How moving and fitting — and how American — to see Rosa Parks’ coffin in a place of honor in the Capitol rotunda. The seamstress whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus sparked the civil rights movement received the same honored place as presidents Lincoln and Kennedy and other national icons.
It’s an inspiring reminder that ordinary citizens can be great leaders in this country.
“She was a citizen in the best sense of the word,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa. “She caused things to happen in our society that made us a better, more caring, more just society.”
Posted by Randy Scholfield
“Doonesbury” is in reruns this week not because Garry Trudeau is on vacation but because Harriet Miers pulled out Thursday and ruined his narrative. But here are the strips that were supposed to run this week, courtesy of Slate.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Unlike with Harriet Miers, there won’t be a big debate about the qualifications of Samuel Alito, President Bush’s new nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. Alito "has more prior judicial experience than any Supreme Court nominee in 70 years," Bush said Monday. But there will be a knock-down, drag-out fight about ideology. Alito’s views and rulings are so similar to those of conservative justice Antonin Scalia that his nickname among some attorneys is "Scalito." Thus, if he is confirmed, abortion rights would likely be overturned or significantly restricted. But I’m with Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., in believing that it is better to have a nominee whose views and records are clear — even if that means the confirmation process turns into a brawl — than to try to sneak through a stealth nominee.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Tim Shallenburger’s tendency to shoot from the lip is usually to his credit as chairman of the Kansas Republican Party. But he went over the top last week in instantly condemning Democratic attorney general candidate Paul Morrison as having “pulled a Benedict Arnold” by switching parties. Ditto Shallenburger’s suggestion that the Johnson County district attorney was somehow culpable for the 2000 Wichita killing spree of Reginald and Jonathan Carr. And describing a 25-year criminal prosecutor with a 98 percent jury trial conviction rate as “soft on crime”? Puh-leese. Voters need to decide this contest on issues, not insults.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Any Kansas homeowners’ associations still carrying racial restrictions in their covenants shouldn’t need to be told by state law to get rid of them. So maybe just hearing about legislation proposed by Rep. Bill Feuerborn, D-Garnett, will be enough to take care of any vestiges of such racism around the state. If the bill passes, homeowners’ associations with such covenants could be sued by a city, county or individual, and attorney fees could be recovered. Between now and the session’s start in January, homeowners’ association directors should ensure that no such legislation is necessary.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
The good folks of western Kansas have learned to live with their association with the 1959 Clutter family murders, but the buzz is growing again, thanks to Hollywood. USA Today reported last week that Vintage has gone back to press three times with its edition of “In Cold Blood” tied to “Capote,” the new film starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as author Truman Capote. And a Barnes & Noble official said “In Cold Blood” has been its leading literature title of late, outselling “The Great Gatsby,” “1984,” “Of Mice and Men” and “Lord of the Flies.” Wish the movie would hurry up and get to Wichita.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Substitute “the State Board of Education” for “Japan.” Then replace the phrases “food safety” and “international trade policy” with “education standards,” and Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., could have been condemning his home state’s new science education standards last week rather than Japan’s ban of U.S. beef:
“Japan has chosen to ignore internationally recognized science and instead based their food safety on emotion and politics. . . . We’re not going to stand idly by while politics and posturing drive international trade policy rather than sound science.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
White House aide “Scooter” Libby took a direct hit, as expected, in Friday’s indictments in the Plame affair.
But special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s announcement that he would keep sealed any investigative information not resulting in criminal charges left behind a lot of frustration and a host of unanswered questions in this tangled case.
For instance, we still don’t know which senior White House officials leaked Valerie Plame’s name to columnist Bob Novak, who originally revealed Plame’s identity in print.
Still unclear, too, is Vice President Dick Cheney’s role in encouraging or aiding Libby’s efforts to discredit Joe Wilson and his wife.
We did learn from Fitzgerald that Plame’s undercover status was in effect (contrary to some GOP assertions) and “not widely known” at the time of her outing. So much for that excuse.
What about Karl Rove? The investigation is “not over,” said Fitzgerald. What does that mean? Where is this headed, and for how long?
Posted by Randy Scholfield
Wal-Mart’s image problem wasn’t helped much by the outing of an internal memo with suggestions for cutting health-care costs. The New York Times reported some of what the memo said: To discourage unhealthy job applicants, the memo suggests that Wal-Mart arrange for “all jobs to include some physical activity (e.g., all cashiers do some cart-gathering).”
It also said that “the cost of an associate with seven years of tenure is almost 55 percent more than the cost of an associate with one year of tenure, yet there is no difference in his or her productivity. Moreover, because we pay an associate more in salary and benefits as his or her tenure increases, we are pricing that associate out of the labor market, increasing the likelihood that he or she will stay with Wal-Mart.”
