I'm done to a crisp. This heat is...hot. Could someone please turn the oven off?
It really is too hot for critical thinking, at least behind my fevered brow. So what you will get are bits of news and half-developed unborn babies of blog posts. Eek. I'm worse than I thought today.
In Kansas, the State Board of Education looks once again to have reverted to pro-evolution majority because of what took place in the Republican primaries:
Kansas voters on Tuesday handed power back to moderates on the State Board of Education, setting the stage for a return of science teaching that broadly accepts the theory of evolution, according to preliminary election results.
With just 6 districts of 1,990 yet to report as of 8 a.m. Central time today, two conservatives — including incumbent Connie Morris, a former west Kansas teacher and author who had described evolution as "a nice bedtime story" — appear to have been defeated decisively by two moderates in the Republican primary elections. One moderate incumbent, Janet Waugh from the Kansas City area, held on to her seat in the Democratic primary.
If her fellow moderates prevailed, Ms. Waugh said last week, "we need to revisit the minutes and every decision that was 6-4, re-vote."
Ms. Morris lost to Sally Cauble, a teacher from Liberal, who has favored a return to traditional science standards.
Taking another seat from the conservatives in the Republican primary was Jana Shaver of Independence, a former teacher and administrator, who ran far ahead of Brad Patzer. Mr. Patzer is the son-in-law of the current board member Iris Van Meter, who did not seek reelection.
In another closely fought Republican race, in the Kansas City-Olathe district, Harry E. McDonald, a retired biology teacher, lost to the conservative incumbent John W. Bacon, an accountant.
The results seem likely to give the moderates a 6-4 edge on the 10-member board when it takes over in January. Half the members of the board are elected every two years. The election results are not final until certified by the Kansas Secretary of State, Ron Thornburgh, following an official canvas.
Both moderate Republican winners face Democratic opponents in November, but the Democrats are moderates as well, favoring a return to the traditional science standards that prevailed before a conservative majority elected in 2004 passed new rules for teaching science. Those rules, enacted last November, called for classroom critiques of Darwin's theory. Ms. Waugh, the Democrat, does not face a Republican opponent in the general election.
Don't relax too soon, though. This happened once before and the anti-evolution people got back into power. But it's a bit of good news for the time being.
The following isn't good news, but it's important to keep in mind when interpreting what the Republican populism means:
UNRELENTING in their zeal to cut taxes for the richest Americans and unabashed about employing the most cynical of maneuvers to achieve this goal, House Republicans left town this past weekend for their five-week August recess -- after shipping over to the Senate a noxious package that combines an increase in the minimum wage with an outrageous near-repeal of the estate tax and an extension of expiring tax breaks. The House GOP win-win political calculation here is obvious: Marrying a tax break for the rich with a wage hike for the poor dares senators in an election year to cast a vote against increasing the minimum wage. That, combined with some extra goodies, might be enough to get the estate tax cut over the 60-vote Senate hurdle that has so far, fortunately, blocked congressional action. If not, Republican leaders wager, they've at least given nervous House members cover to assert (however insincerely) that they backed a minimum wage increase, only to be stymied by Democrats.
But this is a bad bargain -- unaffordable, unnecessary and, as usual, dishonestly presented. Senators shouldn't be snookered, or intimidated, into going along with it.
Whatever the case for increasing the minimum wage -- and there are points pro and con on that subject -- it doesn't justify nearly eliminating the estate tax. The House measure would raise the minimum wage, which hasn't been increased since 1997, from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 by 2009. According to estimates by the Economic Policy Institute, which favors the change, 6.6 million workers would enjoy an average yearly wage increase of about $1,200. But even assuming that's correct -- and that employers facing higher costs wouldn't respond by cutting jobs -- the benefit pales in comparison with the riches the wealthy would reap by the cut in the estate tax. Assuming that the 2009 exemption of $7 million per couple would be otherwise left in place, according to the Brookings-Urban Institute Tax Policy Center, the estate tax cut would give an estimated 8,200 estates an average tax break of more than $1 million.
This was supposed to become a post on the economics of wage floors. But probably not. It's just too damned hot. Heh, that rhymed.
Then there was a hazy (hot) idea of a post about the Lieberman-Lamont primary in Connecticut, but it's amply and well covered elsewhere. Salon has a good article explaining the roots of Joephobia (among non-Republicans only):
Lieberman's years in public life have been a steady drumbeat of disappointment for Connecticut Democrats, a liberal lot who do not share his often conservative views. End-of-life issues are just one example. In 1992, the state's Democratic voters picked Jerry Brown over Bill Clinton in the presidential primary. Lieberman, meanwhile, spent the 1990s joining cultural conservative Bill Bennett in a kind of Sherman's March through American culture, handing out Silver Sewer awards for sex and violence and denouncing such pornographic abominations as "Married … With Children."
Tag teaming with Bennett was one of the senator's early experiments in what he calls "bipartisanship," which often entails adopting Republican positions without leveraging any concession from the other side. Tell me how Bill Bennett moved toward the middle to accommodate Joe Lieberman. Pretty much the way Bush and Cheney moved to the center to meet Democrats on Iraq. Not at all.
Yet Lieberman's reputation in Connecticut is not purely that of an out-of-step conservative. It's much more complicated, and frustrating, than that. He's a serial raiser and dasher and re-raiser of hopes.
Gays trust him because he's voted with them on a lot of big issues, but they don't trust him because he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. Once he even collaborated with Sen. Jesse Helms on a measure that would have stripped federal funding from public schools that counseled suicidal gay teens that their lifestyle was OK.
Women trust him because he's a reliable vote for abortion rights and don't trust him because he went off the reservation for the only significant vote (cloture) on the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito. During the recent debate over requiring hospitals to provide emergency contraception for rape victims, Lieberman emitted a shockingly callous, and now famous, sound bite. He said it's never more than "a short car ride" in crowded Connecticut to a more accommodating hospital.
That's just the beginning of the catalog of gripes. Long before there were those TV love fests with Fox's Sean Hannity that so enrage lefty bloggers there were earlier love fests with none other than Pat Robertson. On the apocalyptic evangelist's "700 Club," Lieberman complained about moral relativism, said there was too little religion in public life, and said he was pleased that people of faith were taking their principles into the political arena. In 2003, Connecticut political writer Paul Bass chronicled the scramble by the senator's staff to scrub his image from a fundraising infomercial (also starring Robertson and Jerry Falwell) for a conservative religious group with which he had been involved. His 2004 campaign for the presidential nomination was so pitched toward the conservative, moralistic, Southern elements of the party that I jokingly suggested the slogan: "He may be a Jew, but he's a better Christian than you are."
Cutting and pasting... Sorry about that.