You shouldn’t make too much out of an election that drew only 13 percent of registered voters. Still, there’s nothing good in Tuesday’s election results for Wichita Mayor Carlos Mayans. The incumbent received only 25 percent of the votes, while challenger Carl Brewer, a City Council member, received a whopping 57 percent. Even with a low turnout, that’s a statement.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Lindsay Beyerstein provides an interesting inside view on the John Edwards blogger meltdown. Beyerstein was approached by the Edwards campaign about blogging for it. She declined and warned the campaign about the dangers of hiring high-profile bloggers who carry a lot of "personal political baggage." What the campaign didn’t seem to realize, she wrote, was that "the right-wing blogosphere was going to try to get Edwards’ bloggers fired no matter what. Unlike the liberal netroots, the right-wing blogosphere is capable of exactly one kind of collective political action. They call it ‘scalping’ — they pick a target and harass that person and his or her employer until the person either jumps or is pushed out of the public eye." Hiring controversial bloggers, Beyerstein contends, can hurt a campaign and undermine the independence of the bloggers. "Every campaign needs a blog," she wrote, "but the most important part of a candidate’s netroots operation is the disciplined political operatives who can quietly build relationships with bloggers outside the campaign."
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Bush backers have been blasting U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald (in photo) for prosecuting Lewis Libby for lying and obstructing an investigation. But as columnist E.J. Dionne noted, many of these critics had a different view in 1998 (and vice versa for those cheering the Libby trial). "It’s certainly amusing that so many who were eager to throw Clinton out of office for perjury and obstruction of justice when he lied about sex are now livid at Fitzgerald for bringing comparable charges in a controversy over the rationale for war. Do they think sex is more important than war?"
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
The greening of Hollywood extended beyond Al Gore’s win at the Oscars. More celebrities than ever arrived at the Kodak Theatre in gas-efficient hybrids. Ballots and programs were printed on recycled paper and organizers concerned themselves with choosing more environmentally responsible materials for sets and decorations.
Though this "green" effort seemed like a lot of shallow back-patting, more and more celebrities acting environmentally responsible may have far-reaching effects. The Hollywood entertainment industry enjoys a rapt audience of millions of people, not only in the United States but around the world. If anyone can make conservation of natural resources cool, it can.
Meanwhile, a free-market organization called the Tennessee Center for Policy Research is accusing Gore of hypocrisy because his house in Nashville "consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year."
Posted by Patrice Hein
Before the primary election fades away, a few observations:
Yard signs for Mayor Carlos Mayans were among those posted in violation of the city’s right-of-way rules — meaning city workers were in the position of having to confiscate the mayor’s signs. He and his supporters should know better.
In television ads, mayoral hopeful Darrell Leffew repeated his harsh criticism of the downtown arena. Granted, there is a lot of confusion on this point — some of it willful — but the arena isn’t a project of the city of Wichita. It’s a project of Sedgwick County.
David Grebenik, candidate for Wichita City Council, District 2, demonstrated that a campaign yard sign still has the power to surprise. His drew double takes by seeking votes for the "incredibly handsome David Grebenik." The candidate told The Eagle editorial board he was looking to get his name out; he also thought about doing another sign describing himself as "extremely nice."
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Two-term Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., surely noticed how the state became a little less reliably Republican in the November election, when the Congress also switched political hands. It may follow that Roberts will face more serious Democratic opposition in next year’s re-election bid than he has in the past. According to the Kansas City Star’s Steve Kraske, the first potential Democratic challenger being mentioned is Steve Boyda, husband of Rep. Nancy Boyda, D-Topeka. Still, history is on Roberts’ side: Kansas’ most recent Democratic senator, Wichita attorney George S. McGill, left office in 1939.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Good people can disagree about whether LED billboards are an exciting innovation in advertising or a community scourge. But how can anybody pass even a small LED sign without finding it distracting? Even several blocks away or via a rearview mirror, such signs’ brightness and strobelike effects can be impossible to ignore. Yet Ron Blue, president of Clear Channel Outdoor in Wichita and Fort Smith, Ark., told The Eagle’s Carrie Rengers that "there’s no evidence that digital signs are a distraction in any form or fashion." Now that Wichitans have some experience living with more than 100 of these signs — including Clear Channel’s 14-by-48-foot mother of them all at Central and Rock — the Wichita City Council needs to scrutinize the company’s plan for six more LED billboards around town.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Vice President Dick Cheney was probably eager to get back to his undisclosed location in the United States after a suicide bomber killed more than 20 people today during Cheney’s visit to the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. At least one U.S. soldier and one U.S. contractor died. The Taliban claimed Cheney had been the target. “I think they clearly try to find ways to question the authority of the central government,” Cheney said, suggesting that “it shouldn’t affect our behavior at all.”
