Mitt Romney “did what he needed to do in his speech, a workmanlike address in which he made a strong case against the incumbent and a slightly-less-strong case for himself,” the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza wrote, labeling Romney one of the “winners” from Thursday night. He said that Romney “did well in casting himself as the anti-Obama. Where Obama lacked business experience, Romney has it in spades. Where Obama made sweeping promises, Romney made simple ones.” Cillizza said the speech by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., “was, without question, the best of the convention.” His biggest “loser” Thursday, not surprisingly, was Clint Eastwood, who gave a rambling, strange speech. “Eastwood was a totally unnecessary distraction that had to leave the Romney convention planners grimacing,” Cillizza wrote.
The GOP platform position opposing abortion for any reason has received the most attention, but Brad Plumer of the Washington Post noted that the platform has some planks that are just plain odd. His top 10 list included policing universities for liberal bias and ending our dependence on foreign fertilizer. But House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, dismissed his party’s platform this week, saying he hadn’t read it and doesn’t know anyone who has. “If it were up to me, I would have the platform on one sheet of paper,” he said.
It was refreshing when Gov. Sam Brownback appeared to acknowledge Wednesday that Mitt Romney is wrong in claiming that President Obama is dropping welfare work requirements. Though the claim has been thoroughly refuted by fact-checkers, Romney’s campaign has continued to make it. When asked by MSNBC if he agreed that the claim was false, Brownback said, “As far as I have seen, but I don’t know all of the basis to it.” But as news of his comments spread, Brownback’s spokeswoman said that Brownback “believes the Obama administration allowing states the ability to opt out of the very work requirements which have proven successful over the past 15 years is alarming.”
Closing arguments in the state’s school-finance lawsuit were heard Wednesday, and the three-judge panel hearing the case is unlikely to announce a decision for several weeks or months. But it is difficult to imagine how this lawsuit will end differently from the last one. The Kansas Supreme Court already ruled in 2006 that the state was not suitably funding K-12 education, as required by the Kansas Constitution. The main defense the state made this time was that it can’t afford to better fund schools because of the down economy. But that argument was undermined by the tax cuts the Legislature passed this year. Clearly, the state could spend more on schools. It chose not to.
Former congressman Todd Tiahrt was part of a group of state GOP leaders who dressed in costumes Tuesday for the Republican National Convention. Tiahrt was Wyatt Earp while Amanda Adkins, chairwoman of the Kansas Republican Party, was Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz.” Boarding the bus to go to the convention, Tiahrt said: “I want to make sure there’s no vegetarians on this bus.”
With all the real threats facing this country, the official GOP platform wants to protect us from a nonexistent one: Islamic Shariah law infiltrating our courts. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach – who else? – helped persuade the Republican National Convention to adopt a platform amendment supporting a ban on foreign law. Though Kobach acknowledged that he was not aware of any court that accepted arguments based on Shariah law, he nonetheless thinks “it’s important for us to say foreign sources of law should not be used as part of common law decisions or statutory interpretations by judges in the lower state courts as well.” Kansas lawmakers nearly unanimously passed such as ban last session, despite no evidence of a threat.
In an interview with Britain’s the Daily Telegraph, former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole called Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan a “great team” and compared the ticket to his own 1996 pairing with Jack Kemp (in photo) – the most recent GOP ticket to attempt to unseat a sitting Democratic president. The choice of Ryan, a Wisconsin congressman and Kemp disciple who wrote speeches for the 1996 campaign, was an “extension of Jack’s legacy,” Dole said. But the 89-year-old former Senate majority leader also called on Romney and the GOP to reach out to young people and ethnic minorities. “We cannot be a single-issue party or single-philosophy party,” he said. Dole defended Romney’s decision to release only two years of tax returns, though Dole had released 30 years’ worth. “It wasn’t any sweat for me – I don’t have these complicated things where you need 19 accountants to figure out what your taxes are. I imagine Romney must have an army.” Dole did fret that in the wake of the Citizens United decision, “it’s going to be hard for someone like me to run for president” – someone who lacked either personal wealth or wealthy friends or relatives. Then again, Dole joked, “The Koch brothers live in Wichita – maybe I could call on them.”
