COLBY, Kan. - The following is a little snip taken from a Kansas City Star article:

"The Revenue Department's analysis of the Brownback plan examined income tax data from 2009 and breaks down taxpayers into six income brackets. The only bracket with a tax increase ranges from zero up to $25,000.

"That group, made up of 564,328 tax filers, would pay $88.2 million more in taxes under the governor's tax plan. Meanwhile, the highest income bracket making $250,000 a year would pay $110 million less in taxes."

I don't have the resources at my finger tips to validate these figures. But, I've learned that tax reform reflects an advantage for those proposing the reform. Most of Gov. Brownback's agenda is benefiting the upper crust far more than the the hard tack biscuit eaters in the lower income brackets.

WICHITA, Kan. - According to the Wichita Eagle, Congressman Mike Pompeo is announcing an 'America Flies' aviation campaign.

That's right. Pompeo seems to think Americans need to be educated about what an indispensable asset aviation is for Wichita and America as well.

Yes, just after Boeing stuck it to the people of Wichita and has run out of Dodge with its Tanker deal, Pompeo has shown real political courage by reminding us how much we rely on the aviation industry for jobs and the need to bow down and prostrate ourselves to the gods of aviation.

This "I love airplanes and flying along with my congressional job" campaign, is an about face from last week's performance of outrage and protestations. Pompeo, along with other politicians were lined up like jilted lovers.

WICHITA, Kan. - As the Kansas legislature gears up for another session of spending most of their time on abortion bills, I could not help but reflect that Rick Santorum would be the presidential candidate to win Kansas.

Everyone knows a candidate in Kansas only has to support one issue to be electable; support the unborn. Nothing else matters; not a good jobs bill, not money for the arts or providing good healthcare and funding public education, but forcing women to give birth is the ticket to elective office in Kansas. This one issue defines evangelical conservatism across America as well.

Nothing illustrates this better than Rick Santorum's campaign leading up to the Iowa Caucus. A voter in Newton, Iowa asked Santorum about his reaction to a liberal journalists who criticized Santorum's decision to take his deceased infant home to show his other children.

The question quite naturally caused Santorum's wife to tear up.

Kansas Groundwater Management Districts once argued that they, not the Chief Engineer, had primary authority to regulate water withdrawals in their respective districts. Some may believe that today. The following should clarify the matter.

BOGUE, Kan. - It is true that an appropriation permit may be sold, but the Chief Engineer at the Division of Water Resources (often called the Czar) is not legally obligated to approve the original amount appropriated.

I assume Kansas Administrative Regulation 5-3-9 approved in 1994 (which has the full force and effect of law) is still in force. In pertinent part it says that "unless otherwise provided by regulation, it shall be considered in the public interest that only the safe yield of any source or water supply ... shall be appropriated.

Authorization of the regulation can also be found in KSA 82a-706a -- which dates to 1957! In other words, as I have written before in a statement to the gathered Kansas Water Authority in July of 2000, the Chief Engineer has had the responsibility to enforce safe-yield in the public interest but has never really lived up to his responsibility by declaring intensive groundwater use areas (IGUCA) and reducing water use.

This set of articles is my extended, three-installment comment on Diane Wahto's earlier and elucidating remarks (Water Shortages, the High Plains Aquifer, and the Governor's Summit) about the hydrology and the overall scenario concerning a vital and disappearing resource: the Ogallala Aquifer. Much of what I will have to say comes from the days of my earlier, and more hopeful involvement at the lowest bureaucratic level of Kansas water governance -- the Basin Advisory Committee. Since one cannot reliably predict the future, logically speaking, we do not know where Governor Brownback's initiative will lead. In some sense, it will be like locking the barn door after too many of the horses have left. To put it bluntly, I see little in what the Governor has proposed so far that differs from the pious rhetoric of the past several decades by those who could have actually done something to bring genuine stewardship.

BOGUE, Kan. - The disappearing Ogallala Aquifer. Well, where to begin. For nearly 18 years, I served on the Solomon River Basin Advisory Committee (BAC), the last few years as chair.

In Kansas, and I suspect elsewhere, the Ogallala depletion problem is basically -- as un-politically correct as it may be to say it -- that 'the drunks are running the liquor store.'

WICHITA, Kan. - At the height of the 2011 Kansas drought that lasted through spring, summer, and into the fall, Gov. Sam Brownback called a summit of "stakeholders," for a discussion on the future of the Ogallala Aquifer.

The Governor's Summit

The four hundred attendees who gathered in Colby, Kansas, included, among others, representatives from the Kansas Geological Survey, Kansas State University, Kansas Ag bankers, and the Kansas Farm Bureau, as well as Carolyn Armstrong, Colby City Manager and Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer, representing the League of Kansas Municipalities.

A hydro-geologist from the Kansas Geological Survey, Dr. Geoffrey Bohling, said of the meeting, "A common statement at the summit was, 'I don't like big government [or government regulation], but we need to regulate use of the aquifer.' This was coming from the stakeholders: irrigators (farmers and ranchers) and people responsible for municipal water supplies. Attached to that was the idea that people would prefer more of a grassroots approach to regulation -- for example, all irrigators in an area cutting back their use by a certain percentage voluntarily."

MCDOWELL CREEK, Kan. - "What do you do for entertainment out there?" my husband's friend asked him. Ron was traveling east to help his mother with a long drive and had stopped to visit an old friend in DC.

"The land is our entertainment," Ron replied. His friend looked blank. "Do you drive into town to go to movies?" he asked, as if he hadn't heard what Ron said.

Why couldn't he hear the answer? Perhaps he was in the grip of the old stereotype of Kansas as flyover country, the middle of nowhere. Or perhaps he had a concept of entertainment as a commodity, a pre-packaged experience for which one purchases a ticket. In any event, Ron was aware that he had a mentality that was not easily recognized by his city-dwelling friend.

When Ron came home, it became a joke between us. "What do you for entertainment out there?" we would giggle every time we found ourselves transfixed by something right outside our back door.

HAYS, Kan. - Aside from the conservative and liberal talking-head pundits and their familiar yelling matches so prevalent on cable news channels, millions of everyday Americans believe that our elected officials, our economic leaders, and especially our newspapers and television news channels are out-of-sync with American values. Who are these millions of everyday citizens?

Many are compassionate Americans whose values are in the so-called middle and/or leaning to the near left or far left. Many of these passionate, active and optimistic citizens describe themselves as progressive thinkers, progressive doers, progressive writers or progressive voters.

Are moderates and progressives the same then? Often times yes, but not necessarily. Are liberals and progressives the same? Maybe, frequently, and probably, but still not quite the same.