Even though the Senate seat he’s leaving next year has sparked a GOP family feud, Sam Brownback appears to have broken a cycle of GOP gubernatorial primaries going back at least six elections. The Kansas City Star’s Steve Kraske hands it to the two-term senator in a column on today’s Opinion page: “Brownback has salted his conservatism with just enough pragmatism to give pause to even die-hard skeptics,” Kraske writes. He concludes: “Brownback is off to Cedar Crest. Here’s betting that with a few years of executive experience, he’ll try one more time for residence in another mansion — that big, white one in Washington, D.C.”
Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, hasn’t wasted opportunities to cast himself as preferable to his rival for the GOP Senate nomination next year, Rep. Jerry Moran, R-Hays. But Tiahrt’s first statewide TV ad in the race suggests he isn’t running against Moran but against President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and the “so-called stimulus plan.” The ad ends: “Help Todd Tiahrt stop Obama and Pelosi now.”
The Kansas Board of Regents had help in deciding to do the right thing and release the results of its audit of questionable financial transactions at Kansas State University. The release came after the Manhattan Mercury filed an open-records complaint with Attorney General Steve Six (in photo), whose office decided the audit should be public. “Shedding light on the transactions outlined in the audit helps to inform the public about the practices employed by the athletic department and will help Kansas State improve in the future,” Six’s spokeswoman, Ashley Anstaett, told the Kansas City Star. It shouldn’t take another open-records complaint to convince the regents to release the similar audits of the University of Kansas and Pittsburg State University under way.
Declaring that “The Star-Spangled Banner” has “got to go” as the national anthem because of its two-octave range, melodic leaps, bloody lyrics and lack of places to breathe, columnist Michael Kinsley suggests some replacements, including “America,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “America the Beautiful,” “God Bless America” and “This Land Is Your Land” (despite its communist roots). Or, Kinsley writes: “How about Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’? A bit dark for a national anthem, I suppose. The Shaker hymn ‘Simple Gifts’ (turned by Aaron Copland into a theme in ‘Appalachian Spring’)? . . . Anything would be better than those ‘bombs bursting in air.’”
At least South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford doesn’t have to wonder whether anyone would miss him if he disappeared. But doesn’t his six-day AWOL episode — and the confusing revelation that he wasn’t really hiking along the Appalachian Trail, as his staff initially said, but in Argentina “to do something exotic” — damage his GOP star power and chances to be the 2012 presidential nominee? UPDATE: The governor admitted he was in Argentina having an affair. Definitely not a good career move.
There are five keys to putting health care reform into President Obama’s “win” column, according to Politico: Put the bully pulpit to work. Keep it at $999,999,999,999. Decide if bipartisanship matters. “Let’s Make a Deal: Industry Edition” (meaning more things like Saturday’s $80 billion savings deal with drugmakers). Decide what he truly wants (“He has laid out three principles that leave plenty of wiggle room: Slow the growth in health care costs, expand coverage, and guarantee choice of doctors and private and public insurance plans”).
President Obama has been criticized for being covered too much and too approvingly by the media, a subject pondered Sunday by the roundtable on ABC’s “This Week”:
“Three great love affairs in world history are Abelaid and Heloise, Romeo and Juliet and the American media and this president at the moment,” agreed commentator George Will. “But it doesn’t matter over time. Reality will impinge. If his programs work, he’s fine. If it doesn’t work, all the adulation of journalists in the world won’t help.”
Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, attributed some of the attention to Obama’s “fascinating life story” and status as the first African-American president. “But don’t confuse attention with love,” Keller said. “Here is a new president who has promulgated one huge, ambitious program after another. So of course he gets a lot of big Page One headlines. But I don’t think at least up till now that it’s been unskeptical or uncritical.”
While many other Wichita entertainment enterprises have come and gone, the Crown Uptown Dinner Theatre has endured and endeared itself to Wichitans for 32 years, with a tenacity very much like that of its late founder Ted Morris. Now, just days after it looked like the Crown’s long run was over because of the economy, an anonymous investor and new management team plan to keep the theater going. That’s a relief for those who work at the 81-year-old former vaudeville house. But it’s also a relief for Wichita, which sorely needs a place to go year-round to enjoy a meal, laugh, song and dance.
“There are two basic truths about the enormous deficits that the federal government will run in the coming years,” wrote New York Times economics reporter David Leonhardt. “The first is that President Obama’s agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying. The second is that Mr. Obama does not have a realistic plan for eliminating the deficit, despite what his advisers have suggested.”
You know there is momentum for reducing auto emissions when Lamborghini, the Italian high-performance sports car manufacturer, is researching a possible hybrid engine. The move is the company’s effort to lower emissions by 35 percent by 2015, USA Today reported.
In the JibJab Web site’s latest animated snapshot of politics, President Obama is a multitasking, tights-wearing, pirate-fighting superhero who’s “come to save the day.” On Obama’s to-do list, according to the lyrics: “He’ll spend the dough. Write the checks. Disregard the mounting debt. Stop the globe from getting warm. Fuel your car with nuts and corn. Leap a building. Run industry. Save a kitten from a tree.”
