Police Face Criticism Over Central Kansas Newspaper Raid In Which Computers, Phones Seized

MARION, Kan. (AP) — A small central Kansas police department is facing a firestorm of criticism after it raided the offices of a local newspaper and the home of its publisher and owner — a move deemed by several press freedom watchdogs as a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s protection of a free press.

The Marion County Record said in its own published reports that police raided the newspaper’s office on Friday, seizing the newspaper’s computers, phones and file server and the personal cellphones of staff, based on a search warrant. One Record reporter suffered an injury to a finger when Marion Police

Chief Gideon Cody wrested her cell phone out of her hand, according to the report.

Police simultaneously raided the home of Eric Meyer, the newspaper’s publisher and co-owner, seizing computers, his cellphone and the home’s internet router, Meyer said. Meyer’s 98-year-old mother — Record co-owner Joan Meyer, who lived in the home with her son — collapsed and died Saturday, Meyer said, blaming her death on the stress of the raid of her home.

The unexpectedly close Kansas House race shows that targeting is overrated

Democratic Party leaders, stung by criticism for having done so little to help their candidate in an unexpectedly narrow House special election in Kansas, have swiftly converged on an explanation for their actions. They’re now arguing it wasn’t a mistake — they didn’t just underrate how much Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s unpopularity would matter, or overrate how good state Treasurer Sam Estes, the Republican who ultimately won, was as a candidate. No, they argue, staying largely out of the race was a strategy.

The Kansas Democrat who nearly pulled off the impossible has some advice for his party

James Thompson may not be heading to Congress, but not everyone is calling his loss in Kansas’ special congressional election a defeat.

On Tuesday, Republican Ron Estes beat Thompson in the solidly Republican district by a margin of roughly five points. Just a few months ago, President Trump carried the district with a wide margin of 27 points.

In Kansas City, A Mother Fears Her Children Could Be Next

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Mahnaz Shabbir was 12 when a teacher walked into her sixth-grade classroom and asked her to come to the front of the room and explain why her cousin wasn’t eating. Mortified, Shabbir told the class that her cousin, who had recently moved to the U.S. from India, was observing the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which requires fasting.

When her friends played “cowboys and Indians,” Shabbir, whose parents came from Hyderabad, India, was always made to play an Indian. This felt different: Her teacher had singled her out in front of her overwhelmingly white, Christian classmates.

Kansas Governor Justifies Kicking 15,000 People Off Food Stamps

For over five years now, Kansas has served as an economic policy experiment for anti-tax, small-government conservatives. Their lab work is costing the state hundreds of millions of dollars, crippling public service budgets, and making life harder for low-income families without reducing the state’s poverty rate at all.

With his political star beginning to tarnish, Gov. Sam Brownback (R) came to Washington on Wednesday to discuss his poverty policies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. At one point, the embattled governor justified his policy of forcing people off of food stamps if they can’t find a job by likening low-income and jobless people to lazy college students.

Kansas Voters Have 21 Days to Register if They Speak English, or 15 if They Speak Spanish

Prospective voters in Kansas were given different instructions for how and when to register to vote depending on whether they received the English- or Spanish-language voter guide issued by the Kansas secretary of state's office.

The English-language version correctly informed voters that they could register up to 21 days before an election. But the Spanish-language version told voters that they had only 15 days to register, according to the Kansas City Star. Passports were listed as a valid proof of citizenship in the English version; in the Spanish version, they were not.

Kansas Lawmakers Ignore Separation Of Powers, Look To Impeach Supreme Court Justices

Tired of being told the law doesn’t allow them to enact their radical overhauls of the social contract, Kansas Republicans are out to eject their state Supreme Court justices.

Lawmakers in the state are pushing to replace the American tradition of checks and balances among the three separate branches of government. A bill narrowly passed the state Senate in late March that would give legislators far broader power to impeach judges from the high bench.

Kansas Bill Would Pay Students A $2,500 Bounty To Hunt For Trans People In Bathrooms U

With only two weeks left in the Kansas legislation session, state lawmakers have introduced a pair of bills that would prohibit transgender students from using restrooms that match their gender. The “Student Physical Privacy Act” would apply not only to public schools, but all public universities in the state as well, guaranteeing that anyone who saw someone transgender in the bathroom could sue their school for $2,500 for every time that it happened.

The Republican Party Must Answer for What It Did to Kansas and Louisiana

Over the course of 12 debates, the Republican presidential candidates were never asked to address the budget problems in Kansas. That may not sound like an odd omission but it is. To see why, let’s take a quick trip to a parallel political universe:

In Bizarro America, the tea party never happened. Instead, the Great Recession sparked a left-wing populist movement that swept democratic socialists into statehouses all across the country. In Vermont, these Denmark-worshippers took full control of state government and implemented their radical agenda. They raised income taxes to unprecedented heights, upped the minimum wage to $15 an hour, made all state universities tuition-free, and established a single-payer health-care system. As he signed the last of these programs into law, Governor Bernie Sanders declared that Vermont would serve as a blue-state model, one that the Democratic Party’s 2016 ticket could use to say,  “See, we’ve got a different way, and it works.”

Kansas Governor Cuts Off Planned Parenthood Funding

Kansas Governor Sam Brownback has ordered state officials to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood and its affiliates through the state Medicaid program, a move the organization said on Wednesday it would challenge in court.

