According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll before the president spoke, 74 percent of Americans support using National Guard troops to patrol the Mexican border. Clearly, this is the place Bush wants and needs to be politically on this issue. But there is so much distance between the immigration bill the House passed and what the Senate started trying to pass today — and the president’s leverage on Republicans in either place is so feeble — that his attempt to set a deadline for Congress to act last night didn’t carry much weight. And I don’t see him out barnstorming the nation today to try to sell this. Was it too little and too late, in a country now too stirred up to be satisfied by a commonsense reform?
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline filed notice today that he’s appealing U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten’s ruling on the underage sex case to the 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver, to press his discredited point that authorities should be informed of pretty much all sexual contact involving teenagers. That’s a bad move, one that will cost taxpayers more to cover Kline’s defense against the lawsuit and also could lead to an order that the state cover the plaintiffs’ costs. The time and tax dollars this case is taking are maddening, kind of like Kline’s assertion that health professionals and others can’t be trusted to recognize and report child sexual abuse to authorities.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
It’s surprising that 63 percent of Americans at least initially said they had no problem with the National Security Agency collecting data about millions of domestic phone calls, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll last week. Only 24 percent strongly disapproved.
You wonder: What if bank records are next? Is that OK, too? Where do we draw the line? And are that many Americans so ready to trade civil liberties for security?
The numbers suggest this latest NSA “scandal” may actually help bump Bush’s abysmal poll numbers, at least in the short term, because Americans tend to support aggressive anti-terror tactics, as argued by blogger mysterypollster.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
Sen. John McCain, a likely presidential candidate in 2008, gave a speech over the weekend at Liberty University that deserves a wider hearing, because it seeks to form a basis for Americans — so bitterly divided on many issues — to come together with civility and mutual respect on common ideals. An excerpt:
“Americans deserve more than tolerance from one another, we deserve each other’s respect, whether we think each other right or wrong in our views, as long as our character and our sincerity merit respect, and as long as we share, for all our differences, for all the noisy debates that enliven our politics, a mutual devotion to the sublime idea that this nation was conceived in — that freedom is the inalienable right of mankind, and in accord with the laws of nature and nature’s Creator.
“We have so much more that unites us than divides us. We need only to look to the enemy who now confronts us, and the benighted ideals to which Islamic extremists pledge allegiance — their disdain for the rights of Man, their contempt for innocent human life — to appreciate how much unites us.”
See the full text of McCain’s speech here.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
As he sentenced former Kansas Cosmosphere director Max Ary to three years in prison Monday, U.S. District Court Judge J. Thomas Marten said he thought a prison sentence was important in Ary’s case “for people to get the message.” The judge got that right. As Ary was stealing and selling off artifacts from the museum he co-founded, he not only wrecked his career and tarnished Hutchinson’s sterling science center. He also broke the promise that all nonprofit museums have with their donors, the one assuring that their dollars and other gifts will be handled with extraordinary care for the long term.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright argued in The Washington Post that opposition to the war in Iraq should not morph into opposition to democracy in the Middle East. She wrote:
“The ‘realists’ are right to bemoan the invasion of Iraq, but that misguided operation cannot be used to indict the promotion of democracy. The purpose of the invasion was to seize weapons that did not exist and to sever a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda that had not been made. The failures were of leadership and intelligence, not a too-fervent commitment to democracy.”
Going forward, she advocates a foreign policy approach of “realistic idealism,” which recognizes the world as it is but at the same time aims for a better one.
Posted by Melissa Cooley
A Wall Street Journal article notes how scientists are refining their ability to isolate human-caused climate change and why many think “natural variations” in climate — a frequent explanation used by warming skeptics — aren’t enough to account for present global warming patterns.
Said atmospheric physicist Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University: “We have never seen natural variability on a global scale like we’ve had in the last 100 years.”
Posted by Randy Scholfield
