Difficult as it was to see what it did to 63-year-old WorldCom founder Bernard Ebbers to be sentenced Wednesday to 25 years in prison, that’s exactly what would-be crooked CEOs — and wannabe Wall Street investors — needed to see. Still, it will seem to some like insufficient justice to defrauded former employees and investors of Ebbers’ once-titanic company.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
AARP’s national president, Marie Smith, talked to The Eagle editorial board the other day about the organization’s opposition to privatized accounts for Social Security, which she noted wouldn’t do a thing to address the insolvency problem.
She also acknowledged that the AARP had a disconnect with its members on last year’s expensive Medicare prescription drug bill, which the organization supported at some political cost, and that “I’m still smarting from that.” But she defended the bill as a first step toward helping the millions of Americans without drug coverage.
But she noted that it’s Medicare, not Social Security, that faces the most pressing solvency problem. “We have a patchwork system that’s ready to fall apart,” she said.
She’s right. Why aren’t the nation’s leaders doing more to address that looming crisis?
Posted by Randy Scholfield
Two movies about the life of Truman Capote — “Capote” and “Have You Heard?” — will be released this year and next. The author’s classic book “In Cold Blood,” and the movie that followed, introduced the nation to Holcomb, Kan., and forever linked it in people’s minds to the 1959 killings of the Clutter family that occurred there.
And now it appears that another Kansas town — Park City — will become subject to the public’s morbid fascination with gruesome crimes and the criminals capable of committing them. But Capote — who masterfully blended fact and fiction in “In Cold Blood” to create the true crime genre — deserves partial credit for all of the books about Dennis Rader that are sure to come.
Posted by Melissa Cooley
The Wichita school board took a prudent step Monday in making it easier for parents to keep their child’s contact information from being passed along to military recruiters. Instead of reflecting poorly on the troops, as some are suggesting, the new opt-out approach simply gives parents some semblance of control over their family’s privacy. That’s a precious thing these days. And chances are that those kids who want to serve in the military won’t let this modest change stand in their way.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., has an interesting commentary in today’s Kansas City Star about his recent visit to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, stressing that the detainees are bad people who are being treated well and are still generating good intelligence. He wrote: “Everything I saw is consistent with what we have learned from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s ongoing oversight of operations at Gitmo: It is a tightly run ship with excellent internal, as well as external, oversight and supervision.” Roberts’ point is well-informed and -taken, especially after Sen. Dick Durbin’s ill-chosen comparison of Guantanamo to Nazi camps. But I’m curious as to whether Roberts realizes that “everything” that he, a prominent U.S. senator, saw might not be everything that goes on at this facility.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
President Bush has assured the nation, most recently on June 10, 2004, that he would fire anyone in the White House who had leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
Now that top presidential aide and “Bush’s brain” Karl Rove has been confirmed as one of the leakers, will Bush carry through on his pledge?
Bush firing longtime strategist Rove is inconceivable, says one blog wag. That “would be like Charlie McCarthy firing Edgar Bergen.”
Posted by Randy Scholfield