Brownback administration officials sought at least three legal opinions before hosting a series of legislative committees for dinners at the governor’s mansion, the Topeka Capital-Journal reported. Gov. Sam Brownback’s legislative liaisons, Tim Shallenburger and Peter Northcott, told investigators that they attempted to vet the legality of the dinners beforehand with the governor’s chief counsel, the House of Representatives’ chief clerk and a member of the Office of Revisor of Statutes. Mary Torrence, the head of the revisor’s office, told the Capital-Journal that she didn’t recall giving any advice about the meetings. If she had been asked and had been told the dinners included a quorum of committee members and that the governor would outline his policy agenda and take questions from legislators, she would have advised that the Kansas Open Meetings Act would apply. “I think we would have said, ‘well, that’s a committee meeting,’” Torrence said.
Former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline blamed the dismissal of the case he filed against Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri on a conspiracy to protect abortion providers, the Topeka Capital-Journal reported. Kline said the web of “corruption and cover-up” included Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe, Shawnee County District Attorney Chad Taylor, Attorney General Derek Schmidt, and former Attorneys General Steve Six and Paul Morrison – multiple officials from multiple jurisdictions and political parties over multiple years. Pedro Irigonegaray, an attorney representing Planned Parenthood, offered an alternative explanation for why the case fell apart: Kline’s “incompetent prosecution” and “abuse of political power.”
Mitt Romney likes to describe to audiences how his parents read to him from Irving Stone’s “Men to Match My Mountains,” and how “a fellow” or “homeowner” once told him the book’s title came from a four-line poem by 19th-century poet Sam Walter Foss. Last week Romney went further, reported the Washington Post: “I was actually at the home of Bill Koch (in photo), who you may also have heard of, and I mentioned a book I’d read, called ‘Men to Match My Mountains.’ And he said, ‘You know, the title of that book comes from a poem.’ And then he proceeded to recite it, which I thought after, I don’t know, 60 years since high school, was a pretty impressive thing. And I’ve now learned it myself.” Koch, whose brothers Charles and David of Wichita-based Koch Industries are high-profile backers of Romney’s bid, is also invested in the election, the Post reported. Bill Koch and his company have donated at least $2 million to a pro-Romney super political action committee, and he recently hosted a Romney fundraiser on Cape Cod. The Foss poem goes like this: “Bring me men to match my mountains,/Bring me men to match my plains./Men with empires in their purpose,/And new eras in their brains.”
The following satirical headlines come from borowitzreport.com and theonion.com:
Republicans Move Convention to 17th Century
Nation’s Underfunded Public Education System To Experiment With Shortened 6-Day School Year
Republicans Condemn Akin’s Comments As Blemish On Party’s Otherwise Spotless Women’s Rights Record
‘Romney Murdered JonBenét Ramsey,’ New Obama Campaign Ad Alleges
Pregnant Woman Relieved To Learn Her Rape Was Illegitimate
Americans Pool Together $945.23 To Counteract Corporate Money’s Influence In Politics
Nation’s Economists Quietly Evacuating Their Families
Obama Criticized For Living In Lavish Mansion While Most Americans Struggle To Make Ends Meet
Gov. Sam Brownback said that the reason he pushed for reducing income taxes was that it had the most potential to spur economic activity. And he focused on eliminating income taxes on partnerships, sole proprietorships and other businesses because most Kansans work for businesses with 10 or fewer employees. “We took a narrow slice within that because of your key economic growth being small businesses,” he told Associated Press. Brownback said he would have liked to reduce property taxes or eliminate any marriage penalty in the income-tax code but that those reductions were unlikely to result in as much economic growth. As to why he signed a tax bill that is projected to result in large budget deficits, Brownback said he didn’t want the state to stay on the same track it has been on. “It’s better to get to a different track,” he said. Critics contend the new track shifts more of the tax burden to poor and working-class families and is unlikely to produce enough revenue growth to cover the budget shortfalls.
