Watch Rick Perry's Campaign End Before Your Eyes

George Miller on GOP Health Care Plan

The CBO found that the GOP plan would save money because it doesn't actually extend insurance coverage to any of the 17 percent of legal, non-elderly Americans who the CBO thinks will be without health insurance in 2010. In fact, most of the Republican plan centers around reforms that would make the health insurance industry work more like the credit card industry by allowing insurers to base themselves in the state with the weakest regulations and then sell their health plans nationwide (as credit card companies already do from South Dakota).

Kansas Republicans Miss Deadline for Filing Presidential Elector Candidates

Ballot Access News reports October 3rd, 2008

The Kansas deadline for qualified parties to file their candidates for presidential elector is June 20. The Republican Party of Kansas still hasn’t filed any candidates for presidential elector. The Kansas Secretary of State’s webpage lists candidates for presidential elector. That webpage says the Libertarian Party also hasn’t filed its candidates for presidential elector, but the Libertarian Party did submit the list, late on October 3.

There are no consequences to missing the Kansas deadline. John McCain will still be on the ballot in Kansas.

Brownback confirms Palin was McSame's first pick

Kansas Senator Sam Brownback was interviewed on National Public Radio
Tuesday and let a couple of interesting things slip through in his rapturous adoration of Gov. Sarah Palin. Brownback is going to make one of the nominating speeches for Palin on Wednesday.

Revelation # 1. Brownback said he had originally been asked to make a nominating speech for another candidate. This candidate was pro-choice and Brownback assumed it was Joe Lieberman. Brownback agreed to make the nominating speech for candidate X. When McCain changed his mind, Brownback agreed to make a speech for Palin, who he probably knows even less well than McCain.

It has been said that a district attorney can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. Apparently, so hungry is Brownback for attention, that he would agree to make a nominating speech for a ham sandwich.

Revelation # 2. I'm getting ahead of myself with that ham sandwich crack. Brownback, in this instance, has shown himself to be lacking in political principles. Willing to nominate a pro-choice or a pro-life candidate. Willing to nominate a moderate liberal on domestic issues (Lieberman) or a far-right kook (Palin.)

Bushies Screw Kansas Again

First it was the Air Force Tanker, now it looks like the Bush administration, aided and abetted by Roberts and Tiahrt, are rigging a government contract to go to their political allies. This time it's the contract for a biodefence lab. Manhattan (Ks.) is still in the running, but the fix may be in.

The Washington Post reports

The Homeland Security Department swept aside evaluations of government experts and named Mississippi - home to powerful U.S. lawmakers with sway over the agency - as a top location for a new $451 million national laboratory to study some of the world's most virulent biological threats, according to internal documents obtained by the Associated Press.

And more

The states where locations were eliminated despite earning scores higher than Mississippi include Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, Texas, Wisconsin and California, where a site in Tracy near the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had vied for the lab.

Government experts originally expressed concern that the proposed site in Flora, Miss., was far from existing biodefense research programs and lacked ready access to workers already familiar with highly contagious animal and human diseases, such as foot-and-mouth virus, that could devastate the U.S. livestock industry. They assigned the site a score that ranked it 14th among 17 candidate sites in the United States.

Roberts--Intelligence Failure

Jon Stewart skewers Kansas Senator Pat Roberts over his failures as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Message of the Kansas Caucuses

Everybody knows that Barack Obamma and Mike Huckabee were the big winners in the Kansas caucuses last week, but there were some other winners and losers.

Big losers were citizens of Kansas who were denied the opportunity to vote in a primary. Secretary of State Ron Thornburg estimated that 800,000 would have voted in a primary. That's 20 times that number that took part in the caucuses. The projected cost to taxpayers was a measly $ 2 million.

Looking at the caucus data shows that Democrats may have been big winners and Republicans big losers.

Nearly twice as many Democrats as Republicans caucused in Kansas--and the Democrats did it on a weekday night in the middle of a snowstorm instead of a warm-for- winter Saturday morning.

In raw numbers that was 37,089 Democrats versus 19,432 Republicans. The State GOP had predicted a turnout of 35,000. State Senator Phil Journey, a leader in the Republican right-wing went even further saying he expected a turnout of 50,000. This may have been more spin than real expectations; some caucus sites were overwhelmed and said they had many more than expected.

The contrast is even more striking when compared to party registration. 8.4 percent of Demorats participated as compared to 2.6 percent of Republicans. That's 1 of 12 Democrats and 1 of 38 Republicans.