Policy and Politics
tfk | March 14, 2007A year ago, John Bacon joined the other conservatives on the Kansas Board of Education in voting for nonbinding guidelines on sex education. While the Board has no power to do anything one way or another, they voted to tell local school boards that they ought to require parents to opt their children into sex ed, rather than letting parents who object to opt out.
It may seem like a small thing, but that difference actually does change how many children will get basic education about matters which could save their lives.
A year later, a new Board is in charge and focusing on the way that…
tfk | March 13, 2007Rasmussen Reports polled Brownback vs. Clinton & Obama:
Brownback … trail[s] … Clinton among likely voters by the narrow margin of just five percentage points. It’s Clinton 46% Brownback 41%.
However, Democratic Senator Barack Obama leads Senator Brownback by the much wider margin of 49% to 34%.
In polls of the primary, Obama tends to trail Clinton, though polls on MyDD or DailyKos, home of Democratic activists and opinionmakers, strongly favor Obama.
tfk | March 12, 2007Talking about Iraq is getting harder and harder. Not in the way that talking about Israel is getting harder; there are no forces maumauing dissenters into lockstep. Indeed, the political leadership is lagging the public's desire to see an end to the occupation of Iraq.
What's hard to talk about is the agony and suffering being inflicted not just on the Iraqi people, but on our citizens who go to fight there. On one hand, you have soldiers injured in combat being sent back before they heal:
"This is not right," said Master Sgt. Ronald Jenkins, who has been ordered to Iraq even though he has…
tfk | March 11, 2007I'll agree with Kevin that citing the Dred Scott decision is an odd way to justify anything, let alone the claim that the 2nd Amendment grants an individual right to bear arms. That's an interpretation that is, at best, debatable, and Dred Scott is not considered the high water mark of American jurisprudence.
One thing about the decision has me confused. As quoted by the Wall Street Journal, the decision states:
"Although Dred Scott is as infamous as it was erroneous in holding that African-Americans are not citizens, this passage expresses the view, albeit in passing, that the Second…
tfk | March 10, 2007Conservatives are shocked (shocked!) to learn that Democrats don't care for Fox News.
Democrats actually were shocked that the Nevada Party thought it was a good idea to broadcast on the extraordinarily conservative Fox, but were not at all surprised that Fox wouldn't let Air America carry the event on the radio.
Fox News is, and has always been, a conservative media outlet. I find it difficult to believe that anyone didn't know that. J.D. seems to be blaming Democrats for this bifurcation of news sources, but that's difficult to credit. Fox News is the Conservapedia of news sources; and…
tfk | March 9, 2007The body will not be empowered to create legislation, but will investigate climate change and energy independence with an eye towards creating a record which will support future policymaking. 44 Republicans supported this committee. Perhaps the 150 opponents hope that we can address the problem by ignoring it.
tfk | March 7, 2007The BB Gang find this contradictory:
In the Washington Post today, Nancy Boyda reported that commanders in Iraq were "cautiously optimistic" about new efforts to secure Baghdad.
That's not the same picture she painted in today's Cap Journal, where "she had little positive to report."
If the only good thing going on is that the commanders are "cautiously optimistic," I think that's "little positive to report."
For instance, rape of female soldiers is a bad thing. The escalating civil war (and no, BB, it isn't externally fomented, it's an internal clash). The rate of American fatalities…
tfk | March 6, 2007"Scooter" Libby is guilty of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements to federal officers. He did so to protect his boss, Dick "Go F--- Yourself" Cheney from an investigation into who ordered a covert agent's identity to be exposed. His lies prevented the investigation from moving on to Cheney and other administration figures, protecting the person truly responsible for endangering investigations into weapons proliferation.
Libby was acquitted of one charge, that he lied to the FBI about a conversation with Matt Cooper of Time magazine, but convicted him of lying about a…
tfk | March 4, 2007Bill Clinton tells Kansas Democrats:
"You're in a party that's in the solutions business. … Can you prove that what unites us is more important than what we disagree about? Can you prove that America can be about doing again? And that the Democratic party can lead the way? That's what everybody's looking to see, and I'm gambling you'll give them a very good answer."
Grover Norquist at the Conservative PAC summit:
"Our job is to say 'no, no, no, no' for two years."
