This year will test just how short voter memories are in Kansas. Will Kansans keep rejecting the politics of the Gov. Sam Brownback era? Or, will they buy those politics again, attractively repackaged and reframed? With the Kansas legislative session underway, that test starts now. The ...
With Illinois legalizing recreational marijuana, Kansas is increasingly an island of marijuana Puritanism in the Midwest. As more states create legitimate marijuana economies, what do we know about the black market marijuana economy in Kansas? Could legalization tame it? The marijuana economy ...
Welcome to 2020 and join in offering Kansas lawmakers New Year’s resolutions to guide their work in the upcoming legislative session. Focus on problem solving Many state lawmakers run for office to address issues of concern to voters, such as health care, poverty, criminal justice and gun ...
In this holiday season, gifts take center stage for better or worse. We often give and receive gifts that are curious, strange or useless, as well as those we genuinely desire. Sometimes, however, we get a gift that we never anticipated, one that we appreciate in part because it’s a ...
There are only three kinds of birds in the world: little brown birds, big brown birds and medium-size brown birds. So declared a former colleague who studied mammals, most of which are little brown rodents. He’d grouse that the holiday season had become the Adoration of the Aves. It starts ...
The conventional wisdom says Americans are highly divided over gun rights and gun control. But is it true? Recent data from the 2019 Kansas Speaks poll suggests that there is a political center on this issue after all. Political scientists have argued for years that Americans are not as ...
School budgets were tight in the Oklahoma farming community where I grew up, but teachers’ dedication was boundless. Take, for instance, my high school biology teacher, who seemed to live for his students and active learning. To experience dissection, he instructed each of us to bring a frog ...
One major myth about prisons is that they are packed with nonviolent offenders whose only crime is marijuana possession. As I have written editorials about Kansas state prisons recently, this has been the top concern of readers contacting me. But this myth is not reality. Criminal justice ...
The century-long tradition of nonpartisan elections in Kansas suffered a setback in Wichita earlier this month. Many partisans were at fault. Take a look at the facts: First, the incumbent Wichita mayor hires the chair of the Sedgwick County Republican Party to aid in his reelection campaign. ...
To better represent Kansans, we citizens should press for better pay for our lawmakers. This is a simple statement, and such a change would not guarantee better policies, however they are defined. But without question, higher salaries would produce a Legislature that looks a lot more like the ...
Wichita’s mayoral election is supposed to be nonpartisan, but that virtually disappeared in this year’s campaign. Mayor-elect Brandon Whipple has served since 2012 as a Democratic member of the Kansas House. Before that, he was vice-chair of the Sedgwick County Democratic Party. His ...
The “nation’s report card,” or National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), was released Oct. 30. Results show stagnant progress in what students know and can do on the national level and a disappointing decline in Kansas scores. NAEP is administered every two years and is the ...
Two justices of the Kansas Supreme Court recently announced their retirements, and well-established constitutional procedures are now underway to fill those vacancies. In a desperate, preemptive strike anti-abortion activists interjected themselves into the selection process and declared two ...
Kansas faces a prison crisis of crowded facilities and escalating costs to taxpayers. Fixing that requires addressing mental health and the grim reality that our approach to the mentally ill is often to imprison them. In fairness, America has evolved on this issue. Historically, states often ...
As the dust settled after the 2018 Republican gubernatorial primary election, Secretary of State Kris Kobach defeated incumbent Gov. Jeff Colyer by 350 votes, of 128,838 total votes (40.6%). Lagging far behind were moderate Jim Barnett (8.8%), Insurance Commissioner Ken Selzer (7.8%) and three ...
With the deluge of news from the current impeachment turmoil in Washington, one could be excused for missing the continuing assault on science from the administration and its supporters. In August, in explaining his no-exception anti-abortion stance, Iowa GOP Rep. Steve King claimed that ...
Sleepless in Kansas? Maybe not, if you are a student at Emporia State. ESU has contracted with a private company to install two sleeping pods. They are designed to be dark, quiet and clean. Pods must be reserved in advance, the areas are secure, private and monitored, and the pods are cleaned ...
“When an ir-re-sistible force, meets an old im-mov-able object like this, you can bet just as sure as you live, something’s got to give.” Johnny Mercer wrote it. Frank Sinatra sang it, and we all fell in love with its optimistic take on inevitability. Today, the romantic 1950s ...
A couple weeks ago Gov. Laura Kelly made good on her commitment to initiate a comprehensive review of the Kansas tax structure by establishing a Council on Tax Reform, co-chaired by two former state senators, Republican Steve Morris of Hugoton and Democrat Janis Lee of Kensington. Kelly called ...
To address prison overcrowding, Kansas must understand the racial disparities that exist in our system of mass incarceration, how they fuel our ballooning prison population, and potential remedies. Our state prison population does not reflect the Kansas population on race. According to 2018 ...