Brownback, a Republican, said in his state of the state address on Tuesday that he would direct the state health secretary to ensure that no taxpayer money go to Planned Parenthood, which he said trafficked in baby body parts.

After Cutting Taxes On The Rich, Kansas Will Raise Taxes On The Poor To Pay For It

Kansas lawmakers concluded the longest legislative session in state history Friday night by approving a slate of regressive tax hikes that will balance the state’s budget by targeting low-income workers and their families.

More than half of the $384 million in new revenue expected from the tax hike will come from cigarette taxes and sales taxes, two policies described as “regressive” because they fall more heavily on lower-income taxpayers than on the wealthy. Even though everyone who shops will pay the new 6.5 percent sales tax rate – up from 6.15 percent in previous years, and the 8th-highest of any state according to the Tax Foundation – the move is regressive because poorer shoppers already have to stretch each dollar farther than their more flush counterparts.

The Kansas Supreme Court Challenged Republicans' Agenda. Their Solution: Replace the Judges.

Since Republican Sam Brownback became governor of Kansas in 2011, he and his allies in the GOP-dominated state Legislature have implemented drastic tax cuts—part of a "real, live experiment" in conservative governance, as Brownback put it in 2012, that has resulted in precipitously falling revenues. But Brownback's tax slashing hit a snag last year when the state Supreme Court ordered the Legislature to increase education funding, potentially forcing the governor to roll back his signature tax cuts in order to increase school spending. So conservatives in Topeka declared war on the court.

More Kansas Schools To Close Early For Lack Of Funds

Six school districts in Kansas will close early this year, following budget cuts signed in March by Republican Gov. Sam Brownback.

Two school districts, Concordia Unified School District and Twin Valley Unified School District, announced earlier this month that they would end the year early because they lacked the funds to keep the schools open. This week, four more districts confirmed they would also shorten their calendars, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal.

Kansas To Impose Unprecedented Restriction On Welfare Recipients

The Kansas legislature has sent a bill to Gov. Sam Brownback’s (R) desk that limits welfare recipients to withdrawing just $25 a day from their benefits and enacts a range of other restrictions.

If Brownback signs the law, recipients of the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program would only be able to withdraw $25 a day with their benefits cards from ATMs, which act like debt cards. No other states or the federal government currently limit withdrawals.

To Make Up For His Massive Tax Cuts, Kansas Governor Proposes Cutting Schools

Rather than retreat from the massive tax cuts that are crippling his state’s finances, Gov. Sam Brownback (R) wants to cut classroom funding for Kansas schools by $127 millionand push pension fund payments off into the future.

The defining characteristic of the governor’s various proposals for fixing the nearly billion-dollar deficit is that they will create larger problems down the road. The proposed budget would replace the state’s current financing formula for schools with block grants that districts could use as they see fit. But that flexibility masks a significant cut in classroom resources for a state that has already been accused by judges of falling hundreds of millions of dollars short of the bare-minimum level of education funding required by the Kansas Constitution.

Kansas Is Totally Screwed

In 2012, when Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback first pitched his plan to drastically slash the state's income taxes, he promised "a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy." Brownback brought in Arthur Laffer, Ronald Reagan's trickle-down economics guru, to help sell the idea that the cuts—which zeroed out taxes for 200,000 businesses and slashed rates for top earners—were guaranteed to boost the state's fortunes, prop up the economy, and bring in countless new jobs as businesses and individuals flocked to Kansas to escape the tyrannies of higher-tax states.

Officials: Kansas Faces $279M Budget Gap By July

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas will face a $279 million budget shortfall by July, far worse than state officials had thought before a new revenue forecast Monday that will force Gov. Sam Brownback and legislators to consider spending cuts.

The state will also be required to close an even bigger additional gap — $436 million — during the following 12 months, according to the new forecast.

Aides to the Republican governor, who narrowly won re-election last week, said his administration will work in the next weeks to find savings while trying to protect funding for schools and core programs. But a Democratic leader called the new projections "devastating."

Independent Greg Orman Holding A Lead In Kansas, Polling Shows

Kansas independent Greg Orman continues to hold an edge in his quest to unseat Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas), according to most recent surveys on the race.

An NBC/Marist poll released Sunday finds Orman leading Roberts by 10 points, 48 percent to 38 percent, among likely voters. Five percent chose libertarian Randall Batson, and the remaining voters were undecided or opting for yet another candidate.

Kansas Changes Food Stamp Requirements To Mandate Work

Thousands of Kansans could lose food stamps under a new state policy that congressional Republicans hope to implement nationwide.

Kansas officials indicated that they will reinstate work requirements for food stamp recipients who are able-bodied adults without dependent children. Under the new policy, come October, those aged 18 to 49 will need to work at least 20 hours per week or enroll in a job training program within three months in order to continue to receive benefits from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

The Real Reason Kansas Is Running Out of Water

Like dot-com moguls in the '90s and real estate gurus in the 2000s, farmers in western Kansas are enjoying the fruits of a bubble: Their crop yields have been boosted by a gusher of soon-to-vanish irrigation water. That's the message of a new study by Kansas State University researchers. Drawing down their region's groundwater at more than six times the natural rate of recharge, farmers there have managed to become so productive that the area boasts "the highest total market value of agriculture products" of any congressional district in the nation, the authors note. Those products are mainly beef fattened on large feedlots; and the corn used to fatten those beef cows.