Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered a probe of Friday’s presidential election results, and many U.S. analysts are assuming that there was widespread fraud. But pollsters Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty caution that the results “may reflect the will of the Iranian people.” Nationwide polling they did three weeks before the vote showed incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad leading with a more than 2-1 majority.
Even if Ahmadinejad really did win, Iran shouldn’t be surprised by the skepticism. As a Washington Post editorial noted: “When a regime peremptorily chooses which candidates can run; shutters newspapers, Web sites and television bureaus; silences text messaging; and throws critics into prison — such a regime should not expect its pronouncements on election results to garner any respect.”
“Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment,” columnist Paul Krugman asserts. “Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the RNC haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that ‘some’ called Dr. Tiller ‘Tiller the Baby Killer,’ that he had ‘blood on his hands,’ and that he was a ‘guy operating a death mill.’ But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House. And at this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased.”
Though Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, has filled the 4th Congressional District seat for 14 years, not every Kansan sees it as a given for the GOP when Tiahrt gives it up in 2010. “This district is not necessarily a win for the Republicans,” Joe Aistrup, political science professor and interim dean of arts and sciences at Kansas State University, told CQPolitics. “Wichita has a history of supporting Democrats over the course of time. The district used to be Democratic-leaning, and now it is Republican-leaning. There are some Democrats that could make a go for the seat.” So far, retired court services officer Robert Tillman is the only Democrat to file for it; declared Republicans are state Sen. Dick Kelsey and businessman Michael Pompeo.
The University of Kansas denied the father of Jason Wren, a freshman who died of alcohol poisoning in March, access to his son’s disciplinary records, claiming that the information was protected under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Many other universities are also misapplying FERPA to hide rule breaking by college athletes, coaches and boosters, according to a six-month investigation by the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch. FERPA is supposed to protect the privacy of students’ report cards and transcripts, but at many schools, any document containing a student’s name is considered an “education record.” As a result, schools such as the University of Nebraska refused to release any documents on NCAA violations. The Dispatch tried to obtain various records from the University of Kansas but was told that it would have pay $328, the eighth-highest amount of all the schools that the newspaper contacted, the Lawrence Journal-World reported.
