When 63 percent of Sumner County voters favored a casino in an advisory vote in late 2005, for the jobs and economic development it could bring, the county’s unemployment rate was just 5.2 percent. Few could have imagined then the recession ahead, or that by last month the county’s unemployment rate would be 7.6 percent. Consider the 4,000 employment applications submitted to Peninsula Gaming as a kind of second endorsement. They confirm that the up to 575 jobs available for the first phase of the Kansas Star Casino near Mulvane are well-timed and much-needed in the county, especially with the average salary estimated at $38,000.
Where is the conservative principle in requiring a photo ID to vote and a birth certificate to register to vote for the first time? “No one has justified the cost and inconvenience of this nuisance intrusion into our lives to our satisfaction,” wrote Ned Valentine, editor of the Clay Center Dispatch. Arguing that errors related to voter machines are a greater concern than noncitizen voters, he concluded: “Whatever happened to conservative passion to err on the side of individual freedom — to make government leave us alone and stay out of our lives? Should buying a gun now be easier than casting a vote? Put another way, should casting a vote be as difficult as buying a gun? It is no wonder the ranks of independent voters continue to swell with former Republicans.”
When state lawmakers amended a bill with a provision prohibiting insurance companies from including abortion coverage in their general insurance plans, it “caused a chill in the Statehouse,” according to Martin Hawver of Hawver’s Capitol Report. Not only did the move violate legislative rules, because the provision hadn’t previously cleared either chamber, but it raised the possibility of lobbyists adding anti-abortion provisions to unrelated bills to help get them passed. “Could an anti-abortion provision somehow get hung onto a tax bill or a driving-while-intoxicated bill or a school-finance bill, and get legislators who are focused on abortion prohibition to pass it?” Hawver asked, adding that “we’ll find out next year whether it was an aberration or a new way of doing business under the dome.”
Former Kansas Attorney General Robert Stephan wants the U.S. Supreme Court to hurry up and weigh in on the constitutionality of the health reform act, much as the court expedited Bush v. Gore in 2000. “A case may be taken by the Supreme Court before judgment upon a showing that the case is of such public importance as to justify deviation from normal appellate practice as to require immediate determination by the court,” wrote Stephan in a Kansas Health Institute News Service commentary. “If there ever was a case of public importance that would justify deviation from normal appellate practice, it is the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act.”
When 63 percent of Sumner County voters favored a casino in an advisory vote in late 2005, for the jobs and economic development it could bring, the county’s unemployment rate was just 5.2 percent. Few could have imagined then the recession ahead, or that by last month the county’s unemployment rate would be 7.6 percent. Consider the 4,000 employment applications submitted to Peninsula Gaming as a kind of second endorsement. They confirm that the up to 575 jobs available for the first phase of the Kansas Star Casino near Mulvane are well-timed and much-needed in the county, especially with the average salary estimated at $38,000.
