Robert Layton has finally decided that, yes, he wants to be Wichita’s city manager. The City Council offered Layton the job two weeks ago, but he couldn’t seem to make up his mind whether he still wanted it. His main concern seemed to be that three of the seven council members, including Mayor Carl Brewer, didn’t vote for Layton. But as Brewer has said, that divide was a reflection of the quality of the finalists for the job. Here’s hoping that Layton does well.
President-elect Barack Obama made more solid picks for his Cabinet, officially announcing today that Hillary Clinton would be secretary of state and that he was retaining Robert Gates as defense secretary. Anti-war activists won’t be happy, but the choices are pragmatic and reflect how Obama values smart people, including those whose views may differ from his.
Conservative writer Michael Medved counsels his fellow Republicans to at least postpone the rampant Obama bashing, in part because it only confirms the perception of Republicans as angry and negative: “It’s a much smarter strategy to give Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt in his early days as the nation’s leader. If we furiously reject any attempts at reconciliation or governing from the center before they’re even made, we only encourage the new president to turn sharply to the left – and give him public justification for doing so.”
Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s profile has been so low that one wonders whether he’s already checked into Dick Cheney’s bunker at the undisclosed location. As the Web site Politico put it, Biden “generates less buzz than the nonexistent first puppy.” Long a media hound, Biden has not spoken publicly since the election (as of last week) but appeared with President-elect Barack Obama at one news conference. Has Obama sidelined his running mate? Washington Post columnist David Ignatius called him the “incredible shrinking vice president-elect” and noted that “he can’t be happy at the idea of considering (Hillary) Clinton as foreign policy tsarina – wasn’t Biden’s foreign policy savvy the reason he was picked?”
Or is it just that much of Obama’s transition is happening in Chicago, meaning Biden’s role will grow after Inauguration Day? According to Politico, the pair have had weekly one-on-one lunches since the election, and Biden is otherwise advising Obama privately.
A staggering and infuriating report for this, the 20th anniversary of World AIDS Day: “The South African government would have prevented the premature deaths of 365,000 people earlier this decade if it had provided antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients and widely administered drugs to help prevent pregnant women from infecting their babies,” the New York Times reported, based on a study released last week by Harvard University. The policies grew out of the denial by former President Thabo Mbeki (in photo), who was ousted in September, of “the well-established scientific consensus about the viral cause of AIDS and the essential role of antiretroviral drugs in treating it.”
Robert Layton has finally decided that, yes, he wants to be Wichita’s city manager. The City Council offered Layton the job two weeks ago, but he couldn’t seem to make up his mind whether he still wanted it. His main concern seemed to be that three of the seven council members, including Mayor Carl Brewer, didn’t vote for Layton. But as Brewer has said, that divide was a reflection of the quality of the finalists for the job. Here’s hoping that Layton does well.
