Kansas politics: drugs, sex and hate groups

Greg Orman filed papers to run against Pat "Memory Pills" Roberts in the US Senate race. Roberts ran unchallenged 6 years ago, but will face a strong challenge this time.

AG Morrison is accused of carrying on an affair with a staffer from his days as Johnson County DA, who also alleges various sorts of impropriety, from witness tampering to sexual harassment. He acknowledges the affair but denies most of the particulars and all of the criminal claims, and has called for an independent investigation. Gov. Sebelius says that, if the charges are true, Morrison should step down. It's hard to know just yet how much of this is true. Morrison points out that, if the accuser thinks so badly of him, why has she repeatedly sought to transfer from Kline's office in JoCo and back into Morrison's employ.

Of course, Kansas GOP chairman Kris Kobach has no interest in waiting for all the evidence to come out. Unfortunately for him, he's got bigger fish to fry. The major group tracking extremist hate groups recently decided that Kobach's long-time employer and political backer, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, has crossed the Rubicon of hate, and will be classified as a hate group:

last February, underlining the way that FAIR does business, its leaders met with the leaders of Vlaams Belang — a hastily renamed Belgian party that under a prior appellation, Vlaams Blok, was officially banned by the Belgian Supreme Court as a racist and xenophobic group. It was, for some, a final straw — the Rubicon of hate, as it were. When FAIR officials met with Vlaams Belang leaders to seek their “advice” on immigration, we decided to take another look at FAIR. When our work was done, it was obvious that FAIR qualified as a hate group. Early next year, when the Southern Poverty Law Center’s annual hate group list is published, FAIR will be on the list.

More of the details are available in the SPLC's report on The Teflon Nativists. I'm sure Kobach would rather talk about AG Morrison's peccadilloes, but the public would do well to question how the GOP's leaders have been spending their time.

"Bad Harmony" by Frank Black and the Catholics from the album Pistolero (1999, 3:17).