Even superstar evangelical author and pastor Rick Warren wasn’t pure enough for some anti-abortion groups, which turned on him for — horror of horrors — inviting Sen. Barak Obama, D-Ill., to speak at an AIDS conference at his Saddleback Valley Community Church last Friday. But by not backing down, Warren helped American politics take an important turn, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne argued. "Warren speaks for a new generation of evangelicals who think that harnessing religious faith too closely to electoral politics is bad for religion, and who are broadening the evangelical public agenda to include a concern for global poverty and the scourge of AIDS," Dionne wrote. And he concluded that the standing ovation Obama received "suggests that Warren is right to sense that growing numbers of Christians are tired of narrowly partisan politics."
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
“Current U.S. policy is not working,” the Iraq Study Group declared today. It’s key recommendations include direct talks with Iran and Syria; withdrawing nearly all combat units from Iraq by early 2008; and threatening to reduce economic and military support for Iraq’s government if it fails to meet specific benchmarks, the Washington Post reported.
Study group co-chairman James Baker said that Iraqis “have been liberated from the nightmare of a tyrannical order only to face the nightmare of brutal violence. . . . It is time to find a new way forward.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
James Carville told a Wichita audience last night that the real transformative election to watch for will be 2008, because it’s so wide open and the country faces such enormous challenges.
He believes one winning issue for a candidate of either party would be a call for a massive investment in renewable energy and national energy independence — Americans “are so ready for that” message, he said, because they understand that our messy entanglements in the Middle East are all about oil.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
The pay gap between men and women is narrowing — from 26.3
percent difference in 2000 to 23 percent in 2005 — but not because
women have made great strides, the Los Angeles Times reported. Rather, it’s because because men’s wages are eroding.
"Wages generally have been depressed, but men’s have been more
depressed," Michele Leber, chair of the Washington, D.C.-based National
Committee on Pay Equity, told the Times.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Even superstar evangelical author and pastor Rick Warren wasn’t pure enough for some anti-abortion groups, which turned on him for — horror of horrors — inviting Sen. Barak Obama, D-Ill., to speak at an AIDS conference at his Saddleback Valley Community Church last Friday. But by not backing down, Warren helped American politics take an important turn, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne argued. "Warren speaks for a new generation of evangelicals who think that harnessing religious faith too closely to electoral politics is bad for religion, and who are broadening the evangelical public agenda to include a concern for global poverty and the scourge of AIDS," Dionne wrote. And he concluded that the standing ovation Obama received "suggests that Warren is right to sense that growing numbers of Christians are tired of narrowly partisan politics."
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Rep.
Dick Kelsey (in photo), R-Goddard, was the only Wichita-area Republican
elected to a leadership position Monday in Topeka. He is the new
majority caucus chairman. That’s the bottom rung of the leadership
ladder, but, Kelsey said, it is still a seat at the leadership table.
On the other side of the aisle, Rep. Jim Ward, D-Wichita, retained his
No. 2 position as assistant minority leader.
Kelsey told me that the conservative new GOP team, headed by
House Speaker Melvin Neufeld, R-Ingalls, would have cooperative spirit
with Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and with the Senate. Kansas doesn’t need
fighting, it "needs things to happen," he said, adding that "we’ve got
to step up to the plate."
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Remember
Randy Newman’s "Short People" song that offered a tongue-in-cheek swipe
at the vertically impaired? Turns out some parents are taking the
perceived disadvantages of short stature way too seriously. They’re
injecting their underheight kids with growth hormones in a bid to add a
couple of inches and overcome this "disability."
There is something creepy about such tinkering, especially considering the unreliability of predicting adult height.
After
all, short people are just as liable to make a mark in life: Look at
Napoleon, or Ross Perot (in photo), or Charlie Chaplin, or economist
Milton Friedman, just to name a few.
Short people have every reason to stand tall.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
