President Obama was smooth and relaxed during his appearance on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.” He spoke about AIG and the economy but also about being in a bubble as president. His one impolitic moment was when he joked about his bowling score of 129 and said, “That was like the Special Olympics or something.” What do you bloggers think? Does it diminish the presidency to appear on the show? Or does it help Obama connect with ordinary Americans — sort of an updated fireside chat?
“Part of what we do is investigations. We find stuff out and I feed the information to the prosecutors.” — Troy Newman (in photo), president of Operation Rescue, taking credit in the Los Angeles Times for providing information that helped lead to charges against abortion provider George Tiller
The Wall Street Journal tried to calculate whether millionaire college basketball coaches are earning their money. It ranked each coach based on his salary compared with his school’s Ratings Percentage Index — or the team’s winning percentage against the difficulty of its schedule. The paper arbitrarily based its Elite Coach Value Score on how much the coaches are being paid for each point their schools’ RPI is above 50. The University of Kansas had a three-year RPI index of 65.2, the fourth highest. But coach Bill Self’s $3 million guaranteed salary gave him a coach-value ranking of 20th. The coach with the highest value ranking was Bruce Pearl of Tennessee. North Carolina coach Roy Williams was No. 8.
Just as another area death tragically demonstrated the potentially dangerous combination of teens and driving, the Senate took the welcome step of finalizing approval of a graduated driver’s license bill. In addition to requiring more time and practice by teens before they are given the privilege of an unrestricted license, the legislation will ask more of parents in terms of supervision. But the statistics in the 48 other states with such laws indicate that it will save lives. “I know this is not an easy issue for anybody. We want to see young kids live and grow up to be adults and do what God intended for them to do,” said state Sen. Les Donovan, R-Wichita.
Now lawmakers should further safeguard Kansas roadways by passing a primary seat belt bill, which would empower law enforcement officers to pull cars over if they see adults without seat belts. As it is, they can only stop a car when someone younger than 18 is unbuckled. The Senate has approved the bill 23-17; the House’s failure to pass the law this session will mean Kansas loses a one-time federal grant of $11.2 million and another $456,000 annually.
“AIG, which has already received $170 billion in taxpayer money, paid $165 million dollars in bonuses. They say the bonuses were justified because the company made an extra $170 billion dollars last year.” — Jay Leno
“This is how a global economy works. Our hard-earned tax dollars are used to bail out German banks for making bad investments in American companies that shut down because their Japanese owners moved the whole thing to India, China and Mexico. You follow?” — Leno
“They had a big St. Patty’s Day party at the White House complete with corned beef and cabbage and green beer. It’s an important part of Obama’s “everybody-get-drunk-and-forget-about-the-economy” policy.” — Jimmy Kimmel
