Our country’s stated reasons for invading Iraq — Saddam Hussein is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and has ties to al-Qaida — have been debunked by government investigations, most recently by a Senate Intelligence Committee report. Now the latest National Intelligence Estimate has debunked our results. Rather than make the United States safer, as President Bush has claimed, the war in Iraq has fueled Islamic extremism and created a training ground for terrorists.
Now that we understand the past and the current reality, this country needs to have a forthright debate on what should happen next. Do we need more troops or fewer? Is our strategy of training Iraqi troops likely to succeed? (Some of our soldiers are complaining that the Iraqis troops are among the worst they’ve ever seen, and are more loyal to militias than to the government.) Is there a better strategy? Is there reason for hope?
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
What got into former President Clinton during his debut interview on “Fox News Sunday”? Host Chris Wallace mentioned the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” episode in Somalia and al-Qaida’s later bombings of U.S. interests and asked, “Why didn’t you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business?” Clinton worked himself into a finger-wagging tantrum about Wallace’s “nice little conservative hit job on me” and the “false pretenses” of the interview, half of which was to be about his Clinton Global Initiative.
Clinton still seemed upset about that ABC docudrama and kept referring to former anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke’s book. His spokesman later told the Washington Post that Clinton “came in prepared to respond to any attack on his record.” OK, but if he can’t calmly handle one question about how his White House handled terrorism now, how would he and his wife handle countless questions about that and other aspects of his record during a “Hillary Clinton for president” campaign?
And as Wallace told the Post, the surprise is not that he asked the terrorism question, but that no other TV interviewer asked it of Clinton during last week’s media blitz.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
OK. Not my strongest effort. Click on the cartoon to enlarge. And after drawing it I was filled with remorse and dread that the entries would be equally weak. Surprise! Readers rose to the occasion and sent in some pretty funny captions. The numbers were a bit down this week but the quality of the submissions seemed higher than normal. Thanks for saving my butt. It was a tough decision but in the end we had to go with the, ahem, stand-out caption from Jim Holler, a repeat winner. Here are some of the other close contenders: Dale Martin of Lawrence sent "I bet he wouldn’t be so thirsty if they’d allowed beer sales at this show!" From Randy Carriker of Wichita came "It’s a Shocker Kieth Richard still has a pulse!" Also from Wichita, Karen Wallace sent "Wait a minute. Is Mabeline one of the corporate sponsors?" Belle Plaine’s Richard Julius said "He’s just lip syncing!" Runner up Bruce Cole had another good entry with "Hey (hey) Wu (Wu) get out of my seat!" Ruth Allen, from Wichita, submitted "It leaves a bad taste in our mouths too." Roger Neugent of Haysville got pessimistic with "Wu just realized that it the Stones barely filled the stadium, there isn’t a glimmer of hope for football!" Brad Allen made a reference I didn’t get, but someone else clued me in to the fact that this guy’s a DJ: "Boy, Ronnie Taylor has really let himself go." So that’s it for this contest. I’m still wondering if I should choose topics that are more national in scope to see if responses increase. Any thoughts, dear bloggers? (Forget it, Santiago. I’m not drawing about Zionist plots to implant pro-Israel chips in our city council’s skulls.)
Friends and family gathered Thursday in Hutchinson to memorialize Baby Annabelle — the name given to the remains found by a man on rural Reno County land he shared with the infant’s grandmother and 15-year-old mother. Two autopsies couldn’t determine if the badly decomposed baby was born alive or dead, so the most the mother has been charged with is three felony crimes of unlawful voluntary sexual relations; the grandmother faces a count of aiding a felon. If a live birth could be confirmed, the mother could face murder charges.
Rep. Peggy Mast, R-Emporia (in photo), has worked the past two years on legislation that would make it a felony if a health care provider isn’t notified under similar conditions. Discarding a baby’s remains should be considered a serious offense.
Posted by Angie Holladay
Patricia Dunn (in photo) is stepping down in January as chairman of Hewlett-Packard as a result of the ongoing criminal investigation (and a congressional hearing) about the company spying on its board members, their spouses and newspaper reporters. But the company’s ethics director and several other top executives may need to follow. According to the Washington Post, the executives received a confidential report about the spying — so they can’t claim ignorance.
The spying techniques used by Security Outsourcing Solutions included sending spyware through e-mail messages on Blackberries that could track each keystroke of the target, and illegally obtaining personal phone records.
Posted by Angie Holladay
At the request of prescient author Joel Rosenberg, polling firm McLaughlin and Associates asked 1,000 adults whether recent world events are evidence of the approaching end times: “Yes,” said 42 percent overall, half of women, 75 percent of blacks and 57 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds. Rosenberg is pushing his new book on the Middle East crisis, “Epicenter.” Maybe this is why so few Americans are saving for retirement.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Another reason for educators and political leaders to find more ways to keep kids in school: It turns out that those who drop out of high school tend to drop out of civic life, too. According to a new report by the National Conference on Citizenship, a nonprofit group created by Congress, only 31 percent of high school dropouts voted in 2004, compared with 62 percent of college graduates. A similar gap in “civic health” among those with and without high school diplomas was evident on the issues of trusting government, doing volunteer work, attending church and even perceiving others as honest.
The good news? That volunteerism is on the rise, especially among those ages 18 to 25, and that more people are politically involved than in the late 1990s. But regrettably, Sept. 11, two wars and Hurricane Katrina have not led to “the deeper civic transformation for which many had hoped.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