Wonder what it would take to shake Cheney. He’s also so unerringly on message, of course, that he saw even last week’s announcement of a British troop pullout from Iraq as a good thing — “an affirmation that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well,” he told ABC News.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Kansans startled to learn that former President Bill Clinton earned nearly $40 million on the speakers’ circuit in six years may wonder if their tax dollars will go into his pockets when he speaks Friday afternoon at Kansas State University. The university says Clinton’s Landon Lecture will be unpaid, save reimbursement for expenses. It seems that when someone of Clinton’s stature speaks at a university, you “do it for free or you don’t do it at all,” series chairman Charles Reagan told Harris News Service.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
The new Visioneering Wichita survey about the city’s image is designed to provide a more specific snapshot of local attitudes about Wichita and suggest some courses of action.
Here are a couple of questions from the survey:
What would you tell friends or family members about the greater Wichita region if they were thinking about moving to Wichita to live?
When marketing the community, what three things would you highlight as Wichita’s strengths?
Bloggers: Care to weigh in on either of these, or on the survey itself? Are these self-evaluation exercises worth doing?
Posted by Randy Scholfield
“Too many teachers are worried about No Child Left Behind, that it is sucking the joy out of teaching,” Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., told a gathering of school superintendents from northeast Kansas Friday.
It’s also sucking the joy out of learning. An Eagle news article Sunday on why so many boys are underachieving noted that some students are so tired of all the testing and tedious drills that they no longer care how they do on the tests.
Then there is the law’s other problem: Its 100 percent proficiency requirement is statistically impossible. So we are driving away teachers and students in pursuit of an unattainable standard.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Another call for better mental health care for returning veterans and their families: A task force report released Sunday by the American Psychological Association concludes that “many service personnel and their family members are going without mental health care because of the limited availability of such care and the barriers to accessing care,” according to USA Today.
The group says that military spouses and children are being overlooked, noting that 700,000 kids have had a parent sent to Iraq or Afghanistan, and an estimated 2,733 children have had a parent killed abroad — and yet the military has done no systematic research on the war’s impact on families.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
It’s time to stop celebrating the new moderate majority on the Kansas State Board of Education and start worrying about 2008, when the election could once again swing board control back to anti-evolution religious conservatives.
Moderate board member Janet Waugh (in photo) told the Douglas County Democratic Party Saturday that pro-science forces need to start recruiting candidates right away, especially with two moderates — Bill Wagnon of Topeka and Carol Rupe of Wichita — expected to give up their seats in 2008, the Lawrence Journal-World reported.
"We’re only 6-4, and in two years this can turn," she noted.
As if to prove her point, anti-evolution crusader Rev. Terry Fox recently issued a call to arms from the pulpit of his Summit Church in Park City, telling his flock that "these groups that believe that man came from a monkey are back in charge on the board" and vowing that "God’s army is reorganizing and will come again."
Posted by Randy Scholfield
Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., surely thought he’d be the religious right’s guy for 2008 by now, if not from the get-go. But yet another article, this about dissatisfaction about the presidential choices expressed at a recent meeting of the Christian conservative-dominated Council for National Policy, counted Brownback among candidates raising doubts about their ability to unify conservatives and raise enough money to win. These leaders also are queasy about Brownback’s support for a guest-worker program and failure to say much about the threat of radical Islam. Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform suggested Brownback and the other problem candidates still could redeem themselves by making certain promises that would distance themselves from their past.
"It’s called secondary virginity," Norquist said. "It is a big movement in high school and also available for politicians."
Posted by Rhonda Holman
As Newsweek columnist Michael Hirsh observes, there’s a strange disconnect between public debate about Iraq and the new ground strategy: Amid all the talk of a brief “surge” and narrow window of opportunity, Gen. David Petraeus’ counterinsurgency plan now under way calls for a long-term commitment of U.S. troops, at least for five years and possibly 10 years. It amounts almost to a complete do-over.
