Leonard Pitts has a column in today’s Eagle strongly criticizing President Bush for the invasion of Iraq and for claiming, as he did last year, that “We are staying on the offensive — striking terrorists abroad — so we do not have to face them here at home.”
Pitts writes: “So maybe it’s time we called a halt to this absurd game of claiming the war President Bush chose to fight in Iraq was ever about terrorism. Or that it has done anything to protect us from another Sept. 11-type attack on our soil.”
What do you think? Is the war in Iraq helping or hurting the war on terrorism?
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
At its Tuesday meeting, the Wichita City Council is expected to consider putting another $25,000 into Ice Sports Wichita, on top of $50,000 approved in May. City staff appears to have made good efforts to stabilize the troubled rink, but more cash is needed due to difficulty terminating the management contract with Canlan Ice Sports, the cancellation of a youth hockey tournament in May, the bankruptcy of tenant Wichita Thunder, and a failure of the refrigeration plant and compressor. Clearly, lousy luck is making a bad situation worse. But the city needs to keep trying to right the rink’s course and find it capable new management. This is a precious community asset that should have a bright future as part of a reinvented downtown.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
How much would it take to protect U.S. railways, subways and other public transit systems from the kind of devastating bombings that shook London’s Tube and killed scores on Thursday?
In 2003, the American Public Transportation Association told Congress that although transit agencies had already spent $1.7 billion on security upgrades since Sept. 11, an extra $6 billion was needed for enhanced communications, detection and surveillance systems and the operating budgets for them.
But since 2001, the federal government has spent a measly $250 million for mass transit security, and another $150 million or so is in the pipeline.
That might change after the Madrid and London bombings. Clearly, al-Qaida understands just how vulnerable public transit is because of its miles of rails and access points.
We can still make it much more difficult for them and perhaps thwart plots and save lives. Given the economic devastation caused by any terrorist attack, transit security is surely worth a larger investment.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
It’s good that public and private groups in Kansas are stepping up efforts to keep kids from buying smokes with an “It’s Everybody’s Business” program. If 27 percent of the places in Kansas that sell cigarettes are selling them to minors, that’s a problem. But so is the federal government’s compliance target of 80 percent. True, kids can be enterprising when they want to smoke, but the goal ought to be keeping more than 80 percent of them from succeeding.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
