That’s right. That’s Mark Warner, junior Democratic Senator from Virginia, who won an astonishing 65% of the vote in 2008 (besting Obama by 12 percent), after a highly acclaimed term of Governor from 2002-2006. That’s the same Mark Warner who was rumored to be considering a Presidential run in 2008, a favorite among the establishment elite for his mixture of [...]
This hasn’t made the front page of The New York Times (yet!), but I thought it was important to get the word out: Topeka, Kansas has changed its name to “Google, Kansas — the capital city of fiber optics.” This move is part of Topeka’s (I mean Google’s) push to be chosen as one of Google’s experimental cities in its [...]
So I was reading this article by Nate Silver. It’s a good read, and you should look at the whole thing, but the last paragraph in particular caught my eye. The bigger risks, however, are probably for the Republicans. We’re not in What’s the Matter With Kansas anymore: the left’s economic populism has the potential to be an extremely strong [...]
New role, new tactics for Kathleen Sebelius In December 1999, Kansas Insurance Commissioner Kathleen Sebelius expressed concern that new privacy rules imposed by the federal department of Health and Human Services would undercut state jurisdiction over health information. Federal bureaucracy, she argued, could not handle enforcement as nimbly as the states. A decade later, Sebelius will have the opportunity to [...]
Reading today’s New York Times editorial on the Lincoln-Kyl proposal to cut estate taxes to the tune of $250 billion, I wondered about what kind of reward these politicians hope to get for their sponsorship of such a plan. According to CNN, Arizona (from which Sen. Kyl hails) had more foreclosures in the first two months of 2009 than every [...]
I don’t know how many of you saw this interesting article in Politico yesterday about Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. For those who didn’t, the crucial paragraph is this: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) and his deputy, Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D.-Ill.) were called to Pelosi’s office late Thursday night and ultimately prevailed in their argument that Democrats should [...]
Does America’s transportation policy need an overhaul? “The nation faces a crisis. Our surface transportation system has deteriorated to such a degree that our safety, economic competitiveness, and quality of life are at risk.” So begins the Feb. 2009 report of the National Surface Transportation Financing Commission (NSTFC), tasked by Congress to develop a new framework for funding America’s transportation [...]
The Democratic Party and California's Proposition 8
A new history of the disputed election of 1876
Last night, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius gave the Democratic response to President Bush’s State of the Union Address. It was a sober, confident message, looking past the end of the Bush presidency and arguing for an Obama-style politics of national unity. The tonal similarity to Obama was no accident: Sebelius endorsed the Illinois senator today and will campaign for him [...]
