Opinion: Bureaucrats at root of government trust

So here we are. Like snakes on a plane. A country overrun by 'slithering partisans'.

Look in the mirror George.

June 16, 2013 at 8:13 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Letter: Sacred wetlands

The Holocaust is a historical reminder and serves as a warning against totalitarian regimes. It has not prevented similar events from happening. It has been useful as an educational tool to try to make the world safer.

The wetlands to me is an excuse to use events long ago to foment resentment and to leverage that resentment into a political cause for the purpose of gaining something.

In other words, it has been a useful political tool to manipulate and influence others while the arguments themselves have remained very controversial and have caused this community great time, expense and economic harm.

June 15, 2013 at 8:51 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Editorial: Privacy lost

What concerns me is that none of these news sources seem to value enough the concept of unbiased reporting.

Americans, caught in the middle, have to try to sift out what is true no matter how tedious the task may be.

I think my point is that we have entered a period where sometimes Fox News has been a better source of information than MSNBC.

Obviously, MSNBC has been actively promoting the liberal agenda and trying to to sell positions on the issues that most Americans do not agree with.

I think most Americans wish these news outlets would stop selling their political views and just give us the facts including what the government is hiding. These people have become so arrogant that they believe we have to have the news filtered, massaged and then told how we should think.

June 12, 2013 at 7:54 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Editorial: Privacy lost

Before the gun control issue and before the NSA scandal, I was not watching Fox news. Now I am.

That should concern a lot of Democrats.

June 12, 2013 at 4:30 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Opinion: Stay calm and let the NSA carry on

Are these kind of columns now being published as part of a campaign to whitewash the recent spying scandal and to keep Americans from being upset with our government? Hard to say, but what is clear is that we are being asked to trust the government that they know what they are doing.

Trust in government has to be coupled with protections afforded by laws, the enforcement of those laws and penalties that are strong enough to deter the violation of those laws.

Looking at the Patriot Act, we now know that there have been 1000s of violations of the Patriot Act by the FBI and those violations have come against American citizens like you or I. These violations and the possible misguided implementation of the Patriot Act have been a target of the ACLU and now the ACLU is suing the federal government over the recent spy scandal involving the NSA.

We do not know the depth of the invasion of our privacy and how this intelligence is being used against American citizens until we have an investigation and get to the truth. There are too many unanswered questions and there are not enough safeguards, legal protections and enforcement in place to protect US citizens.

We are being asked to accept either of two choices. Trust the government or get attacked by terrorists. This is not fair. There are plenty of other choices and this issue needs far more scrutiny than it has been getting up to now. Clearly, a new Bill of Rights is needed to protect American freedoms and privacy.

http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-sec...

June 12, 2013 at 8:01 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Editorial: Privacy lost

Everything that we have been doing with chips and software since the internet began has been opening us up to being spied on. The more recent push to put everything on the cloud along with online server storage is just a way to put all the details of our lives into the public realm. I have heard from people directly over the years about some of these spying operations so it is no surprise. I have also wondered about whether the chips themselves have a backdoor routine built into them sometimes and this is something between the government and companies such as INTEL.

The point is that before last week some of the questions you might ask as a citizen would give you strange looks, such as telling someone about your alien encounters and too many questions might lead someone to question whether you are schizophrenic or not. After this week, any question about how we are being spied on is a legitimate question and now needs to be answered by our government which currently is still angry because of the parts we found out that were supposed to be secret.

The internet has been a wild and crazy development and the rules have been hard to figure out. We have allowed ourselves to be taken advantage of because we wanted the rewards that come from this technology. Now we have to make privacy and individual rights a much greater issue than it has been up to now or, as this editorial implies, we may not be happy when we realize what we have lost and we have to realize that we are not enjoying the same kind of freedom that our parents enjoyed. Much of our freedom along with our privacy is now gone.

The question most Americans should be asking is whether the technology is worth what we are having to pay for it and if we are not able to go back to the days before this technology existed are we now ready to at least fight for a new kind of Bill of Rights to protect us in the internet age before the power of our government and the financial power of our largest corporations buy and sell every shred of freedom and privacy we have left.

June 11, 2013 at 11:16 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Regents, Legislature going in opposite directions on higher education funding

According to Dave Trabert of the Kansas Policy Institute and according to the right wing legislature, the Kansas Schools are loaded with cash.

According to the Kansas Supreme Court, the Regents and the Kansas Schools themselves, we are in big trouble.

I would like to hear more details and less rhetoric. I would like to know in greater detail how these right wing politicians are justifying these cuts. It has been my experience that they are not interested in sharing that information and Dave Trabert is very good at skewing the information he gives you.

Publicly, Brownback is saying that we need more money for schools. If he signs the bill, we can assume he is lying.

June 9, 2013 at 10:56 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Brownback weighs decision on higher ed cuts

Exactly. They know that Kansas elected Sebelius because of education.

June 8, 2013 at 2:41 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Analysis group believes new tax plan could ruin Kansas

I think your analysis may be missing the point.

This may have been something as simple as a payoff by people who did not care anything about the consequences.

It doesn't need to make sense. It is a game for these people and it makes them feel superior.

How else can you explain policies that make no mathematical sense?

June 5, 2013 at 8:58 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Letter: Power of prayer

We keep seeing records being broken as the the size of these storm events.

I can understand how sin might have caused this change in the weather but it has to do with something called greed and selfishness and what I regard as the criminal actions of a political party that is blocking efforts to save our planet.

I can easily find this sin in the Bible. It is as old as the human race.

June 5, 2013 at 2:37 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )