Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, is facing a difficult re-election battle in part because of the smashmouthed redistricting plan he pushed through in Texas, The New York Times reported. What great irony. In an attempt to guarantee a Republican majority, the plan shifted thousands of Democratic voters into districts with large GOP majorities, including DeLay’s. But now that DeLay has fallen from grace, his re-election is no longer a sure thing, and those new Democratic voters could end up helping unseat him.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Dahlia Lithwick of Slate explains how Samuel Alito may bore his way to the bench: “Anyone can manage to be boring on boring subjects; Alito has seemingly perfected the art of being boring on controversial ones. Executive power in wartime? Boring. His deeply felt passion for Robert Bork? Boring. His incendiary job application from 1985? So boring that he’s actually forgotten it. His resistance to the constitutional principle of one man, one vote? It was based on some stuff his dad told him. He doesn’t fight to defend these ideas, he just slumps even lower in his chair and looks more earnest.”
Posted by Melissa Cooley
Members of the Phelps clan have a right to their opinions and beliefs, however twisted. But they shouldn’t harass grieving families at funerals. In our editorial in today’s Opinion pages, we support reasonable “time-place” restrictions on funeral protests as long as they balance free speech concerns.
State officials also must acknowledge that the Phelpses — often identified as a “Kansas group” — are severely hurting the state’s image. It would be great to see Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, Kansas lawmakers and religious leaders publicly denounce this hateful cult and affirm Kansas’ commitment to diversity, tolerance and decency.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
Pension plans may soon be a thing of the past — yet another benefit American workers are kissing goodbye in the name of higher profit margins. Even successful companies such as Verizon and IBM are now freezing their pensions and using global competition as an excuse to shift the risk onto employees.
“With Verizon, we’re talking about a company at the top of its game,” Karen Friedman, director of policy studies for the Pension Rights Center, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C., told The New York Times. “They have a huge profit. Their CEO has given himself a huge compensation package. And then they’re saying, ‘In order to compete, sorry, we have to freeze the pensions.’ ”
Posted by Melissa Cooley
Sedgwick County officials have known for months that some of them would be visiting Little Rock’s Alltel Arena to gather ideas for Wichita’s downtown arena, so there should have been no need to buy seven airline tickets on short notice at a whopping $921 each. That said, this week’s $8,000 one-day trip by three county commissioners and four other officials will have been money well-spent if it leads to smart decisions about how to make the arena both architecturally striking and cost-effective. And as County Commissioner Ben Sciortino said, “It shows we need more affordable airfares around here.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
One thing about the Alito hearings has been bipartisan: senators’ stunning waste of time with partisan speechmaking only loosely disguised as questioning. By one account of Tuesday’s proceedings, “10 of the first 12 senators spent more time talking than listening to the nominee’s answers.” (Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., also reportedly was caught catnapping.) Come on — the point of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s line of questioning of Judge Samuel Alito should be Alito’s answers. And a listener should not be able to guess the questioner’s political affiliation five words into his question.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
In the end last weekend, the Kansas State Fair board thought better of asking lawmakers to mandate an in-service day in K-12 schools during the fair. It will instead seek a legislative resolution underscoring the fair’s value. That’s good news, because the Legislature should not be in the business of ordering local schools to close — especially when the closure would come just days into the school year. The idea behind the in-service day was worthy, though: The fair has educational value, and more kids should experience it.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
It makes sense that more women are finally leading Kansas schools and school districts, given that women have always dominated the teaching ranks. As The Topeka Capital-Journal noted over the weekend, 37.9 percent of school principals in Kansas are women, up from 9.3 percent in 1984-85. And women represent 11 percent of superintendents, compared with 3.6 percent as recently as 1993-94. The source on this is a Kansas Association of School Boards survey, which found that women now outnumber men 292 to 236 as elementary principals. The final frontier appears to be high school principal jobs: 167 are held by men, only 21 by women. When women teachers move up into administration, they become important role models for girls in these schools — as they command higher salaries for themselves. Now, if only Kansas schools could get more men into elementary classrooms, where they have their own special value as role models for boys.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
