Bob Hamrick has a commentary in today’s Eagle urging his fellow Wichitans to stop whining about the Rolling Stones concert. Some of the naysaying includes: Tickets cost too much. So what if we got the Stones, so did Missoula. They still haven’t sold out the stadium. And now, no one has heard of the opening band. “Nothing is ever quite right here in River City,” Hamrick wrote.
Our editorial today also notes that those who seem to take pleasure in arguing that there’s nothing to do in Wichita certainly can’t say that this weekend — if they ever can. Besides the Stones concert, options include the first Kansas Book Festival today and Saturday at Lawrence-Dumont Stadium, the Downtown Chili Cookoff and the Great Plains Renaissance Festival. There are also concerts, a rodeo, theater performances and much more.
As Hamrick put it: “All you have to do is show up, shut up and listen.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
It’s not surprising that the New York Times editorial board opposes the detainee interrogation bill that the Senate approved Thursday night. But its editorial Thursday is worth reading, because it provides a concise list of what it sees as the bill’s biggest flaws — including “a dangerously broad definition of illegal enemy combatant” that could give a president the power “to apply this label to anyone he wanted.”
One thing that seems clear is that the bill will end up in court. In fact, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (in photo), R-Pa., is counting on that. He had said the bill was “patently unconstitutional on its face” and tried to amend it. Yet he ended up voting for it anyway, explaining that “the court will clean it up” by striking the habeas corpus provisions, the Washington Post reported.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
As part of an editorial calling for tighter limits on funeral protests, the Daily Union in Junction City asked readers to pick which quote goes with which source: Al-Qaida’s Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, or Topeka’s Westboro Baptist Church leader Fred Phelps.
It’s harder than you’d think. Here are the quotes:
A) “Death is better than living on this earth with the unbelievers among us, making a mockery of our religion.”
B) “Stay tuned — it won’t be long and you will have so many dead bodies . . . that you won’t be able to bury them.”
C) “Regardless of how the world has changed after (Sept. 11), ‘Death to America’ will remain our reverberating and powerful slogan: Death to America.”
D) “The world and the United States of America . . . in particular, have deeply corrupted themselves and incurred the wrath of God.”
E) “Your doomed destiny will be annihilation, misfortune and abjectness.”
F) “God hates the U.S.A. and America is doomed.”
G) “The Bush presidency was a bunch of cocky fools. . . . They threw themselves, their people and their nation into a sea of fire from which they are uselessly trying to secure themselves.”
Answers: A) Bin Laden, B) Phelps, C) Nasrallah, D) Phelps, E) Ahmadinejad, F) Phelps, G) Zawahiri.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
The $75 million police training facility in Iraq, which was to be a key part of U.S. efforts to help Iraqis take control of their own security, was so poorly constructed that feces and urine now rain from the ceilings in student barracks, and the campus may need to be partially demolished, the Washington Post reported. “This is the most essential civil security project in the country — and it’s a failure,” said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. “The Baghdad police academy is a disaster.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
The phrase “do-nothing Congress” is used so often that one wonders if it has always applied and always will. But as the 109th Congress prepares to adjourn this weekend, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein offer some depressing context in a Los Angeles Times commentary. The 11 appropriations bills are unfinished. More than 25 of the year’s fewer than 100 days in session have seen no votes scheduled before 6:30 p.m., and the typical congressional workweek now lasts from Tuesday evening through noon Thursday. Of greater concern to the authors, though, is how Congress increasingly pushes through “sloppy and ill-considered legislation” to score political points. “The framers wanted Congress to move slowly and deliberately,” they write. “But today, it is common to spring on the House and Senate a 1,000-page bill that has not been through any vetting process. With little notice and no time for anyone to read the bill, much less absorb or analyze it, with no amendments allowed, the leadership demands a party-line, up-or-down vote. This is a formula for poor oversight and worse law.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
A few of the health and safety violations the city of Wichita found at Old Cowtown Museum seem petty. But many others are quite serious and, according to a letter given to Cowtown’s board this week by City Manager George Kolb, could endanger visitors and staff. Granted, it isn’t easy to keep mice, cockroaches and rain out of old, wooden buildings. But the letter revealed that Cowtown’s maintenance problems are sizable and won’t be fixed just by slapping on a fresh coat of paint.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
