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
