Two Johnson County children have been confirmed to have swine flu, health officials said Wednesday.
Also, a child and an adult are the latest confirmed cases of swine flu reported in Wyandotte County.
The new Johnson County cases include a Nike Elementary School student and a younger sibling of the student, the Gardner Edgerton Unified School District said.
The district said that based on newly issued federal guidelines, it would keep its schools open.
The recent publication of the Torture Memos and of the International Red Cross report on the treatment of high-level detainees in the aftermath of 9/11 has returned to national prominence the discussion of the morality of torture and “enhanced interrogation” techniques. It is important to be clear, as a moral matter, on what boundaries should be accepted in interrogation of human beings; a responsible and non-politicized discussion is essential on this difficult issue.
Economics has long been called the dismal science. The general economic outlook today is indeed dismal, but that doesn’t mean job prospects in the field are. “There is no unemployment among Ph.D.s in economics,” declares John Siegfried, a Vanderbilt University professor.
Just do the math, and you’ll see why: In the current academic year, the American Economics Association has listed approximately 2,200 job openings worldwide-but U.S. universities will grant only 950 Ph.D.s in economics.
Universities themselves may cut back, but economists remain in demand in government, business, and nonprofits and as consultants or policy analysts. “Depending on the program, about half the graduates stay in academics, and the other half go into the private sector, government, or places like the World Bank or International Monetary Fund,” says William Collins, director of graduate studies in economics at Vanderbilt. (more…)
Specter (D-Pa.) has already come out against the EFCA and announced on March 24 his opposition to the plan, which would make it easier to unionize. But on Tuesday, he left the door open for a compromise with Harkin.
“I’m opposed to giving up the secret ballot or mandatory arbitration as they are set forth in the bill, but I do believe that labor law reform is past overdue,” Specter said.
Americans give mixed reviews to Congress’ “Cash for Clunkers” plan to encourage the purchase of new, more fuel-efficient cars.
Forty-two percent (42%) favor the proposal to offer car owners up to $4,500 if they turn in their old vehicle and put the money toward an energy-saving replacement, but 34% oppose it.
However, a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that hardly anybody is paying attention to the plan just yet. Only 14% of Americans say they are following news reports about it even somewhat closely.
While the plan will benefit struggling U.S. automakers, just 34% of investors support it. Forty-six percent (46%) don’t like the idea.
Race42012: “They only win popular support where blacks don’t vote and after all, its only a regional thing”
Given the size of the Southern region (pictured in red), wouldn’t it be more prescient to say that opposition to tea drinker opposition to government bailouts and tax hikes on businesses is going the way of the dinosaur?
And let’s look more closely at these New England (and other blue state) “successes”:
TOPEKA | Gov. Mark Parkinson said Monday that he was willing to take a fresh look at the death-penalty law he helped write 15 years ago as a legislator.
The governor’s comments to reporters came after Senate leaders said the Legislature probably will debate the death-penalty law during its 2010 session. Efforts to repeal the law failed in the Senate this year because of concerns that the legislation was flawed.
“I applaud those folks out there who are saying, ‘We’ve had this law for 15 years. Let’s take a look at how it works.’ I’m more than happy to encourage their efforts to do that and then look at whatever work product they come up with,” he said.
Kansas Department of Transportation officials say the cables will first go up in Sedgwick and Shawnee Counties. In Sedgwick County the cables will be put up along a four-mile stretch of K-96 from I-135 to Rock Rd. In Shawnee County they cables will go up along a one-mile stretch of U.S. 75 from 25th to 35th streets. Work is expected to begin in 2010.
State statistics show there were 115 crossover crashes in Kansas between 2002 and 2006; 19 of those involved fatalities. Officials with the Kansas Department of Transportation say crossover crashes are only a small percentage of the accidents on Kansas highways. They say most highways are designed with broad, flat medians that allow drivers to regain control before crossing into opposing traffic.
