President Obama clearly wants to demonstrate that he’s in charge and focused on the challenges before him. That’s why he has seemed to be everywhere since taking office five weeks ago, including Canada, Indiana, Florida, Colorado, Arizona and Capitol Hill. He might want to think about lowering his profile, because the public also can take confidence in a president who’s quietly at work in the Oval Office. But Associated Press suggested Obama’s schedule has been comparable to that of President Bush in early 2001, when he was pushing his $1.6 trillion in tax cuts. And former Wichitan Ron Walters, director of the African American Leadership Center at the University of Maryland, sees a strategy in the salesmanship. “If he were not as active as he is, there would be a vacuum,” Walters told AP. “We’d be talking about a vacuum of leadership in the midst of these huge crises.”
More than two candidates would have been preferable, but USD 259 appears to have two capable finalists for superintendent. Denise Wren (in photo) is Wichita’s assistant superintendent for high schools and was formerly principal at Wichita North. John Allison is superintendent of the Mt. Lebanon school system in Pennsylvania, though he spent much of his career in the Shawnee Mission school district.
Members of the U.S. House, including all four Kansans, deserve credit for voting 398-24 Wednesday to forgo their automatic pay raise for 2010, leaving most members’ annual salary at $174,000 through that year. That’s a far cry from what Congress did in the Great Depression, when it cut its own pay by 10 percent in 1932 and 5.5 percent in 1933. But it signals that lawmakers understand the lousy symbolism of taking automatic tax-funded raises on Capitol Hill amid an avalanche of job losses across the country.
The Kansas House fired the first shot of the session Thursday in the coal war with Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, giving first-round approval to a bill that would green-light the Holcomb plant expansion among other energy initiatives. House Speaker Mike O’Neal, R-Hutchinson, thinks he has the votes to override Sebelius, should she veto the plant expansion for a fourth time. Maybe he does. But O’Neal and other coal proponents are disregarding reality in pushing the plants when the Obama administration is proposing to tax and regulate carbon emissions, other states are halting or shelving new coal plants, and financing has frozen for other large projects.
Preserving our country’s long-term health requires addressing the growing cost of Social Security, President Obama said during his address to Congress Tuesday. But Obama’s biggest challenge will be convincing his fellow Democrats of this need. Liberals are concerned about possible benefit cuts, while some Democratic strategists worry that Obama’s political capital would be better spent on other priorities, such as health care. But others argue that now is an opportune time to seek bipartisan reform, because the stock market’s collapse has taken the idea of privatizing Social Security off the table. That had been the main stumbling block between Republicans and Democrats.
Though the time frame is too short, it’s good that the Wichita school board is planning to announce the finalists for superintendent today and then to hold public meetings Saturday. District employees (8:30-10:45 a.m.), high school students and media (11 a.m. to noon), and parents and community members (1-4 p.m.) will be able to meet the candidates at Wichita North High School and ask them questions. As United Teachers of Wichita union president Paul Babich noted, there won’t be much time to research the candidates before the Saturday meetings. But at least there will be an opportunity for input. The board earlier had been unsure about whether it would announce finalists and had seemed to care mostly about not wanting to scare off candidates. But if a candidate can’t handle public meetings and some media scrutiny, he shouldn’t be hired.
The state Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony today supporting state Sen. Carolyn McGinn’s proposed repeal of the death penalty and will hear from death penalty supporters Friday, before deciding whether to send the repeal to the full Senate. It’s good to see legislators re-examining this tough issue. As we said in today’s editorial, though 65 percent of Kansans in a new poll support keeping the 15-year-old death penalty law, “the costs are mounting and death row is filling up, with no executions carried out or even in sight. McGinn’s repeal wouldn’t undo the cases of those already sentenced to die, but it would recognize that Kansas’ death penalty isn’t working as intended and get rid of it going forward.”
It is welcome news that the Obama administration is lifting the 18-year ban on allowing news photographs of flag-draped coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Cameras reportedly will be OK in cases where the families of the returning war dead have given their approval. This seems a reasonable way to respect privacy concerns, while finally acknowledging that Americans need not be spared the sight of this fact of war and even arguably need to see it.
It was no surprise that Sedgwick County District Judge Clark Owens decided Wednesday to let the state’s case against Wichita abortion provider George Tiller (in photo) go to trial next month, rather than dismiss the charges or suppress all evidence obtained by former Attorney General Phill Kline. But neither was the ruling a vindication of Kline and his overzealous pursuit of Tiller, who was charged by Kline’s successor with 19 misdemeanor charges related to how Tiller obtained second opinions necessary to perform late-term abortions. Kline’s “procedures have certainly been questioned by the Kansas Supreme Court, but his conduct in the investigation does not merit the sanction of the dismissal of the charges or suppression of evidence,” Owens wrote. The judge opted to let the case have its day in court. The rest of us should do likewise.
“To come up at this moment in history with a stale, ‘government is the problem. . . we can’t trust the government’ (message) . . . it’s just a disaster for the Republican Party,” columnist David Brooks said on PBS’ “NewsHour” about Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s GOP response to President Obama’s address to Congress. “The country is in a panic now. They may not like the way the Congress passed the stimulus bill. The idea that government is going to have no role in this . . . in a moment where only the federal government is big enough to do stuff . . . to just ignore all that and say ‘government’s the problem’ . . . ‘corruption, earmarks, wasteful spending’ — it’s just a form of nihilism. It’s just not where the country is, it’s not where the future of the country is.”