Gov. Sam Brownback isn’t the only one who has hosted meetings for legislative committees. Lawmakers told investigators that “lobbyists have long hosted similar events and conducted similar Q&A sessions with legislative committees,” according to a report by the Shawnee County District Attorneys Office. The investigators concluded that there were technical violations of the Kansas Open Meetings Act at the Brownback gathering earlier this year but declined to take action, other than recommend better training.
At least one group defended U.S. Rep. Kevin Yoder, R-Overland Park, for his naked swim in the Sea of Galilee. The American Association for Nude Recreation said in a statement last week that Yoder’s only mistake was “picking a spot to go skinny-dipping that is illegal under Israeli law.” The group said that Yoder “should have gone to Tel-Baruch beach north of Tel-Aviv, which has a long history of topless and nude sunbathing. Then instead of being in hot water, he’d have been in refreshing nudist waters.” Yoder is unlikely to put the group’s endorsement on his campaign website.
It has never been easier to find out what’s happening in the world, and it’s never been easier to get numerous perspectives on the issues of the day.
In light of the information explosion, it isn’t at all clear that subsidies for public broadcasting – like those that go to National Public Radio – are necessary or wise.
Today – in contrast to 1970, when NPR was founded – anyone with access to an Internet connection also has access to a virtually unlimited amount of information from a wide variety of sources. NPR adds little of additional value to the mix.
There also are a couple of important facts about NPR that should give us pause.
First, NPR programming, like most media programming, leans left. Forcing people to fund programming with which they disagree – even at very low levels – is not much different from forcing them to help pay my pastor’s salary.
Second, NPR listeners tend to have higher-than-average incomes. Subsidies are not needed. If they value NPR, listeners could easily write out checks to cover its costs.
Art Carden, Stanford University
Some conservative members of Congress are seeking to de-fund National Public Radio, but these legislators might want to think twice about that effort. NPR is – believe it or not – a favorite of many conservative listeners. In a survey by the research firm GfK MRI, 28 percent of the network’s listeners self-identified as conservative or very conservative and 25 percent identified as middle-of-the-road. Millions of informed conservatives regularly listen to a network that some critics describe as a service aimed at a prosperous liberal elite.
Some members of Congress who seek federal de-funding of NPR point to what they say is the network’s liberal bias in news reporting. I don’t hear it. I hear a scrupulous attempt to be – may I coin a phrase? – fair and balanced.
More affluent public radio stations could pay for NPR programs from other sources, like listener contributions. But some smaller stations would not have enough of those non-federal funds.
National Public Radio, through local public radio stations, serves listeners across the country, from the largest cities to the smallest rural communities. Congress should reject all legislation aimed at eliminating NPR’s federal funding.
Fred Andrle, independent journalist
Beaten down by all the aircraft layoffs, Wichita needed some good economic news. And it got it Thursday with NetApp’s announcement that it plans to add 400 jobs at its Wichita facility. These are good-paying jobs – averaging $73,000 a year – that will help diversify Wichita’s economy. Congratulations to local and state economic development officials for helping make this expansion happen, and thanks to NetApp for believing in Wichita. We needed the boost.
Secretary of State Kris Kobach seems to be everywhere these days – except in Kansas doing his job. Last week he was in Pennsylvania trying to resurrect a law he wrote barring landlords or employers in Hazleton, Pa., from dealing with illegal immigrants. He then was in Alabama defending that state’s anti-immigration law at a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hearing. Kobach’s testimony was disrupted by protesters, one of whom shouted, “These laws are made from hate.” This week Kobach was in Tampa, Fla., persuading the Republican Party to include anti-immigration measures in its official platform. “If you really want to create a job tomorrow, you can remove an illegal alien today,” Kobach said. He also filed a lawsuit Thursday in federal court in Dallas over the Obama administration’s plan to stop deporting certain young illegal immigrants and grant them work permits.
