"What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom," Peggy Noonan wrote in a Wall Street Journal column today. "Just wisdom — a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don’t need hacks."
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Sedgwick County officials rightly have resisted the urge to engage the insurgents still fighting for a revote on the downtown arena project. The arena won fair and square at the polls in 2004. Why give credence to those bizarrely demanding a do-over?
However, a new KWCH-12 Eyewitness News poll conducted by SurveyUSA indicate that community concerns about the arena run deeper than a few dead-enders. In the automated phone poll of 500 adults, 64 percent said the county should hold a second vote on the arena; 48 percent said their opinion about the arena project was less favorable now than in 2004. (Though it’s worth noting that 30 percent of those polled were not among the nearly 171,000 who voted on the arena ballot question in 2004, when it passed with a 52 percent majority.)
As we argue in an editorial today, the poll shows it’s time for county leaders to do more to communicate what’s going on and why going back is not an option.
The public hearing sought by the arena critics would not be pleasant for county commissioners, who may consider the idea next week. But it could provide some answers and reassurance, as well as a more formal opportunity to vent.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
A statistic included with an interesting Sunday Eagle article on local Asian education noted that 8,000 of the estimated 18,000 Asians in Wichita are Vietnamese — a reflection of the 135,000 Vietnamese who were welcomed to the United States after the fall of Saigon.
Meanwhile, as conditions in Iraq continue to deteriorate, 2 million Iraqis have fled that country and nearly 2 million more have been displaced within Iraq. Thousands of interpreters, guards and others who’ve helped the Americans now have “an assassin’s bull’s-eye on their backs, as Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., has noted. So how many Iraqis have been granted asylum in the United States? Only 466, noted Frank Rich in the New York Times. Yes, Congress has cleared the way for 500 interpreters to come, and under new screening measures announced this week, the administration plans to allow another 7,000 this year. But Sweden plans to welcome 25,000 Iraqis this year. Surely the United States can do better than Sweden. Or will official U.S. policy be to lump innocent Iraqis in with those terrorists we’re afraid will follow our troops home?
Posted by Rhonda Holman
The American Civil Liberties Union is suing a Boeing subsidiary for supposedly aiding the CIA in torture activities. Jeppesen Dataplan allegedly helped the CIA transport terrorism suspects overseas where they were eventually tortured.
Representatives for Jeppesen said the company doesn’t provide actual flights, just flight services such as flight plans. They have not admitted to working with the CIA and said they do not make a practice of asking clients about the purpose of their trip.
But the ACLU said that companies “are not allowed to have their heads in the sand, and take money from the CIA to fly people, hooded and shackled, to foreign countries to be tortured.”
Posted by Andie Clum
