When state lawmakers committed themselves in 2005 to giving $250,000 each to the families of three fallen Kansas National Guardsmen on top of other death benefits, they made a tacit promise to those whose grief was still to come. After a problematic attempt to cover further payouts via an insurance plan left four more families with fewer benefits, legislators rightly acted this year to equalize the benefits, including to the family of Staff Sgt. David Russell Berry of Wichita. Since adjournment, though, two more Guard members have been killed, leaving their families short until or unless lawmakers can act. As Rep. Lee Tafanelli, R-Ozawkie, a colonel in the Kansas National Guard, told the Topeka Capital-Journal, “Clearly we need to have some uniform policy.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
A 2010 gubernatorial run for veteran Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh now seems more a certainty than a likelihood. A month after announcing he’d appointed a campaign treasurer, Thornburgh told the Wichita Pachyderm Club last week, “I think the time is right for me to move forward,” and took credit for being “the leading vote-getter on the ballot” among state officeholders in 2006 and 2002 (except for Sen. Pat Roberts in 2002). First, though, he’ll have to address the “Republican in name only” reputation that drew him a conservative primary challenge last year. Thanks to (and unlike) his predecessor as secretary of state, two-term Gov. Bill Graves, Thornburgh at least shouldn’t have to convince voters that his job is sufficient preparation to be the state’s CEO. But there is that matter of Thornburgh having spent his entire adult life, since he was still a junior in college, working in one state office, a total 27 years by Election Day 2010.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
The setting was a Topeka gathering of 2nd Congressional District Republicans. The topic was “Working With the Enemy (media relations).” The presenter was David Kensinger, Sen. Sam Brownback’s former chief of staff. The talking points included, according to the Lawrence Journal-World: The media are too powerful to be ignored. Reporters are biased; get over it. Make the bias work for you. Do not deny the undeniable. Share the sugar.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee joked that, if elected, he might be able to get the Rolling Stones to play at his inauguration party — because guitarist Keith Richards owes him. As one of his last acts as governor of Arkansas, Huckabee pardoned Richards last year for a misdemeanor reckless driving conviction that he received in Arkansas in 1975.
Huckabee said some cynics complained that he gave the Rolling Stone special treatment. Huckabee didn’t disagree but offered a deal: “If you can play guitar like Keith Richards, I’ll do it for you.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
It wasn’t any one act of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that sealed his fate — his resignation, announced today. His serial missteps on terrorist surveillance, U.S. attorney firings, political hiring and more, compounded by his inability to explain himself to the satisfaction of Congress, had eroded the credibility of his Justice Department to the point that even Republicans were no longer defending him. One comfort — that the president decided against nominating Gonzales to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he might have served for life.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
"One thing that has always baffled me about the Bush team’s war effort in Iraq and against al-Qaida is this: How could an administration that was so good at Swift-boating its political opponents at home be so inept at Swift-boating its geopolitical opponents abroad?
"How could the Bush team Swift-boat John Kerry and Max Cleland — authentic Vietnam war heroes, whom the White House turned into surrendering pacifists in the war on terror — but never manage to Swift-boat Osama bin Laden, a genocidal monster, who today is still regarded in many quarters as the vanguard of anti-American ‘resistance.’"
– New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman on how bin Laden has a better image in the Middle East than America does
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Michael Dukakis says if Democrats want to win the White House next year, they need to organize in every precinct in America, all 185,000 of them. He told the New York Observer: “We’re not going to outspend the other guys. We’re probably not going to outstrategize them. And some crazy guy will blow up a building with three weeks to go, you know, and then we’ll be back in Bush-land again.” Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts when he lost the presidential race to George H.W. Bush in 1988, now teaches at Northeastern University in Boston.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
A federal judge last week sided with environmental groups in finding that the Bush administration has violated the law by failing to issue updated reports on global warming and its impact on the nation’s environment, as required by Congress.
It’s just the latest evidence of the Bush team’s obfuscation and active suppression of global warming science.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
Kansas isn’t a bad place for a business to be sued, coming in at No. 13 in the Institute for Legal Reform’s latest ranking of state lawsuit climates. Kansas has moved up three places in two years, according to the survey conducted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, because of improved perceptions of judges’ impartiality and competence, and handling of scientific and technical evidence, among other things. And for judges’ competence and juries’ predictability, Kansas came in fifth. Overall, West Virginia was deemed worst, Delaware best. Nebraska and Iowa were third and fourth, respectively.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Good for Visioneering Wichita for forming a new group focused on adult basic education. The Literate Community Strategic Alliance, which meets today for the first time, will plan how best to deliver adult education services such as language, reading and math instruction and preparation for high school equivalency testing. Sedgwick County Commissioner Tim Norton, who is spearheading the effort, told The Eagle editorial board that this work benefits the entire community, because raising the intellectual capital of our citizens better positions us to grow in an increasingly knowledge-based economy.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Given the willingness of the Bush administration to push against personal privacy rights in the war on terrorism, it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that two federal agencies have experimented with testing wastewater samples as a possible way of monitoring people’s drug use. That revelation was part of a story on Oregon State University researchers’ drug testing of untreated sewage water of 10 unnamed U.S. cities. The “community urinalysis,” as one researcher put it Tuesday at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston, naturally found that caffeine was most prevalent. But it also found that cocaine and affluence go together, that cocaine and ecstasy peak on weekends, and that a gambling town registered meth levels more than five times higher than other cities.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Here’s how Time magazine columnist Joe Klein described Brownback’s digs at the Aug. 11 Iowa GOP straw poll: “a massive air-conditioned tent that looked something like the Denver airport and featured nonstop evangelical preachers and a Christian rock band that strip-mined Stevie Wonder for songs like ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered, Jesus, I’m Yours.’” When it was over, third-place Brownback and second-place Mike Huckabee won 33 percent of the straw poll vote to Mitt Romney’s 31.5 percent, noted another Time scribe, “suggesting that a single social-conservative candidate could be the one to beat when the Iowa caucuses take place in January.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
“I think I speak for a lot of people in town when I say that we don’t want hundreds of terrorists brought in here.”
