Boyda vs. Jenkins Round Three

After three debates, it's pretty obvious there's not much love lost between our little candidates for Congress. Regardless of the all of the fireworks, Congresswoman Nancy Boyda again showed herself to be the more knowledgeable and the more professional of the two woman running in the Kansas 2nd.

We aren't going to do a point-by-point (we did that over on Twitter- ain't the interwebs fun?), but we do have a couple of highlights we'd like to return to:

• Earmarks: Boyda and Jenkins went round and round again on earmarks, and we all should, again, come away with the same basic points: Lynn Jenkins will make sure KU and K-State don't receive federal monies for research programs, she'll make sure places like Iola don't get help building new water treatment facilities designed to provide clean drinking water to her would-be constituents, and she will make sure our law enforcement officials don't have the new equipment they need to keep us safe. That's the commitment we all got again from Lynn tonight.

• Taxes: Jenkins continued to lie about Nancy Boyda's record in Congress reading taxes. The facts- Boyda hasn't voted to increase taxes on working class Americans even once, while Lynn Jenkins has, in fact, actually vote to raise sales taxes, gasoline taxes, and property taxes. Actually, Lynn's the only person in this race who has ever voted to increase taxes on the middle class. Oh, something else? Those tax increases all came after Jenkins promised she wouldn't raise taxes. So much for that whole pledge thing, huh, Lynn?

• Diligence: Lynn Jenkins promises us that, as a CPA, she's going to go to Washington and "clean things up" and find all kinds of money she can cut from the budget all over the place and use her CPA powers to balance the budget in 18 months...even though she'd be a freshmen member of the minority party who literally everyone will ignore.
  

Anyway, she's going to go to DC and make sweeping reforms and find huge savings for us as taxpayers. Oh...but, Lynn, it took you six years- six years- to discover a formula error in the way our state handles gasoline tax revenues. For six years you mismanaged millions and millions of dollars all because of an error you rightly say you didn't cause- but that you didn't catch either.

So sorry, Lynn, but the Kansas state budget is nothing compared to the federal one, and $15 million is nothing compared to trillions- but, still, if you couldn't find a mistake right under your nose that had been there for six everloving years, how on Earth will you ever find anything buried deep in the federal budget? Even you aren't really that naive.

(Pair that evidence our little CPA is bad at her job with the fact she couldn't even be bothered to attend any of the meetings of the KPERS Board of Trustees for the last quarter- while the state retirement system was losing a $1 billion...she's not just a flawed candidate for Congress, she's a bad State Treasurer).

It's remarkably clear: Lynn Jenkins loses on the issues, she loses on rhetoric, and she even loses when you talk about the job she has right now today! Please, tell me- when you balance the two, how in the world can anyone justify a vote for Lynn Jenkins right now today?

UPDATE: Read more about the debate at the Kansas City Star, the Topeka Capital-Journal and WIBW Channel 13 Topeka. A choice pull from the Cap-J article:

Jenkins said local governments should pay for local projects and responded to Boyda's mention of no Kansas Republicans revealing their earmark requests.

"I'm not running against Todd Tiahrt, or Dennis Moore or Pat Roberts," Jenkins said. "I'm running against Nancy Boyda, and I'm saying you're flat wrong on this issue."

Boyda shot back that Jenkins' "cloak of righteousness" on earmarks would have negative effects locally.

"If you have your way, Kansas will absolutely be the loser in this whole thing," she said.

Yep, Kansas will be out millions of dollars for things like law enforcement equipment, water treatment plants, university research that creates jobs all over the state if Jenkins is our representative in Congress.

Lynn Jenkins is the one who is flat wrong on this issue, and if she got her way, she's hurt Kansas in order to get elected to Congress. That's just wrong.