Thoughts from Kansas

As former Kansas congressman Jim Slattery kicks off his campaign to replace Senator Pat "Memory Pills" Roberts, Roberts is already having trouble keeping his facts straight. Sean Tevis explains:

I heard that Senator Pat Roberts, who is seeking his third Senate term, issued an ad criticizing Slattery for his work as a lobbyist in Washington. “He stopped working for Kansas 14 years ago and made millions for himself,” the ad says.

But I can tell you first-hand that’s not true.

The company I work for, based in Overland Park, contacted Jim Slattery three years ago to help us. We designed a radical new technology called Air2Air that makes power plants work more efficiently. But the technology we designed is really big and no customer wants to spend a few million dollars on something that’s never been built before no matter how promising the science is.

We asked Jim Slattery to help us because we’d heard that he helps out Kansas companies.

Jim’s work in Washington helped raise the issue of water conservation and the importance of sustainable water supplies, resulting in stronger incentives for water conservation in the Energy Act of 2005. Subsequently, we successfully received a grant from the DOE to perform a test of this technology in a full-sized power plant.

It was a fantastic success and now we have orders from all over the world for these things. So, as a lobbyist, he helped a Kansas company thrive and helped the U.S. energy infrastructure, which is what our politicians should be doing. Maybe Senator Roberts needs to take a lesson from Jim Slattery.

If Pat Roberts had a better memory, he'd remember that these are exactly the sort of things a Senator should be doing, and his constituents shouldn't have to be going to lobbyists to get their voices heard in Congress. Unfortunately for Kansans, Roberts has shown more concern with covering up Bush and Cheney's political abuse of the intelligence process, and with rubber-stamping Bush's illegal and unconstitutional scheme to allow bureaucrats to wiretap innocent American citizens.

Slattery faces an uphill battle, since he'll have to raise and spend millions of dollars to unseat the addlepated incumbent. Help however you can; Slattery has put together a great team and has a great shot at unseating the unpopular and unsuccessful Sen. Roberts.