Undocumented payments. A questionable $500,000 loan. A bank account unreviewed by the university controller that was used to make more than $1 million in payments a year. These and other revelations in the Kansas Board of Regents’ audit of Kansas State University suggest, at best, that oversight of KSU’s athletic department needed to be tighter in recent years. As our editorial today concludes: “Winning sports teams are important to the state universities, boosting fundraising and recruitment as well as school spirit. But if an athletic department behaves unethically or worse, the taint spreads across and beyond campus, and starts to erode public trust in what is a public institution.”
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., doesn’t fault President Obama for wanting to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, which McCain said Sunday on “Face the Nation” is now a “symbol throughout the world” of past mistreatment of prisoners there. But McCain does blame Obama for announcing that Gitmo was closing without a plan to close it. McCain said he is working with the president and other senators to resolve the issue, and thinks it still would be possible to move some detainees to the United States “if you convince the American people that you had a safe and secure place to put them, that you had an overall and comprehensive plan to do so.”
Congratulations to Wichita for landing its fourth All-America City award on Friday from the National Civic League. Going into last week’s finals of the annual contest, which had 143 entries, it was hard to imagine that the 31 other finalist cities had success stories as impressive as the three in Wichita’s 2009 bid: the Opportunity Drive campus on East 21st Street, Visioneering Wichita and Mennonite Housing Rehabilitation Services. The honor entitles the city to more than bragging rights. Especially amid the sharp decline in employment at the city’s aviation manufacturers, the All-America City title signals to business site-selection teams and others that Wichita isn’t standing still but actively working to improve itself and the lives of its citizens and youths.
Some lawmakers are questioning whether there is enough legislative support to overhaul health care, but the public appears to strongly support it. Seventy-two percent of Americans surveyed support a government-administered insurance plan that would compete with private insurers, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll. Americans also believe that the government would be much better than private insurance at providing medical coverage and holding down health care costs, and 57 percent of those surveyed said that they would be willing to pay higher taxes so that all Americans could have health care.
The Obama administration is supporting a goofy legal claim previously put forward by the Bush administration that it shouldn’t have to release statements that Dick Cheney made to a special prosecutor about outed spy Valerie Plame because it could become fodder for “The Daily Show.” Even the judge hearing the open records lawsuit couldn’t believe it.
Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., was in the thick of the congressional debate on health care reform last week as a member of the committee considering hundreds of amendments, most offered by Republicans. He also played a role in Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank’s description of how senators engaged in “collegial flourishes” even as they split along party lines:
“On so many issues, you and I share a real passion for not creating bloated bureaucracies,” Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., told Roberts, before disagreeing with him.
“You were Princess Leia and I was Luke Skywalker,” Roberts replied.
“Right, but we don’t want to be ‘Harry and Louise,’” Mikulski said, recalling the TV ads that helped kill the 1994 reform.
The Post went on:
“But within seconds, Luke and Leia were pointing their lightsabers at each other. ‘I’m just asking you to read the bill!’ Mikulski told him. Roberts demanded the floor. ‘I have the time,’ he said.”
The following satirical headlines come from borowitzreport.com and theonion.com:
AHMADINEJAD WINS STANLEY CUP
AYATOLLAH WARNS IRANIANS: ‘I AM FOLLOWING YOU ALL ON TWITTER’
ENSIGN: HOURS SPENT ON TANNING BED ‘FRIED MY JUDGMENT’
GINGRICH ACCUSES SOTOMAYOR OF FAKING BROKEN ANKLE; Bid to Get ‘Sympathy Votes,’ Says Newt
OBAMA REVISES CAMPAIGN PROMISE OF ‘CHANGE’ TO ‘RELATIVELY MINOR READJUSTMENTS IN CERTAIN FAVORABLE POLICY AREAS’
NATION READY TO BE LIED TO ABOUT ECONOMY AGAIN
A Gallup poll released last month found that 51 percent of Americans called themselves pro-life rather than pro-choice — the first time the poll has had a pro-life majority. But that doesn’t mean that a majority want Roe v. Wade overturned. Of those surveyed in a new CBS News/New York Times poll, 62 percent thought that the Roe decision was a good thing and 64 percent didn’t want it overturned.
Kansans may not be thinking much about the increasingly likely governorship of Sen. Sam Brownback starting in 2011, but other media observers are on it. The blog Feministing fretted: “Brownback equates reproductive rights with slavery, says rape and incest survivors shouldn’t have access to abortion, has opposed contraception access for low-income women, supported the global gag rule, and has backed a whole host of abortion restrictions. So, yeah, he’d be bad news for the women of Kansas.” And a Brownback item on the liberal American Prospect’s Tapped blog was headlined: “New Front in Abortion Wars: the Kansas Governor’s Mansion.”
