Even if President Bush’s new proposal to set global emission goals is a smoke screen, it puts the administration on record in acknowledging the need to reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions and wanting to be part of a global solution. As British Prime Minister Tony Blair noted, that’s "a big step forward."
Bush said today that he wants 15 major nations — which, unlike the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, would include China and India — to agree to emission-reduction targets by the end of next year. "The United States takes this issue seriously," he said.
But environmental groups are understandably skeptical, given the administration track record of foot-dragging. "This is a transparent effort to divert attention from the president’s refusal to accept any emissions-reductions proposals at next week’s G-8 summit," said National Environmental Trust president Philip Clapp.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Fred Thompson asked to be let out of his "Law and Order" duties Wednesday, seemingly a sign that the former Tennessee senator will bring to 11 the number of white men running for the GOP presidential nomination. Fittingly, a Thompson spokesman said, "Stay tuned." Some see Ronald Reagan in his style and ideology, but conservatives could cool when they look harder at his eight-year Senate record (including support for campaign-finance reform and a vote against impeaching Bill Clinton). He also has been divorced, and has a second wife 25 years his junior.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Bush administration officials have been putting out the word that Gov. Kathleen Sebelius was two days late getting to Greensburg after the tornado struck because she was attending a jazz festival in New Orleans, columnist Robert Novak reported. But that’s not the real story, said Nicole Corcoran, the governor’s press secretary.
Yes, Sebelius was in New Orleans with her family when the tornado hit that Friday evening. But she was notified that night about the tornado, and she and her staff in Kansas immediately began trying to assess the damage. When the scope of the disaster became clear, they began making arrangements for her return.
Sebelius didn’t attend any of the jazz festival and left her family in New Orleans, flying back Saturday afternoon using a plane arranged by Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco. Sebelius didn’t go to Greensburg until Sunday, Corcoran said, because Kansas National Guard Maj. Gen. Tod Bunting told her it would be best to wait until then. That way she wouldn’t disrupt ongoing rescue efforts.
You can’t control where you are when an emergency hits, Corcoran noted. And she said that Sebelius wouldn’t have gone to Greensburg any sooner if she had been in Topeka when the storm struck.
"We absolutely did the right thing," Corcoran said.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Cindy Sheehan helped and hurt her anti-war cause by both motivating and alienating the public. She has been camping outside President Bush’s Texas ranch of and off since 2005, following the death of her son, Casey, who was killed in Iraq.
She expressed some bitterness and frustration in announcingthis week that she would no longer be a full-time activist: "Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives."
Maybe Peace Mom was a little loony. But maybe she was just ahead of her time.
Posted by Andie Clum
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s continued effort to keep Arkansas City-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef from testing all its cattle for mad cow disease is downright un-American. A federal judge ruled in March that Creekstone could begin testing all its cattle Friday. But the USDA is now appealing the ruling, which puts the testing on hold. Creekstone wants to go beyond the USDA standard and test all its cattle, because that’s what its overseas market demands. And if Creekstone and its customers are willing to pay for the testing, they should be free to do it. This is America, isn’t it?
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Tobacco use is down from 42 percent of adults in 1964 to 21 percent of adults now, according to a new study by the Institute of Medicine, but the death toll is still disturbingly high. Tobacco-related illnesses kill an estimated 440,000 U.S. citizens every year. That’s 1,205 people a day.
The institute wants the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products and how much nicotine is in them to help smokers break their addictions. It also suggested raising taxes almost $2 a pack, requiring insurance plans to fund smoking-cessation programs, and banning smoking in most nonresidential, indoor locations.
As our editorial Tuesday noted, the study could also lend support to Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’ proposal to raise state tobacco taxes by 50 cents to help cover the state’s uninsured.
Considering the number of people who die every day, tobacco is a real weapon of mass destruction — and should be treated as such.
Posted by Andie Clum
What Mr. Bumble says in Charles Dickens’ "Oliver Twist" also applies to the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulingTuesday on workplace discrimination: "If the law supposes that, the law is a ass — a idiot."
The conservative majority ruled that the law only allows federal claims of pay discrimination if employees file a formal complaint with a federal agency within 180 days after their pay was set. But as dissenting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted, employees often don’t know until well after that deadline that their pay was unfair, given the confidentiality of salaries.