— Donna Raymond, quoted in a Chicago Tribune article about how Leavenworth residents are uneasy about the prospect of detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba being moved to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
The state’s latest student achievement reports aren’t scheduled to be released until October, but preliminary reports on the Wichita school district look “really, really good,” superintendent Winston Brooks told The Eagle editorial board. He said the district’s elementary schools made “huge gains” and that high schools also improved. For example, 84 percent of high school students were proficient in writing. The district also significantly narrowed the achievement gap between white and minority students in elementary schools, Brooks said. Middle schools were “a little disappointing,” Brooks said. He attributed the difficulty in raising achievement in middle school to such factors as parents becoming less engaged, peer pressure and a lack of extracurricular activities that help connect kids to school.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
A depressing Associated Press-Ipsos poll that found fewer adults are reading books also found that liberals read more books than conservatives. The explanation offered by former Colorado Democratic Rep. Pat Schroeder (in photo), now president of the American Association of Publishers, ought to rile people up: “The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple slogans: ‘No, don’t raise my taxes, no new taxes.’ It’s pretty hard to write a book saying, ‘No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes’ on every page.”
By contrast, she said, liberals “can’t say anything in less than paragraphs. We really want the whole picture, want to peel the onion.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
President Bush created a stir by linking the Iraq conflict to the Vietnam War, but at least two GOP presidential candidates have made the same comparison, the Washington Post reported. John McCain has warned against an Iraq withdrawal by arguing that withdrawing from Vietnam led to suffering and genocide in Vietnam and Cambodia. Rudy Giuliani also recently claimed that the United States was winning in Vietnam before it pulled out, and that the withdrawal had dire consequences.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Despite a broad scientific consensus that human-caused global warming is under way, deniers continue to question the basic science — and even call warming scientists "fanatics" and "jihadists," as Cal Thomas did in his Wednesday column.
Who’s being extreme here?
Far from "circling the wagons," as Cal claimed, climate scientists have issued clear, reasonable rebuttals to most anti-warming arguments, I point out in my Friday column. Those explanations aren’t hard to find for those who care to look. But the same denial arguments persist — as I’m learning anew in the responses to my column.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
It wasn’t the Wichita school district’s idea to propose annexing land from the Circle school district. The Bel Aire City Council asked USD 259 to make the proposal because it doesn’t like its city split between two school districts. The council will decide whether Wichita pursues the annexation. But if it gives the go-ahead, the process likely will be contentious. Circle’s superintendent said her school board would oppose the annexation. If so, that would cause it to go to mediation and then, possibly, to the State Board of Education for a decision. Wichita taxpayers also will need to know more about why it is in their best interests to expand the district and help pay to build new schools.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
The purpose of the military surge in Iraq was to give the Iraqi government some breathing room to reach political solutions. But the new National Intelligence Estimate released Thursdayconcludes not only that there hasn’t been political progress thus far, but that there’s unlikely to be much progress in the near future.
The estimate did determine there has been some measurable improvement in Iraq’s security situation, but that it has been uneven and that violence will remain high during the next six to 12 months. Overall, the estimate confirmed the quandary America is facing: If we continue the surge, there won’t be significant improvement. But if we withdraw, we’re likely to lose what limited progress we have made. Which bad option is better?
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Rep. Nancy Boyda, D-Topeka, was cited by Washington Post columnist George Will as an example of “the war-is-irretrievable faction” of Congress. He reported how Boyda left a hearing of the Armed Services Committee “because retired Gen. Jack Keane was saying things Boyda thinks might ‘further divide this country,’ such as that Iraq’s ’schools are open. The markets are teeming with people.’” He quoted Boyda explaining: “There is only so much you can take until we in fact had to leave the room for a while . . . after so much of the frustration of having to listen to what we listened to.”
Will was equally critical of militant war supporters in Congress who desperately grasp at any evidence that the tide is turned in Iraq.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
As planemaker to the world, Wichita deserves a world-class air show. To be sure, it gets that at each McConnell Air Force Base open house, which again drew thousands of people last month with its fearless fliers and plane displays. But the community also needs to keep building its signature Wichita Flight Festival, which is back at Jabara Airport today through Sunday.
The festival’s mission isn’t just to entertain, though it does that with name aerobatic acts that treat the sky as their stage. It also celebrates a story unique to Wichita, how its aviation pioneers such as Clyde Cessna, Walter Beech, Lloyd Stearman and Bill Lear built an industry. “The whole event is built on our history,” festival director Janet Wright recently told The Eagle editorial board.
That need “to honor and to educate,” as Wright also put it, rightly has kept city leaders committed to the festival, despite its unexpected $189,000 shortfall last year and past conflicts over its entertainment and former name. “We expect it’s going to grow,” Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer told the editorial board.
This year’s schedule highlights women pilots now and in the era of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, and offers kids’ activities and more than 40 aircraft on display, along with tonight’s kickoff concert by the Commodores. “It provides something for everyone,” Brewer said.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
