TOPEKA | Gov. Mark Parkinson is expected to make his first decision about an abortion measure this week, when he takes up the Legislature’s budget-balancing bill.
Parkinson has said his views on abortion are “very similar” to those held by former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, an abortion rights supporter who resigned last month to become U.S. health and human services secretary. However, he has not acted yet on any bills dealing with abortion.
That will change when he deals with the bill that balances the state budget for the fiscal year starting July 1. The bill includes a provision that would abolish state funding for Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, and Parkinson could veto that measure while maintaining the rest of the bill.
From contributing author Lucy: “Obama’s Notre Dame Speech”
Consensus, conscience and conflicts….these three words came up it Obama’s speech to Notre Dame graduates in South Bend, Indiana over the weekend.The speech was artfully woven into a charming and emotion-generating treatise that sounded reasonable and surely fit the bill for a graduation speech, but I have to wonder at how the tapestry of well-chosen sound-bytes will look on the “wall of American ideals.(more…)
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced his 2010 budget request in April to the applause of many of Washington’s nattering nabobs. Advocates of nuclear disarmament praised Gates many programmatic cuts without understanding their implications. (more…)
BLUE KEY SENIOR HONOR SOCIETY AT K-STATE SELECTS MEMBERS FOR 2009-2010
MANHATTAN — A senior leadership honor society at Kansas State University has selected members for the 2009-2010 school year.
Blue Key Honor Society recognizes college students at senior institutions of higher education for balanced and all-around excellence in scholarship, leadership and service. (more…)
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today will propose selling San Quentin Prison, the Los Angeles Coliseum and other state-owned properties in a bid to raise cash to counter the state’s daunting budget shortfall.
He also wants to accelerate the sale of Agnews Developmental Center, the 81-acre facility on the north edge of San Jose that closed its doors in March after 120 years.
The proposal to sell off state assets is part of the governor’s revised budget plan being released today. Besides the Coliseum and San Quentin, the properties he’s eyeing for sale are the Cow Palace in Daly City, the Orange County Fairgrounds, Cal Expo in Sacramento, Del Mar Fairground, and the Ventura County Fair.
The sale of those properties would generate upward of $600 million and possibly more than $1 billion for the state, according to a copy of Schwarzenegger’s proposal. But proceeds from those sales would not arrive for another two to five years.
Selling the Agnews property would be done within two years.
With its stunning views of the San Francisco Bay, San Quentin has long been eyed for a more lucrative use. Sen. Jeff Denham, R-Modesto, has proposed selling both San Quentin and the Coliseum to generate badly needed revenues for the state.
Rep. Michael Castle (R-Del.) told POLITICO that he will make a decision whether to run for the Senate in the next two months, and said he’s getting encouragement from many colleagues in the upper chamber.
“I talk to senators, they call me, I talk to them. There’s no real pressure,” Castle said, mentioning that he’s recently talked about the race with Sen. John McCain.
“They’ve been all through it, they’re respectful of the fact that it’s a personal decision. Even though they encourage me to run, they also understand making a decision has to be about whatever you want to do.”
He said that he’d be able to ramp up fundraising quickly, despite his weak first quarter fundraising report in which he only raised $74,000.
“When he believes that the release of materials may jeopardize the national security, then he’s going to make that case. In this case, his concern is that the release of the photos from acts that happened years ago will serve to inflame the situation now and endanger our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. And that’s something he’s not inclined to do,” Axelrod said.
I thought of Churchill when Democrats and their partners in the mainstream media denounced former Vice President Dick Cheney all last week. I remarked to Newsweek’s Howard Fineman on air that the Left greets every Cheney appearance as Grendel-escaped-again-from-its-den, but their defensiveness about the former vice president is extremely revealing. (more…)
- CONNEAUT - City administrators have sent a letter to a local Website operator, ordering her to remove information related to municipal offices, City Council members learned at Monday’s work session. (more…)
PHILADELPHIA (AP) - The head of the world’s most popular search engine urged college graduates on Monday to step away from the virtual world and make human connections.
Speaking at the University of Pennsylvania’s commencement, Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt told about 6,000 graduates that they need to find out what is most important to them - by living analog for a while.
“Turn off your computer. You’re actually going to have to turn off your phone and discover all that is human around us,” Schmidt said. “Nothing beats holding the hand of your grandchild as he walks his first steps.”
Schmidt, who holds a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, also received an honorary doctor of science degree at the ceremony. Penn President Amy Gutmann cited Schmidt’s “manifold contributions to putting the world at humanity’s fingertips.”
MALDEN, Mass. (WPRI) - According to state education officials, nearly three-quarters of the people who took the state elementary school teacher’s licensing exam this year failed the new math section.
The teacher’s licensing exam tested potential teachers on their knowledge of elementary school mathematics. This included geometry, statistics, and probability.
Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester was not surprised by the results. He told the Boston Globe that these results indicate many students are not receiving an adequate math education.