That’s what happened to the plaintiff in this particular case, who learned late in her nearly 20-year career — via an anonymous e-mail — that she received dramatically less pay than the 16 men who had held the same position at a Goodyear Tire plant in Alabama.
If that hard deadline is really what the law requires, then Congress needs to change the law.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Former House speaker and possible GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich isn’t mincing words in blaming President Bush and White House adviser Karl Rove for the "collapse" of the Republican Party. And he said that the GOP should look to France — France! — for how to resurrect itself.
Gingrich complained that Rove’s 2004 election strategy, which he described as "maniacally dumb," focused too much on appealing to the GOP base. "You can’t be a governing national party and write off entire regions," he told the New Yorker. "All he proved was that the anti-Kerry vote was bigger than the anti-Bush vote."
So what should GOP presidential candidates do? Gingrich advised taking a page from the campaign of new French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who, in effect, ran against his own party leader, former President Jacques Chirac.
"What’s fascinating about Sarkozy is that you have an incumbent cabinet member of a very unpopular 12-year presidency," Gingrich said, "who over the last three years became the clear advocate of fundamental change."
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
The new $27 million Creation Museum near Cincinnati has lots of glitz and high-tech animatronic displays.
But is it science? No.
The evangelical group that built the museum says science backs its claims that biblical stories such as Adam and Eve and Noah’s ark are literally true and that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Dinosaurs are shown co-existing with humans.
The founders have every right to create a museum extolling their beliefs, which are shared by many Americans. What they don’t have a right to do is claim that this has anything to do with science.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
Kansas’ Sam Brownback missed another six Senate votes last week, bringing his AWOL vote total for the year to 58 of 181 votes, or a whopping 32 percent. Among the missed six were Thursday’s key votes on war funding and immigration. Only John McCain and Tim Johnson (the S.D. senator with the brain hemorrhage) have worse attendance records than Brownback this year. Meanwhile, fellow senators and presidential wannabes Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have missed only 13 votes and four votes, respectively. At least with the Senate out of session until Monday, Brownback can campaign for president like crazy this week. But Brownback ought to be realizing by now why Bob Dole quit this seat to run in 1996.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
As he announced welcome new economic sanctions against government-run Sudanese oil companies, President Bush spoke the truth Tuesday in saying that “for too long the people of Darfur have suffered at the hands of a government that is complicit in the bombing, murder and rape of innocent civilians.” He also directed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to push for a tougher response from the United Nations. But it was two years ago this week that Bush labeled the killings in Darfur a genocide. With every day, Bush’s vow that “the United States will not avert our eyes from a crisis that challenges the conscience of the world” sounds more like a hollow promise.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Despite President Bush’s repeated calls to support the troops by staying the course in Iraq, some U.S. combat troops harbor growing doubts about the mission and their Iraqi "allies," as revealed in a New York Times article.
Staff Sgt. David Safstrom — on his third tour of duty — said that his earlier support for the war has been shaken by incidents such one in February, when soldiers killed a man planting a bomb. He turned out to be a sergeant in the Iraqi Army.
"I thought: ‘What are we doing here? Why are we still here?’" he said. "We’re helping guys that are trying to kill us. We help them in the day. They turn around at night and try to kill us."
Safstrom said that 95 percent of his platoon now agrees with him.
The Army is probably glad that soldiers can no longer write online blogs.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
It seems extreme that China sentenced the former head of its food and drug safety agency to death until you consider how many people and animals have died from contaminated Chinese products. But the problem is much bigger than one person who took bribes.
Recent scandals involving phony medicine and tainted food, cough syrup and toothpaste have revealed how few controls there are on what China exports. But as columnist Harold Meyerson argued on today’s Opinion page, the United States shares some blame from this lack of regulation. Some American businesses are so eager to sell to the Chinese market that they pressure U.S. policymakers not to place many barriers on Chinese exports — including meddlesome safety inspectors.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
“No matter how incompetent the Bush administration and no matter how poorly they chose their words to describe themselves and their political opponents, Iraq was a larger national security risk after Sept. 11 than it was before,” Bob Kerrey, the former Democratic senator from Nebraska, wrote in a Wall Street Journal commentary. “And no matter how much we might want to turn the clock back and either avoid the invasion itself or the blunders that followed, we cannot. The war to overthrow Saddam Hussein is over. What remains is a war to overthrow the government of Iraq.”
