Policy and Politics
tfk | April 8, 2007State water board alters priorities:
A state water board on Wednesday unexpectedly pushed reducing groundwater consumption in western Kansas toward the top of a priority list of the Kansas Water Office's new five-year strategic plan.
This is partly a response to the added strain on the declining aquifer that additional ethanol plants would use, and the additional irrigation needed to grow more corn – needed to supply those ethanol plants.
The Ogallala aquifer which supplies groundwater for agriculture, homes and industry in western Kansas, is running low. I don't need to repeat the points I…
tfk | April 6, 2007As the Journal World explains:
Kansas Attorney General Paul Morrison said in the legal opinion that the proposed registry does not conflict with the Kansas Constitution, which bans same-sex marriage. The opinion, though, does say that the registry would need to be open only to Lawrence residents, or else the city could be found to be overstepping its constitutional authority.
That isn't quite right. The opinion (PDF link) is clear that there is no conflict with the marriage amendment. The only scenario the AG's office can imagine in which a court might strike down the registry is if a…
tfk | April 6, 2007OpenCongress reports Republican Reps. and Boyda Come Out Against Bush's Path to Citizenship Plan. Ninety-seven representatives signed a letter asking Speaker Pelosi not to bring any bills to the floor allowing people already living in this country a path to citizenship. As OpenCongress explains:
Where they state, in the first line, that the group of supporters is "Democratic and Republican," they are referring to the fact that one Democrat , Nancy Boyda (D-KS), accompanied 96 Republicans in signing the letter.
Immigration was an issue the Congresswoman ran on, and it's good to see her…
tfk | April 4, 2007
The New York Times summarizes the challenges facing much of the Western US:
Preparing for worst-case outcomes, the seven states that draw water from the Colorado River — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico in the upper basin and California, Arizona and Nevada in the lower basin — and the United States Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the river, are considering plans that lay out what to do if the river cannot meet the demand for water, a prospect that some experts predict will occur in about five years.
Wallace Stegner has written that "it is not the arbitrary 98th meridian that marks…
tfk | April 3, 2007Mike Dever, Rob Chestnut and Boog Highberger won the city commission race. Only Boog stated his support for the domestic partnership registry, the other two were the Chamber of Commerce slate. They were also the top vote-getters in the first round of voting, so that's not a surprising result.
Scott Morgan, Rich Minder, Mary Loveland and Marlene Merrill won the Lawrence school Board race. That seems like a pretty good slate.
In Johnson County, creationist Charley Morasch lost badly to Clinton Robinson. TfK's friend Don Weiss won a Johnson County Community College Trusteeship. That…
tfk | April 3, 2007There's something appropriate about having an election on the first day of our celebration of freedom.
Turnout has reportedly been light, so be sure to vote today. In Lawrence, you can figure out which candidates best match your views with the Journal-World's handy candidate selector for the school board and the city commission.
Click through for my endorsements.
My plan is to vote for Highberger, Schauner and Maynard-Moody, which is how Mike and Diane are voting, too.
On the School Board, Diane recommends Merrill, Minder, Pomes and Machell.
Mike, who is focussed on domestic partner benefits…
tfk | April 2, 2007Matt Nisbet thinks the Supreme Court made things worse:
Despite the ever growing scientific consensus about the nature and urgency of global warming, Americans remain more divided politically on the matter than at anytime in history. And the Supreme Court just made matters worse.
I'm not exactly sure why he thinks that. Yes, a 5-4 decision, with the dissent emphasizing uncertainty, illustrates existing divisions. That doesn't make things better, and I certainly don't plan to "herald [this] as a major event in shaping public perceptions." The Court tends to be a fairly accurate barometer of…
tfk | April 2, 2007Higher corporate taxes may attract foreign investment | Science Blog:
A team of leading economists has challenged the current political drive to cut corporate taxes — with new research showing that countries with higher taxes and higher social welfare spending are more successful in attracting overseas investment. …
After analysing data from 18 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries over a 14-year period, the team found that the countries which attracted the highest levels of foreign investment — a key economic target of most governments — were actually the…
tfk | April 2, 2007SCOTUSblog explains:
Ruling 5-4, the Supreme Court on Monday found that the federal government had the authority to regulate greenhouse gases that may contribute to global warming, and must examine anew the scientific evidence of a link between those gases contained in the exhausts of new cars and trucks and climate change. In the most important environmental ruling in years, the Court rebuffed the Environmental Protection Agency's claim that regulating those gases was beyond its authority, and the agency's claim that it need not take action even if it did have the power to do so. Justice…
tfk | March 31, 2007Bounce Boyda is very excited. The found a small error in my comments about Congresswoman Boyda. I stated that yesterday was the end of the fundraising quarter when today is the end. That means you can still donate.
This error inspired an error-laden post from them, a post filled with misspellings ("dillusion?") and their own fantastical imaginings about what Congress has done.
Contrary to what BB claims, there never were votes to cut military base spending, to raise taxes, or to take away secret ballots. The tax rate changes were part of the bills that the Republican Congress passed, the…
tfk | March 30, 2007Bounce Boyda thinks Bancy broke this promise:
Nancy Boyda stood in front of a camera, taped a commercial, and ran it on the air. On the commercial she said, "I'm not going to raise your taxes."
