So, you took the slow suicide path instead of what you thought was the fast, certain-death route, eh? Gaming? You want to promote and increase the opportunities for Kansans to gamble away their utility bill money?

You boys are morons, you know? Weak-voiced, unimaginative dolts who'll doom us all to what should happen when you don't give people a reason to like you: running to the opposition in droves.

Look, now's not the time to be pretending to come up with economic solutions if you're a Democrat. Now's the time to keep reminding people who voted for the puppets of the plutocrats that they promised to fix things and to slap them back in line when they stray from the economic strategy they're mandated to find but they go off and do dumb stuff like gutting public education, freaking out over strip clubs and wasting time and money trying to control womens' reproductive rights.

Obviously, the press (such as it is these days) will come out and cover you when you announce you're going to talk, so when you talk, don't sound stupid. Hyping gambling is a dumb thing to say in public. Gambling's inherently bad because it's nothing but hoping you get lucky and hoping you get lucky's no way to run your life.

maybe you just don't know that area but tons of people in SE KS travel across the border to oklahoma to the nearby casinos all the time. their proposal is just trying to keep money in this state instead of seeing it go to oklahoma.

sad DNC trying to get good hard working folks to gamble their life savings away cause you have no idea how to fix the mess YOU caused sad !! Merry Christmas Topeka try to see you don't get your self shot out there

i don't understand this concern for strangers to spend their money how they see fit. people spend their hard-earned money everyday on things like booze and strippers or getting the next electronic device versus spending their money wisely or paying their bills. so if people want to gamble, that's their prerogative. don't try and coddle them into being responsible.

Put the next casino to be built in Kansas under the Statehouse dome. That's right. Directly under that much engineered, many times studied, leaky old thing that's covered with so much copper that every tweaker in 4 states has his/her eye on the pickings. The junkyards are licking their lips on this one.

Yes Sir! Double down on the statuary. Forget the Statutes because you folks in the Legislature cannot seem to pass anything without detailed instruction from your old buds, the lobbyists. Sell yourself to Harrahs instead. Put a bright red light where the dome used to be, somewhere above the 2nd floor, and erect a lighted sign that announces to the World that the House of Hookers Casino is now open for business.

Meanwhile, we can move the Statehouse back to Lecompton where it belongs!

The day the Democrats took over was not January 22nd 2009, it was actually January 3rd 2007, the day the Democrats took over the House of Representatives and the Senate, at the very start of the 110th Congress.

The Democratic Party controlled a majority in both chambers for the first time since the end of the 103rd Congress in 1995.

For those who are listening to the liberals propagating the fallacy that everything is "Bush's Fault", think about this:
January 3rd, 2007, the day the Democrats took over the Senate and the Congress:
The DOW Jones closed at 12,621.77
The GDP for the previous quarter was 3.5%
The Unemployment rate was 4.6%
George Bush's Economic policies SET A RECORD of 52 STRAIGHT MONTHS of JOB CREATION!
Remember that day...
January 3rd, 2007 was the day that Barney Frank took over the House Financial Services Committee and Chris Dodd took over the Senate Banking Committee.
The economic meltdown that happened 15 months later was in what part of the economy?
BANKING AND FINANCIAL SERVICES!
THANK YOU DEMOCRATS (especially Barney ) for taking us from 13,000 DOW, 3.5 GDP and 4.6% Unemployment...to this CRISIS by (among MANY other things) dumping 5-6 TRILLION Dollars of toxic loans on the economy from YOUR Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac FIASCOES!

BTW: Bush asked Congress 17 TIMES to stop Fannie & Freddie -starting in 2001 because it was financially risky for the US economy. Barney blocked it and called it a "Chicken Little Philosophy" (and the sky did fall!)
And who took the THIRD highest pay-off from Fannie Mae AND Freddie Mac? OBAMA
And who fought against reform of Fannie and Freddie?
OBAMA and the Democrat Congress, especially BARNEY!!!!

So when someone tries to blame Bush...
REMEMBER JANUARY 3rd, 2007.... THE DAY THE DEMOCRATS TOOK OVER!"
Bush may have been in the car but the Democrats were in charge of the gas pedal and steering wheel they were driving the economy into the ditch.
Budgets do not come from the White House. They come from Congress and the party that controlled Congress since January 2007 is the Democratic Party.
Furthermore, the Democrats controlled the budget process for 2008 & 2009 as well as 2010 & 2011.

In that first year, they had to contend with George Bush, which caused them to compromise on spending, when Bush somewhat belatedly got tough on spending increases.

For 2009 though, Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid bypassed George Bush entirely, passing continuing resolutions to keep government running until Barack Obama could take office. At that time, they passed a massive omnibus spending bill to complete the 2009 budget.

