As expected, the Kansas State Board of Education ignored the recommendations of its science standards committee and the overwhelming opinion of the world’s scientists and voted this afternoon to include criticisms of evolution in the state’s science standards and to change the definition of science to allow for supernatural explanations. Fortunately, state tests won’t reflect these junk standards for another two years, so there is still time to elect an new board majority next year whose members will put academic integrity and our state’s education reputation before their own religious ideologies.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
The religious right gets a lot of criticism — often justified — about mixing politics and faith. But James Taranto argues in his “Best of the Web Today” column in The Wall Street Journal that the religious left can be guilty of a similar sin when the issue is tax cuts or global warming.
He wrote: “Contemporary liberals are happy to beat you over the head with the Bible, but only when completely technocratic matters, like budgets or environmental regulations, are at stake. When the subject turns to abortion or same-sex marriage or Terri Schiavo, suddenly they become absolutists about the separation of church and state. In other words, they fear and oppose religion when it comes to matters of sex and death — the two great mysteries of life, and the two areas where a religious outlook has the most to offer.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
An intelligence report from February 2002 said that an al-Qaida prisoner likely was intentionally misleading interrogators in claiming that Iraq trained al-Qaida members to use biological and chemical weapons. Yet months later, President Bush and other administration officials used these claims, without any qualifications, in making their case for why the United States needed to invade Iraq.
Reliance on such highly suspect intelligence information — and there are other examples — needs to be the focus of the phase II report by Sen. Pat Roberts’ intelligence committee. Did the Bush administration deliberately misuse or overplay intelligence information in order to sell the war?
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
The proposal by House Speaker Doug Mays, R-Topeka, to establish a 2,500-foot sex offender-free zone around schools, parks and licensed day care centers could make it more likely that sex offenders would reoffend, state correction officials told The Lawrence Journal-World. Forcing sex offenders from their homes could make them increasingly frustrated, isolated and unemployed — and more dangerous, the officials said. The officials also said there were no studies or other evidence indicating that the restrictions would increase safety.
Eagle reader Larry G. Houtz also calculated in a letter to the editor Sunday that if you drew a circle with a 2,500-foot radius around every public school and licensed day care center in Wichita, the entire city would likely be off limits.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
The cover story in the Parade supplement in Sunday’s Eagle reported on some of the most egregious federal pork projects, including the infamous “bridge to nowhere” in Ketchikan, Alaska. It also had some good advice for how to get more involved in tracking and discouraging pork spending. But it also cautioned those who think that the federal budget problems would go away if we got rid of the pork: “If all pork programs were miraculously suspended, the total would pay for about 18 percent of the Gulf Coast recovery.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
It’s deeply unsettling to see riots and violence spreading like wildfire across France, with a second week of angry mobs torching cars and battling police in the suburbs of Paris as well as many other French towns.
French politicians have been remarkably tone-deaf and ineffectual in dealing with this crisis. What they seem unable to face: The civil unrest is fueled by years of official French neglect of large Arab and African immigrant communities who find themselves segregated in urban ghettoes with few opportunities for upward mobility.
The French pride themselves on championing liberte, egalite et fraternite, but the riots are a cautionary tale about the dangers of tolerating a huge gap between ideals and practice in social policy.
That said, there is something equally disturbing and dangerous at work here: The failure of European governments to deal firmly with militant Islamic communities who have no intention of assimilating to secular democratic society in countries like France, Germany and the Netherlands.
The social failure plays into the militants’ hands.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