Kerrey continued: “The key question for Congress is whether or not Iraq has become the primary battleground against the same radical Islamists who declared war on the U.S. in the 1990s and who have carried out a series of terrorist operations including 9/11. The answer is emphatically ‘yes.’
“This does not mean that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11; he was not. Nor does it mean that the war to overthrow him was justified — though I believe it was. It only means that a unilateral withdrawal from Iraq would hand Osama bin Laden a substantial psychological victory.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Illegal immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in public services and assistance, a Wall Street Journal editorial argued. In addition to paying sales taxes, most immigrants pay federal and state income taxes as well as property taxes, which are factored into housing rental rates. Yet they often aren’t eligible to receive many of the benefits those taxes pay for. In fact, payroll taxes paid by illegals are helping keep Medicare and Social Security solvent. As the editorial noted: “The Social Security actuaries recently calculated that over the next 75 years immigrant workers will pay some $5 trillion more in payroll taxes than they will receive in Social Security benefits.”
The state of Kansas also makes money from illegals, the Kansas City Star reported. It requires them to pay state income taxes but refuses to refund any overpayments if the Social Security numbers they use aren’t accurate. What a deal.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Producing more students with math and science skills is a matter of national security, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., recently told an advisory committee of the University of Kansas School of Engineering, the Lawrence Journal-World reported. Roberts hopes that legislation passed by the U.S. Senate can help. The America Competes Act would provide $16 billion over four years to recruit and train tens of thousands of math and science researchers and to provide more teachers in those fields.
Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist and author of the best-selling book “The World Is Flat,” thinks Congress also should seek to retain foreign students studying at U.S. universities. He wrote in a column last week: “It is pure idiocy that Congress will not open our borders — as wide as possible — to attract and keep the world’s first-round intellectual draft choices. . . . I think any foreign student who gets a Ph.D. in our country — in any subject — should be offered citizenship. I want them. The idea that we actually make it difficult for them to stay is crazy.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
In 1971, Congress identified the last Monday in May as a national Memorial Day. It now stands as the time to honor those Americans who have died in all of the nation’s wars.
All told, it’s a sobering list:
The 4,400 in the American Revolution. The 2,200 in the War of 1812. The 13,200 in the Mexican War of 1846-48.
The 640,000 Union forces and 133,000 Confederate soldiers in the Civil War.
The 2,400 in the Spanish-American War (1898).
The 116,000 in World War I.
More than 400,000 in World War II.
The 36,000 in the Korean War.
The 58,000 in Vietnam.
Nearly 150 in the Persian Gulf War.
And now, nearly 400 in Afghanistan and nearly 3,500 in Iraq.
These young Americans once again are “risking their lives in liberty’s defense,” observed former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole in dedicating the National World War II Memorial three Mays ago. In doing so, “they are the latest link in a chain of sacrifice older than America itself.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling upholding the ban on partial-birth abortions is likely to lead to a push for enhanced “informed consent” laws in states, the New York Times reported. That’s because the court’s majority opinion said that because some women who have abortions can subsequently experience severe depression and loss of esteem, “the state has an interest in ensuring so grave a choice is well informed.”
But opponents argue — and the court opinion acknowledged — that there is no reliable data showing that abortions hurt women. As a result, requiring women to receive counseling or get a sonogram before they can get an abortion may be more ideologically than medically motivated.
For example, South Dakota’s informed consent law, which is currently being challenged, requires a woman seeking an abortion to be told that the procedure will terminate a “whole, separate, unique, living human being.”
That’s not about protecting women. It’s about trying to guilt them into changing their minds.
Posted by Andie Clum
The clock is ticking on 2008. But Kansas Democrats still promise a viable challenger to Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., for once — somebody to give “people a choice between the mainstream, commonsense leadership of Kansas Democrats and somebody who’s been a rubber stamp for the Bush administration,” said Mike Gaughan, executive director of the Kansas Democratic Party.
Don’t bother, says the Kansas GOP.
“He’s absolutely adored throughout the state. Frankly, I think the Democrats would be foolish to go after Sen. Roberts considering how popular he is, even among Democrats,” said Christian Morgan, executive director of the Kansas Republican Party.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
