You can buy liquor on Sunday in Cheney, Garden Plain, Andale, Colwich (see photo), Douglass and even Walton. And soon you’ll be able to buy it in Maize and Benton. But not in the state’s largest city.
Why not? The reason, apparently, is that most Wichita liquor store owners don’t want to work on Sundays, and they’ve convinced the Wichita City Council not to approve Sunday sales, even though convenience and grocery stores in Wichita want it. But the question should be what consumers want, not what the store owners want. And liquor store owners don’t have to be open on Sundays if they don’t want to be.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Will the discovery of oil deposits 5.3 miles below the Gulf of Mexico waters by Chevron and two other oil companies end the momentum that’s been building on alternative fuels and other efforts to ease U.S. dependency on foreign oil? That’s the potential downside of what has to be viewed as a wonderful find, something that could lead to 750,000 barrels of new daily U.S. crude oil production within six years. It should be noted that the high price of oil has enabled this kind of costly deepwater exploration, and this successful extraction likely will lead to more exploration in the Gulf and elsewhere. But a later deadline on when the world will run out of oil should not deter those determined to find a better way to power the U.S. economy and ensure energy security.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Even supporters of the war in Iraq and President Bush wish he’d better articulate his strategy both to win the war and withdraw. Columnist Joe Klein offers the speech he wishes Bush had delivered to the American Legion last week, one that admits shortcomings, declares to the Iraqi prime minister that “we have not sacrificed 2,600 Americans to create a radical Shi’ite government in Iraq” and outlines how to stay in Iraq but “stay smarter”: He would meet with the Iranian president, join with Democrats in a major effort to break free of foreign oil, and send 30,000 more troops to pacify Baghdad. Interesting ideas, though out of the question given Bush’s “stay the course” plan.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Conventional wisdom has it that Hezbollah emerged the big winner in its recent clash with Israel. Charles Krauthammer’s column in the Washington Post takes a different view.
He cites the recent admission Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah (in photo): “If I had known that the operation to capture the soldiers would lead to this result, we would not have carried it out.”
Not exactly words of triumph. Krauthammer points out that Hezbollah also suffered severe damage to the military infrastructure it spent the past six years building, and political damage among Arab nations increasingly alarmed by Hezbollah’s Iranian sponsorship.
Posted by Dave Knadler
If you haven’t already, you ought to take the free dome tour of the state Capitol. I did it last weekend, and it was very interesting — and kind of scary. The tours were stopped 37 years ago but restarted earlier this year. What’s interesting is that you go up above the dome ceiling (that you see from inside the Capitol). That’s also the scary part — as the narrow stairs angle from the wall of the dome up to the center of the dome (see photo), so that you’re looking down on the glass dome ceiling below. You emerge at an outside walkway encircling the cupola, just below the American Indian statue. There are 296 steps to the top, but the tour makes several stops along the way, so it wasn’t particularly tiring.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Most of the global talk about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (in photo) has been about what he might do to Israel and the United States if he’s successful in pursuing nuclear weapons. But what about what he’s doing to Iran? His call Tuesday for further purging of liberal and secular professors from Iran’s universities should bring new attention to the Taliban-like changes Ahmadinejad’s administration is making in the country, presumably out of nostalgia for the 1979 Islamic revolution. In the past year, dozens of professors have been retired, and a cleric was put in charge of Tehran University. Time magazine recounted other recent fundamentalist reforms, including gender segregation in classrooms, restrictions on women’s dress and their public performance of music, and confiscation of residents’ satellite dishes. Will the world cry out about these limits on liberty, as it did about pre-Sept. 11 Afghanistan?
Posted by Rhonda Holman
