Regional/
Kansas City :

• Josh Hawley Beats McCaskill Despite His Hair
  Sitting at lunch in Kansas City before the election, I could not help but overhear two well dressed women loudly discussing the upcoming election. In my experience, women of means rarely talk politics over lunch. [more]
  
  
• Why Missouri Gov. Greitens Had to Go
  Living in Missouri and editing a regional online publication, the SentinelKSMO.org, I got to watch the rise and fall of Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens up close. [more]
  
  
• Politically Motivated Prosecutions: Missouri to D.C.
  Residents of Missouri are watching up close a phenomenon that in many ways replicates the ones Americans are watching unfold in Washington. [more]
  
  
• Will a Dem Prosecutor Save a GOP Governor?
  Missouri Republican Gov. Eric Greitens, a former Democrat and political newcomer, was looking at what seemed the sure end of his career until a St. Louis prosecutor stepped in and unwittingly threw him a lifeline. [more]
  
  
• White Guys Don't Make for Useful Victims
  In January of this year I helped launch a regional online news service, the Sentinel, in league with the Kansas Policy Institute.
  Our slogan--and our mission—is, “Holding media and government accountable.”" [more]
  
  
• Inmates Strengthen Grip on Mizzou Asylum
  To heal the self-inflicted wounds brought on by its obsession with “diversity” the cash-starved University of Missouri is planning to spend $2 million on new diversity initiatives, including $1.1 million on a “diversity audit." [more]
  
  
• The Imitation Game—KC Style
  These days, the things that really do make Kansas City stand apart from the municipal crowd are fewer, and further between. [more]
  
  
• Dollars Alone are No Foundation for Education
  If things go as planned, Kansas City voters will soon be asked to increase the Kansas City school district’s current levy of 21 percent, from $4.95 to $6.00. [more]
  
  
• How to Educate a Kid on $10 a Day
  The teachers at Padre Pio Academy in Shawnee watch the hysteria about Kansas public school budgets, I imagine, much the way Gary Butler watches the hold-out of Pittsburgh Steelers’ wide receiver Antonio Brown. [more]
  
  
• Better to Reign in KC Than Serve in Heaven?
  A few years back, I had the occasion to speak to a group of inmates at a high-security California prison. The meeting was going well until the candy delivery came in. Everything crunched to a halt as these otherwise grown men got down to the deadly serious business of divvying up the candy bars among themselves. I dared not distract them. I recall that moment when I read about recent developments in the Kansas City Missouri School District. [more]
  
  
• No Cats Killed in Bloch School Scandal
  In the first month or so of 2015, readers of The Kansas City Star received updates, daily or close to it, on two scandals, one national, one local. [more]
  
  
• What’s With The Star’s Brownback Fetish?
  In late January, as I commence writing this column, I enter “Sam Brownback” in the search function on The Kansas City Star’s Web site and review the articles or editorials on Kansas budget issues. Incredibly, 10 have been posted within the last day. [more]
  
  
• The Boys' Book Club
  I am privileged to belong to what is rare now and what may one day soon be extinct, and that is a book club for men. Why such clubs may become extinct is no mystery. For the past few decades, educators have done all in their power to discourage boys from reading—from being boys, for that matter—and more on this theme later. [more]
  
  
• Driving While Missourian
  A few days ago, a very good friend of mine, an African American, sent out a heartfelt plea to his email list on the subject of Ferguson under the message, “Call for restraint and dialogue.” In the email, he accurately described an incident that happened some years back. [more]
  
  
• The Parent of All Other Virtues
  When you send your eager little freshmen off to college next fall, there is a good chance the campus thought police will stop them before they even find their dorm rooms and demand of them, “Check your privilege!” [more]
  
  
• The Strange Case of Ferguson Witness 40
  & Follow-Up.
  Easily the strangest of all the documents that have emerged from the Darren Wilson grand jury is the one attributed to Witness 40. [more]
  
  
• Don’t Expect Riots Over Ferguson
  Democratic Missouri Governor Jay Nixon held a press conference on Tuesday about the events in Ferguson, and he talked tougher than he has in the past, much tougher. I think I know why. [more]
  
  
• Why My Power Company Gave Me Two Smiley Faces
  When your otherwise credible electric company rewards you for not using its services and does so by posting smiley faces on your “Home Energy Report,” you get the unsettling sense that something is amiss in the world of power. [more]
  
  
• The Truly Daffy Demonization of the Brothers Koch
  As Wichita’s Koch family has learned the hard way, the surest way to make mortal enemies in contemporary America is to build a hugely successful business, stick to your principles, and care about the future of your country. [more]
  
  
• What Actually Happened in Ferguson
  I wonder if major media executives are savvy enough to be embarrassed by the unpaid citizen journalists who have subverted their high price monopoly on the news. [more]
  
  
• Letter to a Young Entrepreneur
  A few months back, while driving down I-70 on the ultimate perfect spring afternoon, I glanced off to my left and saw Kauffman Stadium filling with people. As I exited to turn back to the ballpark, I was reminded anew of one of life’s great lessons: at a certain point in your career, you should not have to ask a boss’s permission to do—or not do—anything. [more]
  
