BuzzChatter Friday: Nixon takes a shot at GOP lawmakers for underfunding education
• “This $22 million cut to our K-12 classrooms and higher education institutions is an unnecessary and entirely avoidable consequence of the General Assembly’s failure to include the funding that I repeatedly requested.” — Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon bemoaning the GOP-led General Assembly’s decision not to spend as much on schools and higher ed as he wanted.
Nixon, a Democrat, said he repeatedly warned lawmakers that lottery and gaming revenues used to fund education were running low and that lawmakers would have to find the $22 million elsewhere. Republicans didn’t heed that request. They said education is still getting about $20 million in new funding. But Nixon said that wasn’t enough, calling the $22 million “real cuts that will affect all Missouri students.”• “I’m not running for anything.” — former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, 90, on his upcoming trip to Kansas.
Dole will be at the Dole Institute of Politics in Lawrence at 11 a.m. April 22, a visit that’s open to the public. Dole said he just wanted to visit with old friends and meet a few new ones, too.• “You have really been a role model for the other services on this. You stood up first.” — Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill praising the Air Force for boosting confidence in how the military handles sexual assault cases.
• “It’s like Amazon.com taking stock of the people who (put items in their shopping cart) and then counting them as sales. In other words it’s a false metric.” — Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch ripping the administration’s accounting of how many Americans have signed up for health care through the Affordable Care Act.
Hatch, a Republican, has a point. But the administration doesn’t deny that the 7.1 million Americans who had enrolled as of April 1 is not a count of how many Americans had actually paid their first month’s premiums. They need to write that check in order to begin receiving coverage. Exactly how many have paid apparently is not a number that’s known yet. Oh, the administration announced Thursday that the actual number of folks who have signed up for coverage had jumped to 7.5 million.• “What the hell’s the presidency for if not to fight for causes you believe in?” — President Barack Obama
at the LBJ Presidential Library
in Texas Thursday quoting a line Johnson once used himself.
Obama praised his fellow Democrat for his role in expanding civil right, a story well told in biographer Robert Caro’s continuing series on Johnson’s life. But some environmentalists may be wondering why Obama isn’t doing more for their cause, which the president says he champions.This story was originally published April 11, 2014 at 7:00 AM with the headline "BuzzChatter Friday: Nixon takes a shot at GOP lawmakers for underfunding education."