To many Americans, the rash of violent riots in Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere over 5-month-old Danish newspaper cartoons is as baffling as it is shocking. It helps somewhat to understand the context — the growing anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe that led to the cartoons’ commission and wide reprinting. The reason so many have taken offense is key, too — Islam forbids any depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, let alone images that ridicule him. One truth about this unsettling clash of cultures stands out, or should — it’s unjustifiable to torch embassies, cause deaths and incite further violence over an act of free speech.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee today (see photo) that "the president is acting with authority both by the Constitution and by statute" in authorizing the domestic eavesdropping program. He also has an op-ed piece in today’s Wall Street Journal arguing that the eavesdropping program falls under Congress’ war authorization. "The use of signals intelligence — intercepting enemy communications — is a fundamental incident of waging war," he wrote.
But many lawmakers aren’t buying it — most notably, Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who said this weekend that the eavesdropping "is in flat violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act." The supposed limited nature of the program also doesn’t match The Washington Post’s reportthis weekend that thousands of Americans have been wiretapped.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, got his baptism on the Sunday morning news shows, leaving mixed first impressions. His best feature is his long refusal to do earmarking — other members’ costly practice of inserting funding for pet projects into bills with no scrutiny or accountability. Otherwise, though, Boehner didn’t even try very hard Sunday to discount his reputation for being cozy with lobbyists. At least 14 of his former aides now work as lobbyists, and he still supports lobbyist-funded congressional travel, which House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., wants to ban. "We can’t lock members up in a cubbyhole here in Washington and never let them see what’s going on around the country and around the world," Boehner said on "Fox News Sunday." Perhaps not, but Boehner’s lobbyist-paid junkets to such cushy destinations as Boca Raton, Fla. (six times), Scottsdale, Ariz. (four), Rome, Venice and Paris hardly seem essential to inform his work. Let lawmakers pay their own way, I say, or keep their travel government-funded and only when necessary.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
KAKE, Channel 10, interviewed Fred Phelps and filmed him giving a sermon, which it aired Thursday night. It was even creepier than you might expect.
The Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka looked tiny. There were about 60 members there when KAKE filmed, half of them children. All the women and girls had their heads covered, many with old-fashioned bonnets. In an interview, Phelps said that the United States needs to criminalize sodomy. “And you have to attach the penalty of death to it,” he told KAKE.
Phelps even went after the Rev. Terry Fox, senior pastor at Immanuel Baptist Church in Wichita. “That jackass down there, Fox in Wichita, his church is just chock-full of divorced and remarried people,” said Phelps. “He has no moral authority to preach about homosexuals.”
What was unclear about Phelps — actually one of many things — was that he said he believes that God has predestined only a small number of people to go to heaven, and everyone else is going to hell. But if we’re already predestined, and nothing can change that, what is the point of the protests?
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
The emotional testimony in Topeka last week about what the 2004 in-state tuition law is doing for some children of undocumented immigrants prompted an interesting and instructive reaction from one lawmaker: “They seem to be here to make us feel guilty,” Rep. Judy Morrison, R-Shawnee, said of those defending the tuition break. She got that right: The point of testimony by an 18-year-old Pittsburg State University student (who’s lived in Kansas for 12 years) and others among the more than 220 kids newly able to afford college was that lawmakers can’t repeal the law now without denying at least some of them the chance to further their lives. Do they really want to do that?
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Should we add a new planet to our solar system, or subtract one? That’s the question surrounding the discovery last year of 2003 UB313, a ball of ice and dust nicknamed “Xena” that orbits beyond Pluto, 9 billion miles from the sun. A team of German astronomers reported Friday that Xena is 30 percent wider than Pluto. So if Pluto, which is smaller in size than the Earth’s moon, is a planet, why shouldn’t Xena be one, too? But some scientists think Pluto, which was discovered by Kansan Clyde Tombaugh, shouldn’t really be a planet, because it doesn’t “gravitationally dominate its surroundings.” I vote for adding a new planet.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
It’s not as if media groups want live Webcasts of local governments’ executive sessions. All they want is to require that such closed sessions be audiotaped and the tapes preserved for a year for possible judicial review, should a citizen or media outlet suspect that the discussion violated the Kansas Open Meetings Act. Don Moler, executive director of the League of Kansas Municipalities, is among those who don’t get it, telling Harris News Service the bill is a “golden oldie” that “never was a good idea” and would “have a chilling effect on open and frank discussion.” He added, “I’d say this bill is a solution in search of a problem.” I’d say the way that executive sessions are overused in Wichita and elsewhere, the bill is essential to know how big a problem exists.
Legislators who think there’s such a thing as too much open government — there isn’t — could turn to an alternative bill that would be better than nothing. It would allow a member of the government board in question to request that an executive session be audiotaped. In any case, the point is: It’s hard to prove something was unlawfully discussed or decided in a closed meeting in the absence of any evidence either way.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