It’s clear there will be no troop withdrawal as long as Bush is president — no matter what Congress or the American people want. The question is, will Democrats end up supporting the Petraeus strategy — and are we getting an honest debate about our commitment in Iraq?
Posted by Randy Scholfield
Four members of Sunflower Community Action are scheduled to go to trial in the next two months for a protest at City Manager George Kolb’s house that the group hoped would pressure him to clean up a blighted home in northeast Wichita.
“We don’t think we were guilty of anything,” Sunflower organizer Jason Selmon told The Eagle editorial board. He said the group plans to “fight this to the end” in court.
And he mentioned one piece of evidence the group will use to bolster its case — a videotape Sunflower made of the entire protest.
Selmon says the tape clearly shows the protest was “orderly” and “peaceful.”
Posted by Randy Scholfield
The Web site Borowitzreport.com lampooned the latest science standards vote this way: “The Kansas State Board of Education voted to teach evolution in public schools, with the six human members of the board outvoting the four monkeys.”
Meanwhile, a Philadelphia Inquirer editorial took approving note of the “intelligent move” in Kansas schools’ “continuing passion play” and warned that “unless moderate Kansans keep hold of the democratic process, it can happen again. All states, all voters: Take note.”
And columnist John Young wrote that “opportunists seized on low-glamour elected policymaking roles that turned out to have a tremendous impact on the state. Indeed, they made Kansas a running joke.” His solution against such takeovers: “It takes people stepping forward as candidates, getting more involved in the political dialogue, and voting.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
If state lawmakers want to do something substantive to help Kansas elections, they can pass a bill that would allow split shifts for poll workers. Under the current outmoded law, somebody who wants to work a polling place must do so for the full 14-hour Election Day shift. One of the stated reasons behind Sedgwick County Election Commissioner Bill Gale’s 70 percent cutback in the number of polling places last year was the difficulty in finding workers to staff so many locations. Gale told The Eagle editorial board that he supports the bill. “I hope it passes,” he said, “because we’d love to have the option available to help us.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Correction: Poll workers in Sedgwick County will be on the job Tuesday from 4:45 a.m. until at least 8 p.m. — more than 15 hours.
Here are the top 10 winners in Iraq, according to the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine:
No. 10. Israel. The war in Iraq has eliminated some of Israel’s enemies, although it has created new ones.
No. 9. Old Europe. It told us “don’t do it,” but we wouldn’t listen. Now Europe is sitting back and saying “told you so.”
No. 8. United Nations. Now we’re asking, “How does that diplomacy thing work?”
No. 7. The price of oil. Middle East oil barons are enjoying record-setting oil proceeds.
No. 6. Arab dictators. All of a sudden, those guys don’t look so bad.
No. 5. China. While the United States’ attention is focused elsewhere, China’s power keeps growing and growing.
No. 4. Samuel Huntington, conservative political scientist, Harvard University professor and author of “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.”
No. 3. Al-Qaida. The war in Iraq has been a boon to its publicity and recruitment efforts.
No. 2. Muqtada al-Sadr, radical Shiite cleric who has gained power since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
And the No. 1 winner of the war in Iraq: Iran.
Posted by Patrice Hein
It’s not new information, but the New York Times has a chart of all the presidential candidates (which no longer include Tom Vilsack) and their positions on the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the troop surge and whether to withdraw. For example, here is Sam Brownback’s withdrawal position, such as it is: “While we cannot make a precipitous withdrawal, we can transfer more security responsibility to the Iraqis and reduce the threat to American troops.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
The initial lists of donations made since the Wichita mayoral field was set confirm the dissatisfaction that many in the business community reportedly feel about Mayor Carlos Mayans’ four-year record. Between Jan. 1 and Feb. 15, challenger Carl Brewer (in photo) collected $33,140 in contributions (excluding $40,000 of his own money), compared with Mayans’ $8,750. Brewer had 98 donors; Mayans had 26 in the same period. Both had high-profile business names, but Brewer got the lion’s share of heavyweights.
Of course, campaign contributions can add up differently than votes. All voters should make their voice heard in Tuesday’s primary, which also will narrow the April 3 general election ballot choices in two Wichita school board races and three Wichita City Council districts.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