Wichita East High School principal Ken Thiessen said that parents weren’t notified about a student being arrested Tuesday for having a gun in his school locker because doing so would have been more disruptive than the incident, which was handled quickly and quietly by police. But should that be the criteria for whether to keep parents informed? If the incident is serious, such as a student bringing a gun and ammunition to school, parents should be told, regardless of how much disruption the incident caused.
Kansas Gas Service’s latest plan to raise rates $32.7 million is raising the ire of many ratepayers. Residential customers are irked at the idea of paying about 9.1 percent more as large commercial users pay an average of 8.2 percent less and some unnamed users pay 20 percent less. Small businesses would pay 2.5 percent more. KGS is also seeking a 10.75 percent rate of return for its investors, which strikes many people as excessive in this down economy.
It’s good that the city is taking steps to curb the illegal placement of signs on public property, utility poles or in the right of way between a city sidewalk and the street. Workers in the Office of Central Inspection remove as many of the signs as they can, but they can’t keep up – especially during a campaign season. The City Council voted Tuesday to allow trained volunteers to help remove illegal signs. It also voted to authorize fines starting at $50 and rising to as much as $1,000 per sign for repeat violations. That may be appropriate in some cases, but the city needs to not go overboard issuing fines.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s goal of reducing the pollution that blows from one state to another is good. But it overstepped its authority with its Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, a U.S. appeals court decided Tuesday. The timetable for implementing the rule also seemed too fast and could have forced some energy companies to shut down power plants or triggered rolling blackouts. There was also some confusion about how the mandate would work. Westar Energy officials told The Eagle editorial board last year that they were already reducing pollution but would have trouble meeting the EPA’s timeline. Kansas delegation members were adamantly opposed to the rule and to the EPA. “I am pleased the court identified the EPA as exactly what it is – an overreaching and out-of-control bureaucracy, intent on forcing President Obama’s green agenda upon Americans,” Rep. Mike Pompeo said in a statement.
Republican lawmakers and officials are trying to distance themselves from Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., who said that victims of “legitimate rape” rarely get pregnant because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” But more than 200 U.S. House members, including Akin and vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan (in photo), R-Wis., sponsored a bill last year that would have rewritten the rape exception in federal abortion-funding bans to cover only “forcible rape.” That sounds like “legitimate rape.” Under public pressure, the bill was rewritten to drop the “forcible” language, but another provision was added saying the government couldn’t “subsidize abortions in cases of statutory rape.” The bill passed the House, with all Republicans voting for it, but didn’t clear the Senate.
The nude moonlight swim in the Sea of Galilee by Rep. Kevin Yoder, R-Overland Park, inspired the top 10 list on the “Late Show With David Letterman” Monday on CBS. The highlights among the “Top 10 Congressman Kevin Yoder Excuses”: “What’s the big deal? I was naked the whole trip.” “It’s Obama’s fault.” “Putting the ‘junk’ in ‘congressional junket.’” “That’s how we party in Kansas.”
Meanwhile, Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic came to Yoder’s defense, arguing that skinny-dipping was the least scandalous part of the junket to Israel on which U.S. lawmakers were “influenced by officials of a foreign government who want more from U.S. taxpayers.” He concluded: “Perhaps we’d be better off if the ears of our elected representatives were filled with water every time they were around lobbyists.”
Mitt Romney “did what he needed to do in his speech, a workmanlike address in which he made a strong case against the incumbent and a slightly-less-strong case for himself,” the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza wrote, labeling Romney one of the “winners” from Thursday night. He said that Romney “did well in casting himself as the anti-Obama. Where Obama lacked business experience, Romney has it in spades. Where Obama made sweeping promises, Romney made simple ones.” Cillizza said the speech by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., “was, without question, the best of the convention.” His biggest “loser” Thursday, not surprisingly, was Clint Eastwood, who gave a rambling, strange speech. “Eastwood was a totally unnecessary distraction that had to leave the Romney convention planners grimacing,” Cillizza wrote.
