Thank goodness the Sedgwick County Commission got its act together and funded Project Access, a nationally recognized health care initiative. Though the commission voted last August to put $250,000 into the county’s budget to support Project Access, it deadlocked 2-2 last month on the appropriation, meaning that Project Access wouldn’t get any money. Wednesday, with all its members present, the commission voted 3-2 to approve the funding. Commissioners Richard Ranzau and Karl Peterjohn tried to reduce the funding to last year’s level of $182,000, but Commissioners Dave Unruh, Tim Norton and Jim Skelton recognized that Project Access has seen a dramatic increase in patients and needed full funding.
“Don’t expect to see a lot of newspapers and websites with this headline: ‘Big Government Bailout Worked.’ But it would be entirely accurate,” columnist E.J. Dionne wrote about the bailout of the auto industry. He added: “Far too little attention has been paid to the success of the government’s rescue of the Detroit-based auto companies, and almost no attention has been paid to how completely and utterly wrong bailout opponents were when they insisted it was doomed to failure.”
“Important as the death of Osama bin Laden may be, disposing of al-Qaida’s murderous leader wasn’t the most important goal for U.S. foreign policy. Actually, it hasn’t been for some time,” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s Gerald F. Seib. In reality, he argued, Obama has “three more pressing problems: getting Pakistan right, getting the ‘Arab spring’ right and containing Iran.” On the last problem, Seib wrote, “the danger is that Iran’s leaders are concluding that the lesson to be learned from Syria and Libya is that the way to deal with dissidents is to crush them ruthlessly, and that the way to prevent the Western military intervention now plaguing Libya is to finish developing a nuclear weapon to deter it.”
It’s not over until it’s over, but it’s a relief that the Kansas House and Senate have agreed to continue contributing $5 million to subsidize affordable airfares for south-central Kansas. Though the state is wrestling with a difficult budget that is requiring painful cuts, the Affordable Airfares program is crucial to growing the Kansas economy and is a wise investment.
“The faces in the jury box are a cross-section of southern Kansas. The judge has a white beard, wears a bow tie and speaks in the straightforward language of the Great Plains. One defense lawyer favors cowboy boots and sometimes dons bolo ties.” — the opening of a New York Times article on the Wichita trial of Lazare Kobagaya, who is accused of lying to immigration officials about his involvement in the Rwandan genocide
