One can envision the hearings. The outraged congressmen and the pompous senators grilling the secretary, with no answer likely to satisfy. The TV lights and live coverage on Fox. A new revelation (or non-revelation) popping up every couple of days. Is it any wonder good people are reluctant to go into public service these days?
We still raise corn and cotton in Missouri, and cockleburs pop up as weeds. But we aren’t producing a bumper crop of Democrats these days. And, sadly, our state politicians are no longer immune to the frothy eloquence of charlatans who sell the false logic of income tax cuts and anti-worker laws and other brands of snake oil.
It now appears that the wrong candidate was declared winner of the 2010 Democratic primary in Missouri’s 19th District. That would be the contentious race between John Rizzo and Will Royster.
Truly, what were those folks in Cincinnati thinking? Did they not know that their targeting would result in a conservative firestorm? Singling out groups with keywords in their names was absolutely wrong.
Keeping documents on file hurts no one. Curiously, many of the documents that Missouri Republicans want kept under lock and key are the same ones they want people to produce in order to register to vote.
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has called the bluff of the Republican-controlled state legislature. Good for him. Setting a new standard in bad behavior, the legislature’s budget writers made next year’s fiscal plan a tool in an ongoing power struggle they’re having with the governor.
You’ll find the same apparel at any number of stores in any number of cities worldwide — cheap clothes made by workers who labor for low pay and often in deadly conditions to enable recreational shopping in wealthier nations.
The notion that expanding Medicaid might improve people’s health never proved a compelling argument to opponents of expansion. But you can be sure that opponents are all over a study which shows that access to Medicaid didn’t significantly improve the health of recipients in certain indicators over a two-year period.
Republicans won’t vote for sensible gun safety legislation because they can’t give Obama a political victory. Then they turn around and accuse him of being ineffective. Moreover, their insensitivity to victims and survivors of gun violence is stunning.
The thinking of Gov. Sam Brownback is mysterious. But we can say with some certainty that a pathogen lab is more attractive to him as an economic stimulus than an expansion of health care to low-income Kansans.
Obamacare haters first looked to the U.S. Supreme Court to kill health care reform. When that didn’t work, they fixed their hopes on Mitt Romney’s election and a Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate. Foiled again. As it has from the beginning, the crippling of Obamacare relies on omission and distortion.
To have lost the young Chinese student Lu Lingzi in Boston so suddenly and brutally seems like an abject failure.
After hopes of even winning a rational debate in the U.S. Senate on gun safety fell apart on Thursday, a woman leaving the gallery said of the senators, “Who do they think they represent?” Good question. Not the 80 to 90 percent of Americans who support modest measures such as background checks at gun shows and for Internet gun sales, that’s for sure.
Gun owners matter. But so do the families of the slain children in Newtown, Conn., and the survivors and families left bereaved by shootings in movie theaters, on college campuses, in shopping malls and on the streets of cities all over America.
For a program that helps the poor, the earned income tax credit is remarkably uncontroversial. Thoughtful observers see that it works exactly as Milton Friedman envisioned: Given a lump sum, people generally use it to improve their circumstances.
The hugs for same-sex couples and handshakes for immigrants are great developments. But our baser instincts will always demand a group to marginalize. And as a certain pilgrim said in Biblical times: The poor we will always have with us.
Every week, it seems, the Kansas Legislature takes meddling to a new level. This week, House members have adopted the role of wannabe hospital officials. The chamber supported a bill that would require the University of Kansas Medical Center to establish a center to advance stem cell research — but only the types of stem cell research approved by the Kansas Legislature.
Refusal to insure very low-income Missourians has cost Republicans at the polls before, and a recent survey indicates it may do so again.
It’s difficult to gauge whether the anti-abortion bill up before the Kansas House today is more notable for its cruelty or for its ignorance.
Increasingly, this is what state lawmakers in these parts do best. They seize a cause from some out-of-state think tank or interest group or nut case movement and impose it on their constituents.
Surely I’m not the only one who finds the exclusion of the Kansas City Atheist Coalition from the St. Patrick’s Day Parade to be somewhat laughable.
Score one for the Big Gulp. New York City’s move to scale back oversized servings of sugary drinks unfortunately was a loser in its first round in court. New York Supreme Court Judge Milton A. Tingling overturned the law this afternoon, less than 24 hours before the restrictions were to take effect.
Marissa Mayer apparently is willing to sacrifice some degree of productivity, and morale, for the sake of innovation. That is her right. She was hired, after all, to rescue a sinking company, not to become a champion of the work-at-home movement.
Mirages are still plentiful in Kansas. Gov. Sam Brownback’s administration and Republicans in the Legislature are conjuring them fast and furiously, using numbers to create illusions about funding for elementary and secondary education.
The Wal-Mart mom does it all. She raises kids, works a job or two, runs Girl Scout troops, cares for elderly relatives and walks the family dog. Without her, entire households, schools and neighborhoods would go to pieces. Also, she sways elections.
