The Kansas City Star recently unleashed a torrent of criticism on the influence of political lobbying and money on Missouri’s government.  Aside from some glaring factual errors, the KC Star’s hatchet piece further exposed the paper’s leftist agenda and conclusively demonstrates that The Star’s Editorial Board will sacrifice journalistic integrity to help their friends and ideological allies.

Case in point: the KC Star has consistently refused to criticize (and in some cases, has even praised) legitimate examples of political influence, cronyism and corruption unfolding under their noses right across the river in Kansas.  Rightly or wrongly, the Star singled out former Missouri legislator Rod Jetton and accused him of making legislative action “a salable commodity.” 

Meanwhile, in Kansas, these same editorial board members have, since at least 2002, consistently and willfully ignored millions of dollars worth of political contributions from one special interest group that has essentially bought off the entire Kansas criminal justice system, from the Kansas Supreme Court all the way down through the Attorney General’s Office, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, numerous related state agencies, down to a secret attorney ethics panel –  all of it to the benefit of the one political party and a single special interest group facing a criminal investigation and prosecution.

Public records reveal that just during the 2006 election cycle alone, the ProKanDo Political Action Committee gave $934,460 ($814,460 from Table 1 on this page, and another $120,000 through a laundering scheme with the Democratic Governors’ Association, documented here) to influence a hotly contested Attorney General’s race while the Attorney General’s office actively investigated (and later filed criminal charges against) the man who funded ProKanDo PAC – the late, notorious abortionist George Tiller. 

Where was the KC Star?

The contributions went directly to Kansas Governor (now HHS Secretary) Kathleen Sebelius, her Bluestem Fund PAC, and to third party mailings and other electioneering activities related to the Attorney General race which controlled his fate.

The influence of ProKanDo’s money helped install a Sebelius ally, Paul Morrison, in the Attorney General’s office, which in turn controls the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, its budget, and the cases that it does or does not look into. 

But Tiller didn’t dump nearly $1 million that year into Kansas politics just to control the Kansas Attorney General and the KBI.  He and ProKanDo needed to control the entire Kansas criminal justice system. 

Enter the primary beneficiary of ProKanDo, Kathleen Sebelius, who not only controlled a number of agencies that have some regulatory authority over Tiller and ProKanDo, but who also became the first governor in Kansas history to nominate a majority of justices to the Kansas Supreme Court.  Her nominees include several lifelong Democrat donors, including Carol Beier, a former attorney at the Women’s Law Center, and leading critic of the investigation and prosecution of Tiller – even as the rest of the justices pitched in to help stymie the case.

The Kansas Supreme Court in turn controls the Kansas Board of Discipline of Attorneys, which has been used to harass Sebelius’s political opponents, including three prosecutors (one who was the Kansas Bar Association’s 2006 Prosecutor of the Year) who investigated and filed charges against Tiller.   It doesn’t bode well for them that an overwhelming majority of the board members who will decide their fate are political contributors to Sebelius or former Attorney General Paul Morrison.

You’re thinking:  The KC Star must have been all over that!  Nope.

Part two tomorrow: Sebelius scoops the K.C. Star missed

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