Bounce Boyda, like the RNC and the Kansas GOP, are using a definition of "raising taxes" very different from what you or I might mean by the term. All that this budget vote did was to leave taxes unchanged. All the supposed tax increases were approved by the Republicans as part of the Bush tax plans. As a ploy to make the damage to the budget less obvious, they didn't make permanent changes to tax…
tfk | March 30, 2007Today is the last day of the FEC's fundraising quarter. Your favorite Congresscritters and candidates will file forms based on how much money they've raised and spent as of today, and what those numbers look like will shape perceptions of the races in 2008.
If you've got a favorite in the Presidential races, today is a good day to drop some money on that candidate. But this deadline is more critical for Senate and especially House races.
Nancy Boyda has been working hard to represent her constituents, constituents who had forgotten what it meant to have a representative who cared. The…
tfk | March 30, 2007A few days ago, I mentioned some revisions of the regulations implementing the Endangered Species Act, changes which would gut key provisions. In addition to imposing an arbitrary time limit on what decision-makers could examine regarding potential threats to a species, the new regulations would delegate many powers to state governments, water down the standards used to judge whether a species is endangered, and allow habitat destruction that could harm endangered species. PEER and the Center for Biological Diversity has a handy comparison guide for some major changes.
Regulations are the…
tfk | March 29, 2007One of the great ironies of politics is that the most local offices, the ones that ought to be most responsive to constituent needs, are often the least-known. Presidential elections are hotly debated, even in a state like Kansas where the outcome is fore-ordained. But a local or state school board election can be decided by a few hundred votes, yet draws substantially less interest. That apathy towards local races has made them prime targets for extremists and ideologues, as Mike Hendricks points out in the Star. He discusses slates of candidates from Wichita to Topeka and Kansas City,…
tfk | March 28, 2007These are the Democrats Karl Rove wants to unseat:
Nick Lampson, Texas
Tim Mahoney, Florida
Jerry McNerney, California
Zack Space, Ohio
Baron Hill, Indiana
Chris Carney, Pennsylvania
Patrick Murphy, Pennsylvania
Nancy Boyda, Kansas
Joe Sestak, Pennsylvania
Brad Ellsworth, Indiana
Heath Shuler, North Carolina
Ciro Rodriguez, Texas
Steve Kagen, Wisconsin
Jim Marshall, Georgia
Joe Donnelly, Indiana
John Barrow, Georgia
Jason Altmire, Pennsylvania
John Hall, New York
Kirsten Gillibrand, New York
Stephanie Herseth, South Dakota
You should give them money.
tfk | March 28, 2007Stay Red Kansas – formerly the proprietors of Fire Kansas Democrats – is excited. A recent Pew Poll showed, in SRK's words:
over 40% of the public believe that the situation is going 'very well.'
According to Pew, however:
Four-in-ten Americans say that the U.S. military effort in Iraq is going very or fairly well, up 10 points from February, when positive perceptions reached an all-time low.
That's right, the "very" that SRK quoted should actually read "very or fairly," which is why the graphic SRK borrows from Pew is titled "Situation in Iraq is going well," not "very well." That would be…
tfk | March 28, 2007Mike Silverman found this remarkable statement on the website for James Bush, until recently the minister at a Southern Baptist church here in Lawrence.:
I have read the report the City Commission received from the city staff as well as reviewed the comments made by citizens of Lawrence and members of the City Commission. If I am elected to the City Commission, I would vote in favor of adopting the domestic registry. I support the registry because it affirms the relationship of domestic partners and it can provide employers an avenue to provide health insurance to employees who participate…
tfk | March 27, 200778 Republicans opposed a bill placing a 120 day limit on interim appointments of federal prosecutors. The bill removes a provision slipped into the USA/PATRIOT act which allows the President to name interim prosecutors without going through the Senate confirmation process. That provision allowed the replacement of federal prosecutors with political allies of the White House, prosecutors more willing to target Democrats. The new prosecutor in Arkansas is a Rove protege whose background is in opposition research for the RNC.
As others have observed, think what an oppo researcher with the…
tfk | March 26, 2007Salon reviews a draft of changes to regulations implementing the Endangered Species Act. The major shift is towards greater state control (as opposed to federal control) over the process, a shift that's been a key element of Republican attempts to gut the Act for decades. Salon explains other changes:
Written in terse, dry legal language, the proposed draft doesn't make for easy reading. However, the changes, often seemingly subtle, generally serve to strip the Fish and Wildlife Service of the power to do its stated job: to protect wildlife. Some verge on the biologically ridiculous, say…
tfk | March 26, 2007Lawrence Small has resigned. He has had an interesting tenure as Secretary of the Smithsonian. His collection of South American artifacts wound up putting him in violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty, and he tried to be allowed to use his community service time lobbying to revise that and related laws. He also proposed closing important scientific research facilities at the Smithsonian, focussing on corporate sponsorships of public events, including a screening of a Discovery Institute funded creationist movie. At the same time, the physical plant at Smithsonian museums has degraded,…