Our Friday editorial gave the Wichita Police Department points for openness for its belated incineration this week of the 1,300 DNA swabs taken in the BTK investigation — the second-largest DNA sweep in the nation, after Miami’s 1994 swabbing of 2,300 men. Like the vast majority of such sweeps, this one didn’t catch the killer; police used other methods to finger Dennis Rader as the serial killer. And such DNA swab-athons continue to raise privacy, profiling and cost-effectiveness concerns. Meanwhile, Kansas has joined six other states in requiring all suspects arrested for felony crimes (eventually including DUIs) to have their DNA samples taken and entered into a database. As our editorial noted, “the records of suspects will remain in the database, even if the charges are dismissed or the person is acquitted. Those who cherish civil liberties should be uneasy about treating the DNA profiles of the innocent no differently from those of the guilty.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Who would have thought that a spelling bee would be broadcast live on network TV during prime time? But thanks to the success of the documentary “Spellbound” and the current movie “Akeelah and the Bee,” Americans have learned that spelling bees can be exciting to watch. So Thursday night, not only did 13-year-old Katharine Close of New Jersey defeat students from around the world to win the 2006 Scripps National Spelling Bee, she overcame the pressure of a national TV audience and the disruption of commercial breaks. Congratulations also to Kavya Shivashankar, a 10-year-old from Olathe, who was the youngest competitor in Thursday’s final.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
It would be nice to think that the convictions of Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling (in photos) mark the end of an era of corporate corruption. But that’s wishful thinking, Gary Weiss argues in this piece for Salon. Here’s his take on why the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation enacted in 2002 does nothing to get at the root causes of the Enron scam.
“What Sarbox has never done, and never could do, is change corporate behavior, anymore than you can stop a car thief by taping a Do Not Steal sign to the dashboard. Remember that CEOs who are going to pull off a mega-scam like Enron, or even a routine stock swindle or accounting trick, are not going to be deterred by a law book or someone with a stinkin’ badge. They have a more pragmatic view of corporate responsibility — they feel they don’t have any. If you listened closely, you heard the Enron management credo at the trial. It is the same philosophy that has been employed by second-story men and Mafia bosses since the dawn of the first proto-scam. It can be summed up as, ‘If it’s broke, it ain’t broke, and anyway it ain’t my fault.’”
Posted by Melissa Cooley
Speaking of corporate oversight, executive pay packages have dramatically increased in recent years, even though the company earnings often went down, The New York Times reported. What’s more, the compensation sometimes exceeded the caps set by the directors.
Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil shareholders, fed up with how the company’s directors gave outgoing CEO Lee Raymond (see photo) a final-year pay package of $69.4 million and a retirement lump sum of $98.4 million, voted Wednesday to change the rules for how directors are elected, The Washington Post reported.
And an op-ed piece in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal noted how none of Home Depot’s directors attended its recent annual meeting. “CEO Robert Nardelli, one of the most overpaid CEOs in the U.S., presided over an annual meeting at which no dissent was tolerated and not a single director was present,” Judith Dobrzynski wrote. “This affront to the company’s owners is unprecedented.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Sedgwick County commissioners found it in their coffers Wednesday to comply with Election Commissioner Bill Gale’s request for $300,000 to buy 60 optical-scan vote-counting machines. Voters now must hope that Gale is right that the counters will avert long lines at the county’s far fewer voting machines and far fewer polling places, by allowing wannabe voters to fill out paper ballots that can be fed into the new tabulation machines. Still, the best advice for how to avoid a problem on Election Day: Vote early, at one of the 15 advance voting locations Gale will make available before the Aug. 1 primary and Nov. 7 general election. How odd that the local antidote to all the problems being created by the high-tech, streamlined, federally funded system is the good, old paper ballot.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Forget about needing good grades to get into college; a small but growing number of students are getting in without having a high school diploma or equivalency, The New York Times reported. Nearly 400,000 college students, or 2 percent, never graduated from high school, according to a 2003 survey by the U.S. Education Department. That’s up from 1.4 percent four years earlier. And as more states require high school students to pass exit exams, expect the number of nongrads in college to keep increasing.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