According to a survey of other states the average cost of installing the cable barrier is $125,000 a mile. The cost of maintenance was between $312 and $1,000.
The aviation manufacturing industry in Kansas has been hit by the recession. But so far, employment in the industry hasn’t fallen to the levels it reached after the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Overall, aviation manufacturing employment is down about 20 percent since November 2008. In 2001, aviation employment dropped 35 percent over the next three years.
So J. J. Abrams has reimagined (”rebooted” is the popular term) the Star Trek franchise by starting over with a whole new cast playing James T. Kirk, Dr. McCoy, Spock, and Sulu - now with twice the macho gayness. The movie purports to tell the story of how Kirk and Spock became friends and how Kirk became captain of the Enterprise. In order to placate the fan base, Abrams uses a time-travel gimmick that preserves the original Trek universe somewhat.
If you don’t know that much, you’re probably not reading this article. And if you are reading it and didn’t know, you probably don’t care too much. Still, I’ll save the spoilers for the end of page two (you’ll be warned).
Actually, let me just dispense with the people who only want to know if they should see it. The answer is, Yes. It’s an enjoyable, good sci-fi action movie. The cast is surprisingly good - particularly Karl Urban, who plays McCoy. It helps to have passing familiarity with the TV show, but it’s far from required. Indeed, in a sense, less is more - because the more you know about the Trek canon, the more likely it is you’ll have problems with the movie.
The senators who originally designed our family planning policies believed that the mostly black welfare population was incurably lazy, promiscuous, intellectually substandard, and a burden on public schools, and, moreover, that they probably would remain so indefinitely.
The stimulus package of 2009 originally included millions of dollars for family planning services each year. Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended this extra funding as a means of saving money, noting that by reducing births to the poor, the government could lower its welfare costs. In the first article in this series, I showed that this idea was already central to U.S. family planning policy as far back as the Nixon administration. In fact, family planning is currently the most favored service of Medicaid, and the federal government spends over $1 billion annually in order to suppress the birth rate of the poor. By law it must encourage poor girls who have reached puberty to begin using contraception. These policies have been in place since 1972, when the welfare laws were changed to impose a national family planning policy on all the states at once, overriding the local laws that generally encouraged parental consent. These provisions were written by the Senate Finance Committee during the first major overhaul of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society welfare laws.
The powerful chairman of the committee, Democrat Russell Long of Louisiana, a supporter of Jim Crow and a signer of the “Southern Manifesto” condemning Brown vs. Board of Education, was excited by this proposal:
“Well, I want to say to you, Mr. Welch, that it is refreshing to hear somebody appear before the committee . . . who [has] some contact with the mainstream of the thinking in the United States and who can demonstrate a little common sense. We have heard some awfully ridiculous proposals made to this committee.”
Patrick Tuohey of Kansas City has launched the Missouri Record, an “independent journal of politics and policy dedicated to stimulating a free-and-open debate about the political ideas facing Missouri and to promote freedom and self-government,” according to the site. Tuohey is a principal at MarCom research, a market and communications research and polling firm. He also used to work for well-known GOP pollster and message guru Frank Luntz.
Also on board is Jason Barnes, known to many Missouri politicos. Jason is a talented writer with a number of assets (sharp political mind, knows Missouri politics, has a legal background) so his involvement will provide a major boost to the effort. Barnes has extensive experience writing and producing experience with online political publications.
Forty-six percent of Americans were opposed to creating a bipartisan commission to investigate the interrogations of detainees who were captured during the war, said the Ipsos-McClatchy poll conducted April 30-May3. Forty-one percent favored such a commission, and 13 percent were unsure.
Similarly, 48 percent opposed prosecuting those who authorized the interrogations, with 43 percent saying prosecution would be justified, and 9 percent unsure.
Sixty-two percent opposed prosecuting the people who actually carried out the prosecutions authorized by others high in the government, while 30 percent favored prosecution, and 8 percent were unsure.