  
• How Gov. Nixon 'Besmirched' the Missouri 15
  With one eye on the presidency—he’d settle for “vice”—Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon made the rounds of the morning news shows this past Sunday to rationalize his mishandling of the freak show being staged in Ferguson. [more]
  
  
• Trayvon Vu All Over Again
  While the major media were trotting out the same race-baiting narrative they had been trotting out for the last 50 years, the same narrative Tom Wolfe so nicely parodied in his classic 1987 classic, “Bonfire of the Vanities,” the Treepers were doing the real work on the Michael Brown case. [more]
  
  
• Why No Riots for Miriam Carey?
  While the media look hard for ways to rationalize the irrational pillaging of greater St. Louis over the shooting death of Michael Brown, they continue to ignore the death in October of African American dental hygienist, Miriam Carey. [more]
  
  
• Dissecting the Interest in Kansas’ Tax-Rate Cutting
  John Meara did not move his accounting firm, Meara Welch Browne, from Missouri to Kansas simply because Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signed HB 2117 into law in 2012—but that bill was incentive enough to make the difference. [more]
  
  
• What Ever Happened to the Highway Shooter?
  On April 10 of this year, Kansas City made the national news in a way it had rather not. That was the day on which ABC’s Diana Sawyer shared the scary saga of the highway shooter who was then terrorizing Kansas City. [more]
  
  
• Fighting Back in the City of the Big Blunders
  In the City of the Big Blunders, they tell me you are witless, and I believe them, for I have seen your pained officials sell streetcars to contented drivers—or try to. And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: no, I have seen real crooks and they at least know how to flim-flam the public into costly boondoggles. [more]
  
  
• The Undying Myth of the 77-Cent Dollar
  Like a stubbornly persistent zombie, (I’ve been watching too much Walking Dead), the notion that women get paid less than men for the same work does not die easily. [more]
  
  
• In KC, Not All Shootings Created Equal
  Kansas City, where I live, has received more than its share of attention these last few weeks and for all the wrong reasons.[more]
  
  
• You Can’t Solve A Problem That You Won’t Name
  Google “Kansas City Zoo,” and the headlines that jump out are ones that civic leaders would rather did not, headlines like this one from The Kansas City Star on March 18: “Free day at Kansas City Zoo ends in violence.” [more]
  
  
• Star Turns Anti-Faith Jihad Against J.E. Dunn
  In an impressively twisted column, even by his own contorted standards, The Kansas City Star’s Yael Abouhalkah recently decried the “hypocrisy” of the JE Dunn Company for its attempt to honor the conscience of its family members as the Obama administration very recently promised them it could. [more]
  
  
• Woody Allen’s Got Nothing on Planned Parenthood
  Actor/director Woody Allen deserves his recent notoriety. If nothing else, his quiet seduction of common-law wife Mia Farrow’s adolescent daughter, Soon-Yi, earned him a permanent spot on the creepy-ass cracka watch list. [more]
  
  
• Where Have You Gone, Norma Rae?
  A Kansas City nurse tried to counter her employer's unionization vote, only to realize she was facing a stacked deck. [more]
  
  
• The Mushy Side of Social Media
  Forget the on-line marketing. When it comes to bringing people closer together, few things can match the power—or the reach— of what the Internet hath wrought.. [more]
  
  
• Why You Should Only Name Stuff After The Dead
  A few simple rules can help avoid the embarrassment of namesakes' outliving the appropriateness of the honors. [more]
  
  
• Paving Your Neighborhood With Good Intentions
  A one-size-fits-all approach to diversity, brought to you by federal know-it-alls, is destined to end badly. But why would any rational person expect a different result? [more]
  
  
• Don’t Tweak Failing Public Schools—Destroy Them
  If you’re serious about addressing the ills of underperforming schools, stop throwing money at them and focus on the real issues. [more]
  
  
• An Airport with Friends
  Perhaps there’s a case to be made for a new airport terminal in Kansas City. If so, it should be argued intelligently. [more]
  
  
• For Those Who Don't Believe in Election Fraud
  "Yes, the Rizzo-Royster race turned on vote fraud," admitted the Kansas City Star's Barbara Shelly in a crow-eating column nearly three years after it would do any good. [more]
  
  
• Escape from Kansas City: Isn’t There a Better Way?
  Summertime, and the vacationing isn’t easy. [more]
  
  
• After the Heroics at JJ’s, Something Less Than Heroic
  A community drawn together by tragedy has moved on to the recriminations stage. [more]
  
  
• The Nay-Sayers Misread Our RNC Convention Appeal
  No, we don’t have giant hotels and glittering, expensive public transit systems. We have something better—in spades. [more]
  
  
• One Debt Solution: Bring Back the Bawler-Outers
  Maybe the best way to address our approach to debt issues is by restoring a sense of shame. [more]
  
  
• On the Kansas Energy Front, It's War by Proxy
  In Kansas, two opposing forces are doing battle over the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard. [more]
  
  
• KC to Brainstorm its Way to Artistic Glory
  Kansas City, you see, did not have “a dedicated office in City Hall to facilitate arts growth.” Quel embarrass! [more]
  
  
• