You’d like to think that two local drill teams could have an impromptu dance-off without disturbing the peace or worse. But such a contest went bad Saturday night at McAdams Park, leaving one injured and two arrested. What is particularly shocking is that some of the 50 people involved in the fight were moms of the drill team members. One even allegedly struck a 17-year-old boy in the face with a drum stick, before getting punched and cut up herself. As in the cases of parents behaving badly at their kids’ sporting events, you have to conclude: Having children is not the same thing as having a clue about how to be a good parent.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
The presidential primary system is broken, empowering too few voters in the same few undeserving states to pick the nominees each time. Worse, the will to change things hits a wall at the major political parties. At least the new recommendations of the Commission on Federal Election Reform, a bipartisan effort led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, will get people talking about what’s wrong and what might fix it. Most interesting: the commission’s call for Congress to do what the parties won’t and require four rotating regional presidential primaries (regrettably, while still letting Iowa and New Hampshire go first). Also worthy: the call for voting machines to have a verifiable paper trail. Less appealing: a recommendation that voter registration become a state-level function and that voters must show photo ID cards.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
People are variously saying that the cost of Katrina’s cleanup and reconstruction should put a stop to Social Security reform, delay the Medicare prescription drug benefit and even hasten the withdrawal from Iraq. One expenditure it should render unaffordable is another moon shot, which NASA estimated Monday will cost $104 billion if done by 2018. We’re going to have to get back into that final frontier someday, but the nation’s earthbound problems are more pressing right now.
Still, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin made a good point Monday: “We must deal with our short-term problems while not sacrificing our long-term investments in our future. When we have a hurricane, we don’t cancel the Air Force. We don’t cancel the Navy. And we’re not going to cancel NASA.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Stephen Moore, senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal, put some perspective on the more than $200 billion in federal money expected to be spent on Katrina recovery. “We could give every one of the 500,000 families displaced by Katrina a check for $400,000, and they could each build a beachfront home virtually anywhere in America,” he wrote.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Katrina evacuees report they’ve been treated suspiciously in certain host cities, as if they’re prone to spontaneous looting. Then there are the unfortunate headlines about what some evacuees are doing with their relief money: Debit cards from the Red Cross reportedly have been used to buy $800 Louis Vuitton handbags and a PlayStation in Atlanta, jewelry and a TV with DVD in Illinois, and more. A Red Cross representative told the New York Daily News that the only no-nos for the cards are alcohol, tobacco or firearms. “Once they’re out of our hands, there’s nothing we can do,” she said.
Maybe so, but Americans’ generosity to private groups may dry up fast if more such stories emerge.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Is it really true that President Bush has put White House spinmeister Karl Rove — admittedly a brilliant political strategist but nonetheless a propagandist by trade — in charge of the largest reconstruction effort in U.S. history, as some media have reported? If so, that does not inspire confidence that Bush is thinking primarily of results, not image.
Bush has resisted calls from his own party to appoint a visible reconstruction czar — a Tommy Franks, say, Colin Powell or even Dick Cheney — to oversee the massive effort.
Anyone else taken aback by Rove overseeing this? My complaint simply is: What makes him qualified?
Posted by Randy Scholfield
Three cheers for The Opportunity Project (TOP) Learning Center North, which will hold a groundbreaking ceremony at 10 a.m. Wednesday at 2200 N. Jardine. The $3 million, 23,000-square-foot early childhood education center is scheduled to open August 2006 and will be part of the new Youth Empowerment Zone planned on the old Heartspring campus in northeast Wichita. The center is expected to serve 200 children and is a partnership between the city of Wichita, the Wichita school district and TOP, a nonprofit organization that operates another education center in the Oaklawn-Planeview area of Wichita and was formed by Wichita entrepreneur Barry Downing. Hip, hip, hooray.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