Instapundit notices that the small town of Tracy, California is giving away 800 $500 gift certificates to those who purchase a new car, which will cost the town $800,000, including advertising.
I can’t help but also notice that Tracy, California is getting $900,000 in the stimulus to “widen Corral Hollow Road.”
While Pres. Barack Obama has, in one sense, tipped his hand by saying that he wants judges with “empathy” for certain groups, he has in a more fundamental sense concealed the real goal - getting judges who will ratify an ever-expanding scope of federal-government power and an ever-declining restraint by the Constitution of the United States.
This is consistent with everything else that Obama has done in office and is consistent with his decades-long track record of alliances with people who reject the fundamentals of American society.
Judicial expansion of federal power is not really new, even if the audacity with which that goal is being pursued may be unique. For more than a century, believers in bigger government have also been believers in having judges “interpret” the restraints of the Constitution out of existence.
1. I’ve been against ALL bailouts so far. Why should I be for this one? It would be hypocritical of me to support a bailout for newspapers if I don’t support one for banks, cars and so on.
2. Conflict of interest. Doesn’t the media - who covers the federal government - become at risk of becoming even more of a joke? The credibility of the media, which would receive billions upon billions of dollars from the government, would be endangered even more. Plus, it would almost be Nazi Germany-like for the government to literally buy media. President Obama and Democrats have put strings on the auto bailout, such as GM’s boss being fired. What would a Big Media bailout look like and what stipulations would be necessary?
3. The newspaper business needs to adjust on its own. When a business of any kind fails, it must recovery, clean itself off and find a new business model. News is no different.
To state the obvious, public officials occupy a unique position of power and trust. I do not think that a criminal record is in all cases a disqualifier for public service, but I do think it is something that the public is entitled to know. Some criminals are repeat offenders, and I suspect that the everyday person thinks that having open criminal records is good public policy. So when I first filed a bill that would make the criminal records of government officials public, I figured most people would think it’s a good idea. And maybe it is: but most state legislators think differently.
But the Attorney General, the top law enforcement official in the state, thought it was a terrible idea:
Our Attorney General Dustin McDaniel (not to be confused with Steve Clark) also spoke against the bill; he said he thought the bill was too extensive - that letting the public do background checks on every “state legislator, Justice of the Peace and dogcatcher in Arkansas” granted too much access by too many people. We don’t actually have elections for dogcatcher in Arkansas, but it was interesting to see him say publicly what I suspect some elected officials thought privately.
He even thought that he should “protect the privacy” of criminals.
The Harlem Children’s Zone is a model for other areas to follow because it puts into practice some of the principles that I’ve talked about before: (1) More money does not equal better results.(2) The goal should be to move every child forwardinstead of “leaving no child behind.”(3) Schools are more able focus on kids’ strengths, not weaknesses, when local control is restored.(4) It should be easy to recruit the best teachers, and it should be easy to fire bad teachers.
Now Democrats are ganging up on President Barack Obama’s plans to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison. Or rather, the president’s lack of planning for how to shutter the prison and how to handle the detainees.
“They say, ‘We’re going to close Guantanamo.’ OK, fine. How are you going to do that? That’s the question,” Rep. Neal Abercrombie (D-Hawaii) told POLITICO Thursday. “They should have had that worked out from the get-go.”
“There’s this vague game plan that now we’re going to leave Guantanamo,” Abercrombie said. “It’s allowed it to become a political football.”
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said he believed there were prisons in the United States that could handle the Guantanamo detainees, but it’s becoming clear that many states and localities want nothing to do with the terrorist suspects.
Nebraska Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson, not a fan of the Employee Free Choice Act, tells Fox News-er Trish Turner that efforts to cut a card check compromise are doomed this year.
Even gutting the bill to remove binding arbitration - a key union demand - won’t do the trick, he says:
“You take away the arbitration issue, and you still have the ‘card check’, so that doesn’t work. You take away the ‘card check’ and you still have the arbitration problem. And if both go away, you’re left with nothing. It’s a fool’s errand to do this. I just don’t see an agreement happening,” Nelson said.
