The Wall Street Journal subtitled its Tuesday editorial “In defense of the New York Times.” But, not surprisingly, it really wasn’t. The editorial took pleasure in noting that the Times, whose editorial board championed campaign-finance reform, is under fire about those laws. Some are calling for an investigation of the Times not charging MoveOn.org full price for its David Petraeus ad. The Times’ public editor, Clark Hoyt (a former editor at The Eagle), agrees that the rate was a mistake. The Journal’s defense amounted to saying that the problem isn’t with the Times’ ad rates but with the campaign-finance law.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
During the speech to the National Rifle Association in which he bizarrely took a phone call from his wife, Rudy Giuliani expressed support for the Tiahrt amendment, calling it “a sensible provision” that “gives law enforcement the ability to get information.” A day earlier, Giuliani had suggested he didn’t know much about the 2003 measure championed by Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, that blocks access to aggregate gun trace data. Giuliani’s support put him squarely at odds with his successor, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who lost his costly fight earlier this year to overturn the Tiahrt amendment, which he calls “an outrage.”
Bloomberg, who chided Giuliani for disavowing a 2000 lawsuit New York City had filed against gun manufacturers, did praise the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for, “after what they said was overwhelming demand from around the country, starting to give out more information, probably in violation of the Tiahrt amendment.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Mayor Carl Brewer has listed as a top goal developing free or low-cost citywide wireless access, which would give people access to the Internet from laptops anywhere in the city. But cities such as San Francisco, Cincinnati, Houston and Chicago are shelving plans to provide blanket wireless Internet coverage, citing unexpectedly high costs, unexpectedly low public demand and other complications, according to an article in USA Today.
This summer, City Council members delayed entering negotiations with a wireless company so they’d have time to further research the idea. Considering other cities’ mixed experience with wireless, Wichita’s go-slow approach makes sense.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
This has got to be good for some vote somewhere: Fred Thompson and Elvis Presley were eighth cousins once removed, according to a Washington, D.C., genealogist. Presley and Fletcher Thompson, the late father of the GOP presidential hopeful and former Tennessee senator, had in common great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents. The same researcher also has said that Barack Obama is descended on his Kansas-born mom’s side from a Kentucky slave owner; that John Edwards is distantly related to George W. Bush, Harry Truman and Britney Spears; and that both Jimmy Carter and Howard Dean are distant cousins of the King. Thank you very much.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
President Bush has predicted Sen. Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee for president, saying she has the "national presence" and fundraising network to win.
That’s not a bad bet, since Clinton is clearly the front-runner for the Dem nomination, but is it also wishful thinking? Some have suggested that the GOP is pitching a Clinton nomination as the best way to re-energize the Republican base.
Moreover, Karl Rove and others believe the GOP can ultimately defeat Clinton because of her high negatives. Republicans have a familiar playbook on running against the Clinton era.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
Iraqis are facing a surge of internal migration and homelessness that is reshaping the country, with thousands of families uprooted in recent months, living in shantytowns and makeshift shelters, according to data compiled by the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization.
"In Baghdad alone there are now nearly 170,000 families, accounting for almost a million people, that have fled their homes in search of security, shelter, water, electricity, functioning schools or jobs to support their families," the New York Times reported.
Red Crescent officials say they have a "mammoth task" in trying to aid the burgeoning population of refugees — estimated at 2 million inside Iraq; another 2.2 million have fled to neighboring Syria and Jordan.
Meanwhile, Iraq Ambassador Ryan Crocker recently expressed frustration with the slow pace of efforts to resettle 10,000 Iraqis in the United States, complaining of "major bottlenecks" and insufficient staffing that mean it could take up to two years to complete interviews with the applicants.
The Bush administration has repeatedly raised the specter of a humanitarian crisis in Iraq if U.S. forces pull out, but it seems unwilling or unable to deal effectively with the refugee crisis that exists right now.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
“All summer, many congressional Republicans and Democrats promised that come September, the president would have no choice but to bring substantial numbers of troops home and, for those who remained, to change the mission away from combat,” the Washington Post reported. But that’s probably not going to happen. Why haven’t Republican and Democratic moderates been able to forge a deal to change course in Iraq and bring more troops home? “Pride of authorship, Balkanization and indecision have thwarted their attempts to find a common legislative vehicle,” the Post reported. Or as Sen. Olympia Snowe (in photo), R-Maine, said: “It’s political dysfunction.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Sunflower Electric Power Corp. officials can kill some of the time waiting for the state’s decision on an air-quality permit for a new coal-fired plant by kicking themselves: The company had such a permit in 2002 and let it lapse, thinking it would be a snap to get another, reported the Topeka Capital-Journal. Now, if the latest permit comes from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, it will be over the objections of hundreds of Kansans and of attorneys general from eight other states. At the Garden City hearing that preceded the 2002 green light, “I don’t think there was a soul from the public,” said Steve Miller, a Sunflower executive. “Timing is everything.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
It was a hopeful sign that nearly 200 people attended a town hall meeting Sunday on homelessness. They discussed the problems identified by the Task Force to End Chronic Homelessness, such as a lack of emergency shelter beds and affordable housing units. They identified other problems, including the key one: lack of funding. Maybe enough people do care about the homeless to compel city and county governments to take action.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
It’s good to see building maintenance and infrastructure work beginning at the state universities, thanks to a five-year funding plan approved by the Legislature last session. Wichita State University is initially receiving $4.25 million in state funding for 13 projects it has slated for this year. Those projects include replacing or upgrading heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems in eight buildings along with other unsexy but important work.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s comments so far related to his U.S. visit require the suspension of disbelief. Examples:
“Our people are the freest people in the world, the most aware people in the world, the most enlightened.”
