From a Maureen Dowd column that compares Barack Obama to Spock from “Star Trek”:
“Obama is also a control freak who learned to temper, if not purge, all emotion. But as a young man of mixed blood, he was more adept than Young Spock at learning to adjust his two sides to charm both worlds, and to balance his cerebral air with his talent for evoking intense emotion. . . . Commanding his own unwieldy starship of blended species, with Cheney, Limbaugh and other pitiless Borg aliens firing phasers from all sides, Mr. Obama has certainly invoked Mr. Spock’s Vulcan philosophy of ‘Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.’ And he even recruited some impulsive Rahmulen muscle for his Utopia.”
At the latest stop along former Vice President Dick Cheney’s legacy tour, CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, he sided with radio talker Rush Limbaugh as a GOP standard-bearer over former Secretary of State Colin Powell. “If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I’d go with Rush Limbaugh,” Cheney said. “My take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican.” Limbaugh and Powell have been aiming at each other recently.
Powell said of Limbaugh: “I think what Rush does as an entertainer diminishes the party and intrudes or inserts into our public life a kind of nastiness that we would be better to do without.”
Limbaugh’s response: “Colin Powell is just another liberal. What Colin Powell needs to do is close the loop and become a Democrat.” Powell is “just mad at me because I’m the one person in the country that had the guts to explain his endorsement of Obama. It was purely and solely based on race.”
“Local chambers of commerce in the state are great,” Gov. Mark Parkinson said in an interview with the Topeka Capital-Journal, noting how he used to be president of the Shawnee Area Chamber of Commerce and was president of the six chambers of commerce in Johnson County. But he doesn’t have a similarly positive opinion about the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, which he described as “very, very conservative.”
He said: “I disagree with the approach of the state chamber on a variety of issues. I believe that ultimately the way to grow business in our state is not just to create a good business climate — and that’s a part of it, taxes are a part of it — but it is also to create a great quality of life. Businesses and people move to Kansas because we have great schools, because we have great roads.”
All parties, including the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office, agree that the Wichita City Council violated the Kansas Open Meetings Act last month by using secret ballots to elect Jim Skelton as vice mayor. The DA’s Office opted not to fine anybody, viewing the city’s admission of the error and subsequent release of the council members’ votes as sufficient to close the matter. City Attorney Gary Rebenstorf’s apology and promise to ensure “that like mistakes are avoided in the future” were welcome. But city officials cannot violate the law every few years, as they have three times since 2003, and escape penalties forever.