Even if this was off the cuff, it’s not going to go over well with the sports bosses at CBS.
The network’s golf analyst, David Feherty, writing a column in D Magazine about the George and Laura Bush moving to the Dallas area, says U.S. soldiers would shoot Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid:
“From my own experience visiting the troops in the Middle East, I can tell you this, though: despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious media, if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Osama bin Laden, there’s a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death.”
When Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, proponents boasted that stiff mandatory minimum sentences would be bad news for major drug traffickers. Ha. Over time, drug kingpins learned that they had little to fear from the law — especially if they were dealing crack cocaine. The federal law institutionalized a 100-to-1 crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity by mandating a five-year minimum term for 5 grams of crack — the weight of less than two sugar packets — or for 500 grams of powder cocaine.
Then-Sen. Barack Obama campaigned against the disparity in 2008, as it resulted in longer sentences for black offenders than white offenders. In 2006, more than four out of five of those prosecuted on federal crack charges were black. White offenders accounted for fewer than 1 in 10 crack offenders. The ratio for powder cocaine offenders, however, was 27 percent black, 14 percent white and 58 percent Latino.
Department of Justice Criminal Division chief Lanny Breuer testified against the disparity before a Senate subcommittee last week. As Breuer noted, the crack law doesn’t target major traffickers; 55 percent of federal crack offenders were street-level dealers in 2005, while 7.3 percent of powder offenders were street-level dealers.
I encourage everyone to watch this, pass it along in your network and link on your blogs.
With two of the three major network evening new anchors blogging FOR the Huffington Post (I believe they are paid by Ms. Huffington) and CNN news anchors lying to their audience so that they can attack Republican politicians, I can honestly say that our media no longer supports a liberal agenda, but is part of the liberal agenda.
On Wednesday, I was part of a group that heard Minnesota’s Governor Tim Pawlenty talk about his current battles with the Democrat-controlled Minnesota legislature; Pawlenty, like Horatius at the bridge, is all that stands between Minnesotans and a massive tax increase. But that was only the beginning: Pawlenty went on to lay out his vision for Minnesota with respect to some of the big issues of the day–the economy, education and health care. With few exceptions, his observations and prescriptions could easily be adapted to the national stage.
It was a masterful performance. Pawlenty is a conservative with a disarmingly moderate style. He is smart, articulate, youthful, energetic and likable. He is, to boot, one of the funniest storytellers in American politics. When he had finished, the question in my mind was: who in American politics is better? The only name that came to mind was Bill Clinton, but thankfully he’s retired. Among Republicans, only Mitt Romney comes close. But Pawlenty communicates better with a wider range of people.
Dense, walkable settlements are not just a pleasant lifestyle choice. They are a precondition of the strong, inter-connected communities that social conservatives desire. It is not difficult to envision how these communities can make our lives comprehensively better. Americans are not obliged by any law of nature or rule of the market to live in mediocre, anti-social places. With changes in public policy, over time we can begin again to create neighborhoods that promote real community.
Yarmuth organized Article 1 PAC to “help support candidates that are committed to preserving Article One,” Yarmuth spokesman Stuart Perelmuter said in an e-mail to CQ Politics.
Yarmuth, who was first elected in 2006 to represent the Louisville area, has been concerned that the executive branch topped by the office of the president (that’s the subject of Article Two) has in recent years encroached on the prerogatives of the legislative branch, with little awareness from Congress and the public.
Yarmuth was a critic of the two-term presidency of Republican George W. Bush, who made sweeping claims of executive power. But Yarmuth wrote on his congressional Web site that his pro-Article 1 campaign “is neither a simple claim to power nor a rebuff of a particular President.”
“Establishing the Congress was the first priority of our Founding Fathers, who understood the importance of protecting America from the perils of an all-powerful chief executive,” Yarmuth wrote.