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama’s new fuel and emission standards for cars and trucks will save billions of barrels of oil but are expected to cost consumers an extra $1,300 per vehicle by the time the plan is complete in 2016. Obama on Tuesday planned to announce the first-ever national emissions limits for vehicles, as well as require an overall or industry average fuel efficiency standard at 35.5 miles per gallon.
Carol Browner, the White House energy and climate director, publicly confirmed the new initiative in appearances on morning network news shows, calling it a “truly historic” occasion and saying tougher standards are “long overdue.”
“[People say ‘libertarian']. . . as if it’s an evil word. . . . Throw me in that briar patch, I’m guilty. I love liberty. . . . I’ve been accused of being a libertarian, and I . . . wear it as a badge of honor. Because I do love, believe in, and want to support liberty.”
US government officials are concerned that the quality of the Global Positioning System (GPS) could begin to deteriorate as early as next year, resulting in regular blackouts and failures - or even dishing out inaccurate directions to millions of people worldwide.
The warning centres on the network of GPS satellites that constantly orbit the planet and beam signals back to the ground that help pinpoint your position on the Earth’s surface.
The satellites are overseen by the US Air Force, which has maintained the GPS network since the early 1990s. According to a study by the US government accountability office (GAO), mismanagement and a lack of investment means that some of the crucial GPS satellites could begin to fail as early as next year.
“It is uncertain whether the Air Force will be able to acquire new satellites in time to maintain current GPS service without interruption,” said the report, presented to Congress. “If not, some military operations and some civilian users could be adversely affected.”
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The new influenza strain circulating around most of the United States is putting a worrying number of young adults and children into the hospital and hitting more schools than usual, U.S. health officials said on Monday.
The H1N1 swine flu virus killed a vice principal at a New York City school over the weekend and has spread to 48 states. While it appears to be mild, it is affecting a disproportionate number of children, teenagers and young adults.
This includes people needing hospitalization — now up to 200, said Dr. Anne Schuchat of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“That’s very unusual, to have so many people under 20 to require hospitalization, and some of them in (intensive care units),” Schuchat told reporters in a telephone briefing.
The World Health Organization chief said Monday the U.N. health body will keep the alert against a new strain of influenza at phase 5.
WHO Director General Margaret Chan said the new influenza epidemic is now in “a grace period.”
The WHO chief made the decision as the world health body’s annual general assembly began earlier Monday in Geneva with the central focus on how the international community can work together over measures to stop worldwide spread of the new flu and securing vaccines against it.
More voters have left the Democrats over abortion than have joined it. And the public has been moving in a pro-life direction for years. (The latest Gallup poll even has a majority of Americans calling themselves pro-life.) Obama wants to defend a status quo in which abortion is effectively legal through all stages of pregnancy and abortion policy is sealed off from democratic decision-making. He even wants to make taxpayers pay for abortion. So at Notre Dame, he handled the political difficulty deftly. He didn’t try to make the case for his views on abortion and related issues. He just plead for mutual understanding, civility, and the search for common ground. All of those are perfectly valid goals, of course, but they are also the ones you’d expect to see emphasized by the side that’s defending a politically dangerous position.
WASHINGTON - Members of Congress have been told in confidential briefings that Pakistan is rapidly adding to its nuclear arsenal even while racked by insurgency, raising questions on Capitol Hill about whether billions of dollars in proposed military aid might be diverted to Pakistan’s nuclear program.
Updating some research from Richard Vedder of Ohio University, we found that from 1998 to 2007, more than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holidays moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas. We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts.
Did the greater prosperity in low-tax states happen by chance? Is it coincidence that the two highest tax-rate states in the nation, California and New York, have the biggest fiscal holes to repair? No. Dozens of academic studies — old and new — have found clear and irrefutable statistical evidence that high state and local taxes repel jobs and businesses.
Greg Hengler at Townhall captures this revealing moment in the Senate Finance Committee hearings on health-care reform. The speaker, Professor Stuart Altman of Brandeis University, tells the committee that resources get wasted in the American health-care system, especially for one segment of the population. Professor Altman says he’s reluctant to mention it, but why waste money on in-depth treatment for people who won’t live long anyway? Better to warehouse them and save the resources for the young:
It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more.
How did cap and trade, hatched as an academic theory in obscure economic journals half a century ago, become the policy of choice in the debate over how to slow the heating of the planet? And how did it come to eclipse the idea of simply slapping a tax on energy consumption that befouls the public square or leaves the nation hostage to foreign oil producers?
The answer is not to be found in the study of economics or environmental science, but in the realm where most policy debates are ultimately settled: politics. Many members of Congress remember the painful political lesson of 1993, when President Bill Clinton proposed a tax on all forms of energy, a plan that went down to defeat and helped take the Democratic majority in Congress down with it a year later.