And where was Barack Obama during this time? He was a member of that very Congress that passed all of these massive spending bills, and he signed the omnibus bill as President to complete 2009. Let's remember what the deficits looked like during that period:
If the Democrats inherited any deficit, it was the 2007 deficit, the last of the Republican budgets. That deficit was the lowest in five years, and the fourth straight decline in deficit spending. After that, Democrats in Congress took control of spending, and that includes Barack Obama, who voted for the budgets.

If Obama inherited anything, he inherited it from himself.
In a nutshell, what Obama is saying is "I inherited a deficit that I voted for,
and then I voted to expand that deficit four-fold since January 20th."
There is no way this will be widely publicized, unless each of us sends it on!

"The problems we face today exist because the people who work for a living are outnumbered by those who vote for a living."

here comes the attention deficit.

George Bush's economic policies set a record of 52 straight months of abysmal job creation. Jimmy Carter created more jobs in four years than George Bush did in his first six. (Here's a sobering statistic: there were more people working in Jan. 2001 when he took office than at the end of his first term in Jan. 2005. Please explain how the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts did such a miracle, if you can.)

"Budgets do not come from the White House." Um, actually, they DO come from the White House. Every budget starts with the president's budget request, and that little word "president" should give you a clue.

"Bush asked Congress 17 TIMES to stop Fannie & Freddie." Um, no, he didn't. In fact, when Barney Frank (of all people) got a bill through the House that would have imposed tighter restrictions on Fannie/Freddie, the bill died because the White House (that would be Mr. Bush) opposed it. (H.R. 1461, 109th Congress, Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2005)

When you get basic facts wrong, your argument collapses.

Gambling is immoral and will not help the economy at all, providing no useful goods or services.

Fear always leads to frustration and worry.

My wish for Kansas this Christmas season is that they find a way to stop being so afraid of everything.

Do what's in front of you to do. Don't try constantly to find fault with it, freezing your minds with fear, just because it's coming from Democrats. Both parties do good things now and then. This is one of them.

We do have a lot of people spending their gambling money in Oklahoma.

We have probably hit the saturation point, but the state peed things away years ago when they did nothing as Mo. was adding casinos. Some of you have mentioned the casino $ for education, but I think you are getting us mixed up with the neighbors to the east who used that strategy years ago when they were pushing for the riverboats. I don't understand you small government people being concerned about where people spend their money. There is probably more $ spent each year in Kansas on alcohol and cancer sticks then there is on gambling - why no uproar about that? I would guess that the $ costs of alcohol and tobacco far out weigh those of gambling. And Panama, really, Lecompton? Should we be waving the stars and bars also? The history of this state is not on your side with that one at all. Are you one of them nasty old boarder ruffians we all read about in junior high?

But I find it interesting that jobs isn't even part of what the Reps are going to be working on in the legislature according to Browine. Stripping retirement from long time public servents, cutting more taxes for the rich, taking way more medical care for the poor, locking in the huge cuts education for future generations and probably stealing the water from my fishing hole is their entire agenda. I say we vote every single one of the, Reps and Dems, out of office next year. I have had enough.

GOP Presidents Dem Presidents
$9.5 trillion $3.8 trillion

Total debt is $14.3 trillion.
$1 trillion of debt comes from before Reagan (NYT doesn't make clear who created that debt).
$13.3 trillion accumulated from Reagan to Obama.

71% of the $13.3 trillion was under GOP presidents.
28% of the $13.3 trillion was under Dem presidents.

(Source: NYT pieced together data from Treasury, OMB, Federal Reserve Bank of NY, and more)

PS And before anyone says "you have to look at who controlled Congress," I don't recall the Republicans worrying about that fact when they blamed Obama for the deficit and the national debt.

What's more, I also don't recall any Republican presidents vetoing the debt ceiling increase during their tenure. In fact, many of the biggest causes of the national debt were GOP presidential initiatives, such as:

* Reagan defense budgets and tax cuts
* George HW Bush gulf war
* George W Bush tax cuts, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
http://www.americablog.com/2011/12/guess-which-presidents-killed.html?ut...

for the casino's? What a fallacy that law is. Cigarette smoke evidently is harmless if you are in a casino. I can't frequent the Dodge City casino because of the smoke. We eliminate smoking every where else but not in a casino that might make the state a few dollars. What hypocrites we have in Topeka. We really care about the health of our fellow Kansans and the cost to treat the related diseases caused from and by inhaling second hand smoke but ignore it if it will provide a few extra dollars for a few pet projects. Both Dems and Republicans are guilty of this.