BuzzChatter Wednesday: Justus touts rewrite of MO criminal code

By STEVE KRASKE

April 9, 2014 7:00 AM

Forecast of 72 and sunny today. Oooh, baby!

• “It gets the right criminals off the street and keeps them off the street.” — Missouri state Sen. Jolie Justus, a Kansas City Democrat, who’s sponsoring an overhaul of the state’s criminal code for the first time since 1979.

The measure creates new punishment ranges for various crimes. It’s also 400 pages shorter than an original proposal. Gov. Jay Nixon, a former attorney general, had raised questions about whether his office could digest such a detailed measure before he would have to act on it. Justus said those pages were “probably unnecessarily” removed, although the shorter bill still gets the job done.

• “There’s no way there will be a Bush-Clinton race in 2016.” — conservative commentator Bill Kristol

on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Tuesday.

Kristol is convinced that Republicans won’t nominate Bush who’s been out of office since 2007 when his term expired as Florida governor. Bush hasn’t been engaged in any of the battles during Barack Obama’s presidency, Kristol said. “If it’s Bush against Clinton, it’s two people who have been around an awful long time, two people who sort of inherited the mantle,” he said. “And then Hillary gets to say, ‘I’m the first woman president.’ And Jeb gets to say, ‘I’m the third Bush president.’ That’s not a good match-up for Republicans.”

• “I think he was actually sexy.” — historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on President Abraham Lincoln.

She qualified that by saying Lincoln also would have to shave his beard and ditch the stovepipe hat. Speaking at the University of Chicago Monday, Goodwin also said money is the poison of American politics and that it will take a constitutional amendment to change it.

• “Men and women in equivalent roles here earn equivalent salaries.” — presidential spokesman Jay Carney responding to a study by the conservative American Enterprise Institute that showed that female White House staffers earn an average of 88 cents for every dollar a male staffer earns.

The study came as Obama on Tuesday declared that it was an “embarrassment” that women in America earn only 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. Carney insisted that the White House pay figures reflect the fact that women fill more lower-level positions than men do. Women working the same positions as men earn the equal amounts, he added.

This story was originally published April 9, 2014 at 7:00 AM with the headline "BuzzChatter Wednesday: Justus touts rewrite of MO criminal code."

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