The memo doesn’t exactly back up the “we care about our employees” message the company is trying so hard to project.
Posted by Melissa Cooley
Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., again got star billing in the national media after Harriet Miers’ pullout Thursday as a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. He’s the go-to guy in the U.S. Senate for what conservatives think, and a key member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He’s also seeding that likely 2008 presidential campaign with trips to many a primary battleground state and frequent appearances on the Sunday talk shows. A Rolling Stone profile is even in the works — though The Kansas City Star didn’t wait to do this cover mock-up of Brownback as rock star. But as Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, told The Star, Brownback’s electability remains in doubt beyond “the Ivory-soapers, those who are 99 and 44/100ths percent pure. Can he attract the 90-percenters? Or will they drift to someone else with a better chance of winning?”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Ben Bernanke, President Bush’s nominee to replace Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, is known as “Helicopter Ben” in some circles for having famously once said that if necessary, he would fight inflation by flying over the country and throwing money out of a helicopter. And if the problem is deflation, he has said, the United States can “produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.” Colorful stuff — and reason to hope that for Wall Street investors’ sake, he’ll measure his words a bit after confirmation.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
The arena contenders got another look-over at a public meeting Thursday, with new information about where exactly the arena would be sited at each of the four potential sites.
The north site looks like an also-ran. It’s too crowded and is getting too many negative reviews.
The east and west sites still look strongest because of their proximity to Old Town and WaterWalk, respectively.
East is especially promising because of its redevelopment potential with Douglas Avenue shops, the Commerce Street arts district and Old Town. The street-level brick-and-gaslight ambiance is already in place, too.
One consideration that could use more scrutiny: What will be the demographics of arena users? The younger rock concert set will want access to Old Town’s nightlife. Older folks might prefer WaterWalk’s upscale shopping.
It’s also clear that an effective ground transportation and parking plan must be part of any arena site.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
A “Stop the Hate” rally at 3 p.m. today at Wichita State University’s Hubbard Hall isn’t about finger pointing, organizers say. Rather, it’s about encouraging people to lower barriers and get to know others who are different from you. When that happens, we usually discover that there is much more that unites us than divides us.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Harriet Miers accomplished for the Democrats what they have not been able to do on their own, Michael Scherer of Salon points out in this article.
“She single-handedly called into question President Bush’s electoral mandate and helped redraw the political landscape. She fractured the Republican Party’s impenetrable front,” he wrote.
But, he notes, the Miers debacle could end up giving liberals little to cheer about.
“The current political atmosphere echoes 1990, a disastrous time for those who oppose a conservative takeover of the Supreme Court. ‘After a few years of George Bush Sr. being called a moderate on a number of social issues, he finally needed a way to shore up his base before an election,’ says Nan Aron, the leader of the liberal Alliance for Justice, an umbrella organization for civil rights, consumer and women’s groups. “He sent up Clarence Thomas.”
Posted by Melissa Cooley
Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and legislative leaders talk about setting a minimum marriage age as if it will be a breeze next session. Maybe it will be, especially after those embarrassing national headlines about the couple who were able to marry in Kansas only to return home to Nebraska to see the 22-year-old groom charged with raping his 14-year-old bride. But when Sen. Phil Journey, R-Haysville, calls for an “escape clause” in cases where, say, a pregnant girl “demonstrates maturity and understanding of the situation,” you have to wonder what lies ahead for this issue. Our editorial in Saturday’s Eagle calls on lawmakers to “do the right thing and ensure that child rape can’t continue to be legitimized in Kansas with a wedding.” What do you think?
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Superstitious baseball fans should leave politics out of their curse theories. Curses should center on baseball-related blunders and the occasional farm animal. But, as Rhonda pointed out in an earlier posting, Hillary Clinton has been blamed for the Yankees’ recent postseason failures. And now President Bush is being blamed for the Astros’ World Series loss and the entire state of Texas’ baseball woes.
I bet Bush wishes he had only baseball to worry about right now.
Posted by Melissa Cooley
How amazing is it that former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the face of the evil empire during the Reagan years, will be the honored guest and speaker at a Chess for Peace Festival in Lindsborg today?
Then again, who would have believed that chess grand master Anatoly Karpov would establish an international chess school in the small Kansas town? Gorbachev heard about Lindsborg through Karpov.
Lindsborg’s dream has become a wonderfully surreal and positive reality for Kansas. And it shows what can happen when Kansans dare to think big.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s criminal indictment Friday of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff, adds to a deepening crisis of confidence in the White House.
Libby is charged with several counts, including obstruction of justice and perjury, for statements regarding how he learned that Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson’s wife was a CIA operative.