“The freest women in the world are women in Iran.”
“We want nothing but goodness and progress for the Iraqi nation.”
Iran’s nuclear efforts are “legal and for peaceful purposes.”
“In political relations right now, the nuclear bomb is of no use.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
It’s beginning to sound like something out of George Orwell: The U.S. government is keeping far more extensive records than previously thought on millions of Americans who travel abroad, including where they stay and what personal items they’re carrying, according to the Washington Post.
John Gilmore, a civil liberties activist who found that his own file contained notes about books he was carrying, argues that the government’s effort to build a “surveillance society” is happening “largely without our awareness and without our consent.”
It’s not just the government that should concern us. Google and many other online companies monitor the e-mail in-boxes of users to target ads to them, and a new Internet phone company service plans to listen in on the calls of its users to pitch ads to them.
Where does the creeping intrusion into the private lives of Americans end? It’s time for Congress to ask some questions.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
Support is growing in Congress and some cities for giving outstanding teachers in high-poverty schools incentive bonuses and performance pay, the Washington Post reported.
Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., has proposed a bill that would provide up to $12,000 in annual bonuses for teachers in some low-income schools, based on test scores and professional evaluations.
National teacher unions have long fought the idea of “merit pay,” raising valid concerns that it would put too narrow an emphasis on test scores, which can reflect many factors other than a teacher’s skill. Moreover, critics say how bonuses are doled out could be skewed by favoritism and other subjective criteria.
But with teacher retention a critical problem in our schools, surely there is some fair way to evaluate outstanding teachers and reward them the way our society routinely recognizes excellence — with extra pay.
Most schools know who their best teachers are. It’s not fair to treat them the same as those who are dead weight.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
A former Reagan voter in New Hampshire ticks off why he’s voting Democratic in 2008 in a commentary that ought to give the GOP something to talk about: His blistering reasons start with “for the first time in 80 years, mine disasters have increased” and include the Bush administration’s incompetence in general, “contempt for the Constitution” and suppression of government scientists. He concludes: “Republicans need to be kicked out this year, like the Democrats in 1980, and forced to earn their way back.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
“We need a comprehensive federal policy. We can’t solve it a state at a time, and that’s what it’s been left to.” — Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, president of the Democratic Governors Association, speaking to reporters last week at the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock, Ark.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s gross mismanagement of the Iraq war made him a poor choice to be keynote speaker at the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce’s annual meeting, a booking that proved short-lived. Now, Rumsfeld’s appointment as a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University has generated an online protest petition signed by professors, staff members, students and alumni and stating, “We view the appointment as fundamentally incompatible with the ethical values of truthfulness, tolerance, disinterested enquiry, respect for national and international laws and care for the opinions, property and lives of others to which Stanford is inalienably committed.” Ouch — but then you go into retirement with the reputation you have, not the reputation you might want or wish to have at a later time.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Federal prisons, including Leavenworth, had from January until June to remove from their chapel libraries books as seemingly benign as C.S. Lewis’ “The Chronicles of Narnia” and Charles Schuller’s “Living Positively One Day at a Time,” on the premise that library materials should be “free of discrimination, disparagement, advocacy of violence and religious radicalization.” The purge resulted from a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department that recommended that prisons take steps to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups, the New York Times reported. As a result, all books not included on an approved list were removed.
Prisoners are denied some rights, but they shouldn’t be denied the right to read materials of a spiritual nature. Not surprisingly, a Christian and Orthodox Jew at a New York prison have sued. As Pat Nolan, president of Justice Fellowship, in Lansdowne, Va., told the Topeka Capital-Journal, “The problem is the government is situating itself as the sanctioner of what is a proper religious book for prisoners.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Ken Burns’ latest documentary, “The War,” about the American experience of World War II, was undertaken with a special urgency, he said last week — 1,000 U.S. veterans of the “Greatest Generation” are dying each week. “We realized the clock was ticking and there was a narrow window that would close very shortly,” the filmmaker said.
If early reviews are any indication, Burns has performed a national service with this 14-hour history, which took him five years to make and captures not only the stark brutality of war but also the lives of families waiting anxiously on the home front. “The War” starts at 7 p.m. today on KPTS, Channel 8 in Wichita. It sounds like essential viewing for Americans.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
“Robert Gates has been a godsend. After a bombastic defense secretary, we now have a candid one. After ego, we have self-effacement. After domination, we have a man who welcomes discussion,” New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about the Wichita native. Brooks asked Gates whether invading Iraq was a good idea, knowing what we know now. Gates’ response: “I don’t know.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
The following satirical headlines come from borowitzreport.com:
MOVEON.ORG PLANNING MEAN LIMERICK ABOUT PETRAEUS; Seeks Something That Rhymes With ‘Betray Us’
CLINTON CAMPAIGN REACHES OUT TO OTHER FUGITIVES; Attempt to Compensate for Loss of Hsu
O.J. AUTHORS “IF I ROBBED THEM”; New Book Explores Hypothetical Armed Robbery
HEDGE FUND MANAGERS MARCH ON WASHINGTON; Largest Chauffeur-Driven Protest in Capital’s History
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Opinion polls show that Americans trust Democrats more than Republicans on health care. Nonetheless, former White House aide Karl Rove thinks that health care can be a winning issue for Republican candidates, if they offer a bold plan. “Conservatives must put forward reforms aimed at putting the patient in charge,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “Increasing competition will ensure greater access, lower costs and more innovation.”
Rove’s policy recommendations include giving every worker a tax deduction for health-insurance premiums, making it easier to use tax-free medical savings accounts, and putting more information about the cost and quality of medical care in the hands of patients.
“In short,” Rove wrote, “the best health reform proposals will be those that recognize and build on the virtues of our market-based medical system.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
