Minister Tony Blair when it came to fighting terrorism and supporting the Iraq war. So it’s awkward at best to learn that, according to former communications intercept operator David Murfee Faulk, U.S. intelligence had a database on Blair that extended to his private life, contrary to a long-standing U.S.-British agreement not to spy on each other. Faulk said he also heard “pillow talk” phone calls between Iraq’s first interim president, Ghazi al-Yawer, and his then-fiancee. A spokesman for the National Security Agency told ABC News that the agency follows all laws. The reader reaction in the British newspapers included this comment from Times Online: “Ah, so that’s why he went along with the Iraq invasion.”
In his first news conference since the campaign, on which he said he looks “back with pride and honor,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., had admiring words Tuesday for President-elect Barack Obama’s Cabinet choices so far, especially Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano’s reported nod as secretary of homeland security. Then again, notes MSNBC’s First Read blog, that appointment would eliminate McCain’s top rival for a 2010 re-election bid to the Senate. Plus, Obama just engineered Senate Democrats’ forgiveness of McCain’s friend Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn.
It’s great that the Wichita Police Department finally has video cameras in patrol cars. Unfortunately, the cameras are only in eight cars as part of a yearlong pilot project. Still, it’s an important start.
Though cameras can’t catch everything, the footage can be effective in helping resolve some “he said, she said” situations, including allegations of racial profiling. Civilians and officers also tend to behave better when they know they’re being filmed.