This is not a small, technical offense. As Fitzgerald said, “compromising national security information is a very serious matter.” What the indictment of such a high government official also shows, as Fitzgerald said, was that “all citizens are bound by the law.”
Whatever political differences are behind this controversy, that fact is indisputable. What kind of fallout this will have for the administration is uncertain. Even if others haven’t been charged with criminal wrongdoing, questions remain about whether top White House officials acted unethically against political opponents.
This is a bad day for President Bush and for the nation. But it’s reassuring that Libby’s alleged lies have been exposed.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
Liberals in the blogosphere have been giddy at the prospect that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will bring indictments against White House higher-ups in the CIA leak case, perhaps today. But all the celebratory talk of this as “Fitzmas Day” is as inappropriate as Tom DeLay’s grinning mug in his mug shot last week. A little respect for the gravity of the situation, please.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
The concluding paragraph of Andrew Corsello’s lengthy article on Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline in the November GQ fits into the local debates over Kline’s priorities and protesters’ fetus signs: “So you can distrust Phill Kline’s motives. Call him a goon out to gut the right to privacy. Call him a shameless huckster who uses his formidable mind and mastery of tone to veil his ends-justify-the-means essentialism. But you can’t ignore what he wants you to look at. As a moral agent in the world, you ultimately don’t have the option not to decide what, when, and who a person is.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
It’s understandable that the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Teachers Association would be unhappy about seeing their copyrighted material included in new Kansas science standards critical of evolution theory. But unwilling to allow its use? Yet the groups have denied the state the use of their material, which sets back the board’s plan to give the standards final approval next month. In trying to punish the state board’s conservative majority, the national groups are punishing Kansas kids, too, by denying the state the use of solid, science-based information in standards unrelated to evolution. That’s regrettable. Then again, it’s not the science groups’ fault that Kansas is in this mess. It’s the school board’s.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Video games are often accused of promoting violence, but a few of the new ones are trying to promote peace.
One game in the works calls on players to negotiate peace in the Middle East. Another — which the United Nations recently released — asks players to feed thousands on a fictitious island. And MTV is holding a contest to see who can design the best game that deals with the Darfur, Sudan, crisis.
“Activism needs to be rethought and reinvented with each generation,” said Stephen Friedman, general manager of an MTV channel shown on college campuses. “This is a generation that lives online — what better way to have an effect?”
Posted by Melissa Cooley
The United Nations’ oil-for-food scandal extends far beyond the United Nations, according to the fifth and final report by an independent committee released Thursday. More than half of the 4,700 companies that were part of the program paid illegal kickbacks to Saddam Hussein totaling $1.8 billion. Still, former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker, who headed the investigation, stressed that the private corruption shouldn’t draw attention away from the need for the United Nations to have much better management procedures and controls. “The central point, he said, “is that it all adds up to the same story. You need some pretty thoroughgoing reforms at the U.N.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Today’s pullout by U.S. Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers was the right thing for the White House and the court. As Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., told NPR, her hill to confirmation was getting larger rather than smaller, and that disagreement with the Bush administration over the release of documents loomed large. The real problem with her nomination was not that she wasn’t conservative enough. It was her resume, which simply didn’t rise to the level necessary to entitle someone to sit on the highest court in the land. Miers’ confusing questionnaire answers didn’t help. At least nobody can say she was “borked.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
An exasperated Attorney General Phill Kline told The Eagle editorial board this week that people assume abortion is all he focuses on because “that’s all you guys want to talk about.” Yet his spokesman later said Kline was pleased with the article in the November issue of GQ magazine titled “This man will do anything to stop abortion,” which calls him the “most aggressive abortion litigator in the land” and the “future of the pro-life movement.” If Kline is trying to distance himself from abortion, he’s failing.
Some prime Kline quotes from the article:
“When we apply a utilitarian measure to human life — ‘Do I want to have this baby?’; ‘Can I afford to have this baby?’ — it permeates all our thinking to the point where it undermines our ability to protect the inherent rights of the most vulnerable people in society. The disabled and the elderly and so on. To me, this is a foundational political issue.”
“In Genesis 2:19, after God has created all that is beautiful and wondrous in the world, He turns to Adam and says, ‘You name it, all of it.’ Think of the power that imparts, the faith that expresses. God serving what He has created. Amazing.”
“I think abortion has created a deep and abiding national shame and hurt that cannot find healing. And shame is a terrible thing to feel. Quite honestly, I think this is why when abortion is condemned in the political realm, there is such aggressive anger in response.”
“The most frustrating part of my job is the cheapness of the public discourse when it comes to abortion, the way it drives the people who have public roles to extremes — the fear it creates that you can’t concede even an iota of reasonableness in any argument made by anyone on the other side. There’s no room for doubt. It’s all about who wins the argument, which is just moronic.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