Which would you rather be part of?
tfk | March 4, 2007
Bill Clinton is rightly known as a tremendous orator. He speaks to a crowd of hundreds as if he were just chatting over a cup of coffee, and exudes a charisma of a sort that few others have. Last year's speaker, Barack Obama, has a different sort of charisma
He began by saying that in the many political events he's addressed over the last year, he regularly pointed to Kansas as an example of how Democrats could win in Republican areas. The trick in Kansas as it has been elsewhere is "to find a common ground and common solutions."
"You did a great thing here, for the Democrats, but you did…
tfk | March 3, 2007Bill Clinton is a great orator, and unquestionably one of the great minds of our age. A full report will be up tomorrow.
Well-placed sources had not even heard the rumors about Steve Boyda running for Senate, and sources that had heard the rumors were generally dismissive of them. People are either keeping their cards close to their chest, or Steve Kraske got burned. For what it's worth, I think there are a number of people who would be great competition for Pat Roberts, and it's nice to see the threat of a challenge reminding Pat Roberts to come back to Kansas now and then.
I interviewed…
tfk | March 3, 2007The Pitch Weekly reports a clearly unconstitutional judicial order. Having obtained a document which apparently showed how the Kansas City Kansas Board of Public Utilities may have violated clean air laws, the Pitch and the Kansas City Star each ran stories about the potential fines that the Board could be accountable for, according to its own attorneys. When the articles were published, the BPU sued, and astoundingly, a judge ordered the articles to be spiked. Not only that:
Moorhouse … barred the papers from publishing information contained in the confidential document, copying it or “…
tfk | March 1, 2007Tomorrow will be the big gathering of the Kansas Democratic tribe. Any of you who'll be there should keep an eye out for the guy who looks like this and isn't running for President:
Consider this an open thread: here's your chance to suggest questions I should ask people.
tfk | March 1, 2007Shamelessly stolen from Nitpicker. For those who don't know, Terry was a soldier in Afghanistan, where he organized a drive for people to send pens to Afghan kids. He wrote this in response to Barack Obama's apology for saying lives have been wasted in Iraq, but it's apt after John McCain sort of apologized for saying the same thing:
A closer look, however, reveals that Malkin's childish fuming is just another version of Bush's spin point: That only by "winning" the war in Iraq can we "honor" the service members already killed in his war.
When you consider this logical result of this…
tfk | March 1, 2007The White House is threatening to veto a bill to fully implement the 9/11 commission's recommendations. What horror could be in that bill which would earn the second veto in 6 years?:
the White House [is] threatening a veto because one part would extend union protection to 45,000 airport workers.
It's no secret that I'm a fan of labor. My grandfather was a secretary-treasurer of his union, and while speaking out against the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, he got into a tiff with Representative Richard Milhous Nixon.
The Taft-Hartley Act passed, despite President Truman's veto. Truman declared…
tfk | February 28, 2007Western States Agree to Cut Greenhouse Gases:
Five Western governors agreed yesterday on a plan to cut their states' emissions of gases linked to global warming and to establish a regional carbon-trading system, though they stopped short of saying how drastically they will seek to reduce greenhouse gases.
The governors -- [from] California,… Arizona, Oregon, New Mexico and Washington -- said that within six months they will set a regional target for lower emissions. A year after that, they pledged, they will devise a regional cap-and-trade system allowing polluters to buy and sell greenhouse…
tfk | February 28, 2007Red Letter Day rounds up the six City Commission candidates' statements on the proposed registry. The three progressives are for it, the two growth-for-growth's sake candidates are wishy-washy, and the pastor is predictably less wishy than washy. Given the demographics involved, it would be bad mojo for even a Southern Baptist minister to be entirely against it.
Bear in mind that all the city would be doing is providing a central repository for companies to refer to in executing their own decisions about granting domestic partner benefits. The registry would not conflict with state law as…
tfk | February 28, 2007In a world in which public domain speeches by government officials on government time are copyrighted, it's hard to conclude anything other than that copyright is broken.
If it is not "fair use" to present film shot by CSPAN's cameras of congresscritters at work for educational purposes and with attribution, copyright is broken.
Historically, the idea was that works were in the public domain unless Congress, exercising a right granted by the US Constitution in order "to promote the progress of science and useful arts," grants a copyright, patent or trademark. In our age of corporate mass…