The verdict is in. There is no connection between vaccines and autism. And it is time that all of us get our children vaccinated. In 2008, the United States had the highest measles rate in 10 years. An increasing number of parents have been refusing to vaccinate their children against measles because of this fear of a connection. It is not grounded in science. Major medical groups and government research are unanimous: The measles vaccine is safe, and you must get your children vaccinated, because if you don’t, you are endangering my children. You are endangering your neighbor’s children. You are endangering all of our children. This is serious stuff. Measles can be deadly. Parents, please don’t endanger all of our children based on a myth. Medical science has proved there is no link. — Campbell Brown, CNN
It would be a big mistake to take the recent U.S. Court of Claims opinion as the last word on whether vaccination can contribute to the development of regressive autism in some children. The U.S. Court of Claims special masters are hampered from considering evidence that has not yet been published in the medical literature regarding potential associations between vaccines and the development of regressive autism. There is inappropriate pharmaceutical industry influence on which vaccine studies do get published and widely cited in the medical literature. What is thought to be a scientific truth today can be proven false tomorrow. The answers will come when independent researchers, without ties to industry or government agencies concerned about protecting the status quo, can conduct appropriate scientific investigation into why many children who are healthy regress into autism after vaccination. — Barbara Loe Fisher, National Vaccine Information Center president
“One doesn’t want to sound snarky, but it is nice not to see Cheney up there.” “I did big wooohoo for Justice Ginsberg.” “Capt. Sully is here — awesome!” “Place is on fire.” “Fixed the teleprompter, I think.” After rounding up these and other inane “tweets” offered by members of Congress before and during President Obama’s speech, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank asked a fine question: “Should these guys maybe spend time fixing the country and leave the Twittering to somebody else?”
President Obama’s address to Congress Tuesday may not have won over many GOP lawmakers, but the public gave it strong reviews. Of a representative sample of Americans who watched the speech, 80 percent said they approved of Obama’s plans to handle the economic crisis, according to a CBS News poll. Before the speech, 63 percent of them approved. Also, 91 percent of those surveyed approved of the proposals Obama outlined in the speech, though only 55 percent thought he would be able to accomplish the goals.
It’s no surprise that reactions from conservative commentators weren’t as positive. Power Line blog said Obama was “surprisingly ineffective.” And Charles Murray of National Review complained that “it looks very much as if the president is oblivious to everything we’ve learned about social programs and educational reforms in the last 40 years” — that they don’t work, in Murray’s view.
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel won’t have much free time for the next few years, so where he sleeps might seem beside the point. But the IRS might have another view of his rent-free basement digs in a house owned by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and her husband, pollster Stan Greenberg. The Chicago Tribune reports that “tax experts are divided about whether Emanuel would have an IRS liability for the free room.” Others have raised questions about why Emanuel didn’t list the room as income or a gift on congressional disclosure forms when he served in the House, and about Emanuel’s past use of Greenberg’s polling services. More basic is this question: Should the president’s go-to guy be living rent-free anywhere, let alone in the home of a member of Congress and a pollster?
Nationalizing banks is as American as apple pie, argued columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. “Lately the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has been seizing banks it deems insolvent at the rate of about two a week. When the FDIC seizes a bank, it takes over the bank’s bad assets, pays off some of its debt, and resells the cleaned-up institution to private investors. And that’s exactly what advocates of temporary nationalization want to see happen, not just to the small banks the FDIC has been seizing, but to major banks that are similarly insolvent.”
Krugman argues that the case for nationalization rests on three observations.
“First, some major banks are dangerously close to the edge — in fact, they would have failed already if investors didn’t expect the government to rescue them if necessary.
“Second, banks must be rescued. The collapse of Lehman Brothers almost destroyed the world financial system, and we can’t risk letting much bigger institutions like Citigroup or Bank of America implode.
“Third, while banks must be rescued, the U.S. government can’t afford, fiscally or politically, to bestow huge gifts on bank shareholders.”
One of the five Kansas road construction projects ripe for federal stimulus spending is a new interchange at 47th Street South and I-135, which has been discussed for decades and finally could begin construction as soon as early June. As the project will replace a deteriorating bridge, it will untangle traffic. And the new interchange is expected to fire up development nearby, such as the proposed retail and hotel development South Fork just south of 47th Street. It was great to see the underserved south side come out on top in the process of deciding where to spend Wichita’s $45 million for stimulus-funded transportation projects.
There was a lot of cheering within Republican circles about how united and vociferous GOP lawmakers were in opposing the stimulus plan. But the public as a whole isn’t applauding. Sixty-four percent of Americans approve of the stimulus plan, according to a Washington Post/ABC News survey. Also, while 71 percent said that they thought President Barack Obama has been trying to compromise with Republicans, only 34 percent thought that Republican lawmakers have tried to compromise with Obama. Talk radio hosts have hailed this as standing up for principles, but the public doesn’t see it as admirable — 66 percent said it was better to compromise and work across party lines than to stick with political positions. And 63 percent of Americans think GOP lawmakers opposed the stimulus plan primarily for political reasons, according to a CBS News/New York Times poll. Perhaps as a result, those surveyed said that they trust Obama more than the GOP on economic matters by 61 to 26 percent.
Good for President Barack Obama for using a more honest method to calculate the government’s budget deficit. In his first annual budget submitted this week, Obama won’t include several accounting gimmicks that President George W. Bush used to make deficit projections look smaller, such as not counting the full cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, Obama’s budget will be $2.7 trillion deeper in the red over the next decade than it would have otherwise appeared. But some economists are calling “wildly optimistic” Obama’s goal of cutting the deficit in half by the end of his first term. And even if he were successful, that would still be a deficit of more than $500 billion.
“I call it ‘funny money’ because they didn’t just go down to Fort Knox and make a withdrawal of money that’s backed by hard assets. This is 100 percent borrowing. This is a 100 percent loan.” — House Speaker Mike O’Neal, R-Hutchinson, suggesting Kansas might refuse to take some of the stimulus money, perhaps dollars intended for unemployment benefits