Cap and trade, by contrast, is almost perfectly designed for the buying and selling of political support through the granting of valuable emissions permits to favor specific industries and even specific Congressional districts. That is precisely what is taking place now in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has used such concessions to patch together a Democratic majority to pass a far-reaching bill to regulate carbon emissions through a cap-and-trade plan.
The day before President Barack Obama was to meet with Israel’s prime minister, community activists, clergy and residents marched through Oak Park on Sunday to call for a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And they were led in their efforts by a politically provocative pair from Chicago: Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. and William Ayers.
The two men shared the stage for one of the first times at First United Church of Oak Park during a forum before the annual walk.
And even before the economy got nasty, seniors were found to be generally happier than Baby Boomers. Some of that owes to the American Dream being lived by past generations, while Boomers work two jobs and watch the dream wither.
In times like this, it’s clear how age can have its advantages. While not all seniors are weathering the recession well, for many the impact is much less severe than it is for younger people.
Why? Many people 65 and older retired and downsized their lifestyles before the economy imploded, according to Pew analysts. Most aren’t raising kids and many are not so worried about being laid off. Loss of income can be, of course, a source of stress and displeasure. (While money doesn’t buy happiness, a study in February showed cash can help, especially when people use it to do stuff instead of buy things.)
Late last week, I reached out to the Association of Former Intelligence Officers to get their take on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s claim that the CIA lied to her in its briefings about detainee interrogations and that “they mislead” Congress “all the time.”
Gene Poteat, president of AFIO, offered this statement:
Those CIA officers chosen to brief the Congress, and especially the intelligence committees, are very senior, experienced officers, who well know the reputation and future of the CIA, as well as their own jobs, are on the line should they be perceived as not telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Such restrictions, however, do not apply to members of the Congress when they then appear before the public.
“The best use that I can make of this experience is to offer myself as a candidate to be the next governor of the state of Florida,” McCollum said in Orlando.McCollum said his experience as attorney general will allow him “to be the strong leader that the next governor of Florida requires.”"That is a position that we have to have filled by somebody who will be strong and will face the challenges that we all know are out there today,” McCollum said.
Sen. Chris Dodd (D., Conn.) has a primary challenger, a former donor. I was ready to dismiss the challenger, Merrick Alpert, as a no-name, but he has a fairly impressive résumé - Air Force officer who served in Bosnia, advance work for Vice President Gore, started a medical software company.
However, if Alpert ever gains enough prominence to become a real challenge to Dodd, I could see his campaign making hay out of this line: “Merrick transitioned back into the private sector, first working in Oklahoma at Smith Cogeneration International and then in California at Pacific Gas & Electric Energy Services and Enron Energy Services.”
The Field Manual, which was published in 2006, says that “direct approach” interrogation operations in World War II had a 90 percent effectiveness, and those in Vietnam, Kuwait and Iraq had a success rate of 95 percent. Afghanistan since 2002 and Iraq since 2003 are still being studied. “However,” it adds, “unofficial studies indicate that in these operations, the direct approach has been dramatically less successful.”
Another intelligence official, who also asked not to be identified, said waterboarding and other harsh techniques “were meant to get hardened terrorists to a point where they were willing to answer questions.” That capability, the official said, “is now gone.”
The federal government is still woefully behind schedule in issuing high-tech identification cards to its employee and contractor work force. The White House said in budget documents released May 11 that 2.7 million ID cards - about 48 percent of the total 5.6 million cards to be issued - had been issued to employees and contractors as of the beginning of March. (more…)
The three women have been indicted on charges, including conspiracy and bribery. It’s a case that has been under investigation since last year. It’s been a joint investigation between the U.S. attorney’s office, FBI and the Wichita Police Department.
The indictment alleges that 53-year-old Kaylene Pottorff, who worked as a Municipal Court employee, accepted bribes from 35-year-old Alecia Bell of Wichita, and 41-year-old Jessie Garland, who is from Wichita but has since moved to Arkansas.
Bell and Garland worked as bondman agents.
Authorities allege that Kaylene Pottorff took money from them and in turn reduced and in some cases deleted bond amounts. Bell and Garland in turn, are accused of defrauding the companies they worked for.
The administration claims through all of this your identity will be safe because the government will give you a unique encrypted patient identifier. Your doctor will receive a unique health care provider identifier as well. But wait, if the government is giving you the identifier wouldn’t that mean they know who you are or else how can they give it to you…and why?
What if you should want to opt-out? Well, you can’t. And should your doctor refuse to comply with giving over your information he or she will receive a $100.00 per day fine from the state. (more…)
For 34 years, the Kansas Archeology Training Program has invited people to work alongside professional archaeologists at digs throughout the state.
This year, the dig will be at Scott State Park, which boasts springs, canyons and bluffs amid the western Kansas prairie. The site is in Scott County, about 250 miles northwest of Wichita.
There are also the only known Indian pueblo remains in Kansas at the site — El Cuartelejo, a seven-room pueblo and extensive Plains Apache village. It was established in the 1600s by Taos Indians.
