Last week Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, said he’d serve the remaining 15 months of his term, though a judge refused to let him withdraw his plea related to a restroom gay-sex sting. Now he faces an ethics inquiry in the Senate (which traditionally lets members’ misdemeanors slide) and a big chill from his GOP colleagues on the order of this from Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., who chairs the GOP campaign committee: "It’s embarrassing for the Senate, it’s embarrassing for his party." Craig has said he won’t run next year, but given this toe-tapper’s flip-flopping on whether to resign or plead guilty, nobody should be surprised if changes his mind on re-election, too.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Christopher Columbus has long had his detractors, muting the celebration of Columbus Day and shaping how his voyage and "discovery" are taught in schools. But Saturday’s protests in Denver, which disrupted a holiday parade and resulted in 83 arrests, will give the Columbus question more prominence. So should the lobbying by students of Haskell Indian Nations University for the Lawrence City Commission to rename Columbus Day as "Indigenous Peoples Day." Lawrence’s mayor suggested it was a decision for the Legislature, but it’s really one for the country.
It was President Franklin Roosevelt, at the urging of the Knights of Columbus, who proclaimed Oct. 12 to be the federal holiday of Columbus Day in 1937. The federal holiday was designated as the second Monday in October in 1971. Regrettably, any full debate about Columbus’ proper place in history will end up pitting Italian-Americans against Native Americans.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
One of Sam Brownback’s talking points in favor of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage is that where same-sex unions are allowed, marriage rates “have plummeted” such that there are places “now in northern Europe where 80 percent of the first-born children are born out of wedlock,” as he said in a September GOP debate. The Washington Post’s FactChecker blog found enough reason to doubt Brownback’s correlation theory to give him a damning three of four possible Pinocchios on its truth scale: “In general, the rise in out-of-wedlock births in Europe predates changes in marriage legislation, according to the European commission.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Military marriages have additional built-in stresses of safety concerns and extended deployments. However, there’s a growing anxiety for some of those marriages: deportation.
Government crackdowns on illegal immigration are not overlooking the spouses of servicemen and women.
Some soldiers find it ironic that the very government for which they risk their lives is breaking up their families — even while they are deployed. One soldier said it best: “If I’m willing to die for the United States, why can’t I just be allowed to be with my family?”
Posted by Kristin Mehler
Our editorial today is about the bipartisan efforts in Congress to do something about the genocide in Darfur, such as authorize divestitures of state pension funds from companies that have dealings with the government of Sudan — an effort Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., is leading and the White House opposes. Interestingly, the single “no” vote on a Darfur bill in the House in July was cast by “Dr. No” himself, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas.
Paul, by the way, had a very good third quarter. The iconoclastic GOP presidential candidate reported taking in $5 million in campaign contributions.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
In a commentary in the Dodge City Daily Globe, House Speaker Melvin Neufeld, R-Ingalls, suggested that if Kansas declines to allow Sunflower Electric Power Corp.’s coal-fired power plant expansion near Holcomb, the project will go “across the state line in Colorado. This would mean our state could suffer possible negative impacts without the economic benefits, and the energy produced there would be sold to Sunflower and Kansans at a higher rate,” Neufeld warned.
A spokesman for a major Sunflower investor said there is no such contingency plan, which would take board action.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
