Kansas needs to start voting by mail immediately. Our democracy may hang in the balance. With the COVID-19 pandemic showing no signs of subsiding, elections may become very complicated this August and November. Turnout may be low. Seven states have already responded to the pandemic by ...
To grasp how fully this administration and its sycophants have abandoned basic science, look no further than the coronavirus crisis engulfing the country. Exhibit 1 is the president, who has rejected scientific facts, renounced medical reality, rebuffed his own experts and tried to sell America ...
COVID-19 has lessons for Kansas in handling crises. Citizens and policymakers should use this moment to reflect on how we can protect public health now and prepare for the next crisis to threaten Kansas. First, let’s talk social trust. In surveys, Americans report little trust in ...
In democracies, majorities rule, right? The candidate with the most votes wins the election, and a majority vote in the Legislature means that a bill is passed. In Kansas, the math seems remarkably simple. The candidate with the most votes wins, and the way to assure victory is to attract ...
If you think controversy over school funding ended has ended, think again. A dispute currently brewing is about how the new court-awarded funds are being spent by school districts to help at-risk students and how the Kansas Department of Education is managing the districts. The disagreement ...
It’s tempting to label elections as “the most important” in decades, our lifetime, etc. Sometimes, as Kansans discovered in 2010, 2016 and 2018, elections do have real consequences. Moreover, nationally, the 2020 prospect of reelecting Donald Trump makes the election important, to say ...
Here we go again. The Kansas Legislature is back, and anti-abortion advocates wasted no time initiating an amendment to the state constitution. If approved by two-thirds of both houses, and by voters, it would overturn last year’s decision by the Kansas Supreme Court affirming a woman’s ...
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 ...