President Bush probably needs to appear strong and resolute in order to convince Congress to support — or at least not to block — his troop surge plan in Iraq. But his "60 Minutes" interview Sunday conveyed another quality: obstinacy, that Bush doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. "I’ve made my decision. And we’re going forward," Bush said.
Vice President Dick Cheney was also unyielding. "You cannot run a war by committee," Cheney told "Fox News Sunday." But can you appear to blow off the concerns of Congress, military leaders, Iraqi officials and the 70 percent of Americans who oppose the surge and still expect success?
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Following up on the WE Blog’s interesting threads on Kansas’ water crisis, including ksfarmgrl’s passionate and informed posts from ground zero in western Kansas, our editorial Sunday argued that lawmakers need to do more to address irrigators’ continued overpumping of the Ogallala Aquifer in western Kansas.
The state Legislature last year made a small, token start on water-right buyback programs, but it’s just a drop in the bucket, and irrigators’ use of the resource continues to be unsustainable.
This should be a higher priority.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
In trying to convince Congress and the nation to surge U.S. troop levels in Iraq, President Bush may have psychology on his side. Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman argues in an article in Foreign Policy magazine that “a bias in favor of hawkish beliefs and preferences is built into the fabric of the human mind.” He wrote that the biases uncovered in 40 years of psychological research all tend to favor hawks. These psychological impulses “incline national leaders to exaggerate the evil intentions of adversaries, to misjudge how adversaries perceive them, to be overly sanguine when hostilities start, and overly reluctant to make necessary concessions in negotiations,” he wrote. “In short, these biases have the effect of making wars more likely to begin and more difficult to end.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
When Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius appointed a Republican, Kansas Court of Appeals Judge Lee Johnson, to the state Supreme Court earlier this month, she got no props from House Speaker Melvin Neufeld, R-Ingalls. He’s still pushing for Kansas Senate hearings and confirmation of appointees to both state courts — a fading reform idea that didn’t even get as many senators’ votes last March as it had sponsors the year before. Many realize it would needlessly politicize these courts and deter top lower-court jurists and attorneys from applying. Neufeld argues that the current process gives the Kansas Bar Association too great a role in filling these positions. “That setup that we now have has evolved to a good-old-boy club,” he told the Topeka Capital-Journal. But who better than the KBA, which chooses five of the nine members on the independent nominating commission that recommends three names to the governor, to ensure that these crucial jobs go to top legal minds rather than to clueless partisan hacks?
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback will officially kick off his presidential campaign Saturday in Topeka. He already has an exploratory committee and a Web site, but he has yet to unveil a slogan, something snappy, defining and inspiring. Who better to recommend some to him than his Kansas constituents? Some possibilities to get the party started: “The Right Stuff.” “All the Right Moves.” “Brownback to the Future.”
Your turn.
Meanwhile, in an interview in the National Catholic Register, headlined “The Next Catholic President?” Brownback defined his candidacy this way: “I’ll be the only person at the core of the campaign who will be pushing for the reform of the family and restoration of the culture and human dignity at all phases of life.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
