The optimism of President Bush’s speech to the nation Thursday night surely struck many hurricane victims as premature, given that he was speaking from a ghost town in which corpses are still floating in the open. But as the president at last showed a glimmer of his post-Sept. 11 leadership, he said much of what needed to be said — taking responsibility for the inadequate federal response and vowing to help residents and the region both now and long term. His unprecedented reconstruction program and commitment to review urban disaster plans nationwide are laudable. But it will take more than promises to restore the faith of many Americans in their government’s ability to come to the rescue when disaster strikes.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Did you see the news about 38 respected Nobel laureates (most of them in physics, medicine and chemistry) writing an open letter to the Kansas State Board of Education?
In the Sept. 9 missive, the Nobel laureates urged the board to “reject efforts by the proponents of so-called ‘intelligent design’ to politicize scientific inquiry” and asked them to “maintain Darwinian evolution as the sole curriculum and science standard in the State of Kansas.” They went on to state that ID is “fundamentally unscientific; it cannot be tested as scientific theory because its central conclusion is based on belief in the intervention of a supernatural agent.”
But then, as board member Connie Morris might say, what do they know?
Posted by Randy Scholfield
Michael Brown has fallen on his sword for his role in the Katrina response fiasco, but was he really any worse than Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff?
Chertoff, Brown’s boss, was as tone-deaf and clueless as Brown in talking about the unfolding crisis, on Wednesday of that week saying he was “extremely pleased” with the federal response, and at one point in an interview with an incredulous NPR radio host dismissing reports that thousands of people were stranded at the New Orleans Superdome as “anecdotal” and “rumor,” despite the fact that pictures of the appalling scene were being broadcast around the world at that moment.
Hell-o? Reality check. Is this mike working? And is this our point man for fighting terrorism?
According to a Knight Ridder report Tuesday, it was Chertoff not Brown who had the authority to order a massive federal response, and he didn’t need approval from local and state authorities to do so.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
The liberal line that the Bush administration serves at the pleasure of Big Oil surely gets fuel from this bit of post-Katrina news: On the evening of Aug. 30 and morning of Aug. 31, officials in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and the Energy Department made multiple phone calls ordering that electricity be restored to a south Mississippi pipeline that sends fuel to the Northeast. Never mind that powering up the pipeline left hospitals, city water systems and everything else powerless for 24 hours longer than they might have otherwise been.
“I considered it a presidential directive to get those pipelines operating,” one power company manager told the Hattiesburg (Miss.) American. “I reluctantly agreed to pull half our transmission line crews off other projects and made getting the transmission lines to the Collins substations a priority.”
Another entry on the long Katrina-related list headed: What were they thinking?
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Last week, conservatives on the State Board of Education changed the criteria for evaluating candidates for state education commissioner and de-emphasized the importance of education experience. As a result, the national group that was helping the board identify candidates quit. Now, of the five candidates the board is considering, a main qualification of two of them seems to be that they are hard-core conservatives.
Bob Corkins, for example, does a good job providing conservative state lawmakers with information on how the state is spending too much money on schools and why it should provide private school vouchers. But Corkins, who has no education experience, is not the right person to be our state’s top education official. As Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, D-Topeka, noted to the Lawrence Journal-World, picking Corkins “would be like putting Phill Kline in charge of Planned Parenthood.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Good for state Rep. Willa DeCastro, R-Wichita, for giving the idea of barring gays and lesbians from adopting foster children the attention it deserved this week in her interim Joint Committee on Children’s Issues — which was none. “It will not be coming out of this committee,” she said Wednesday, after suggesting earlier that it might come up as part of a larger discussion of adoption. Her reticence makes sense, as there has been no indication of any problems with adoptive parents who are homosexual. Besides, with kids in foster care averaging 4,500 a month, Kansas needs all the caring adoptive parents it can get. Wish other lawmakers could be counted on to keep that in mind next year, and similarly keep a gay adoption ban off the full Legislature’s agenda.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Merit and combat pay for teachers makes sense for a school system as huge and challenging as Wichita’s. That’s why it was good that teachers and the teachers’ union had been involved in crafting an alternative compensation program with the district. But Wichita superintendent Winston Brooks and the school board sent a lousy message Monday by hurdling that process and proceeding with Brooks’ own plan to give $1,500 bonuses to teachers at high-poverty schools. True, there is something surreal about seeing teachers unhappy about getting more money, but the district has negated the good will behind its gesture by ticking off the union and kissing off the collaborative process. At least the policy will be reviewed next year before it will be repeated.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
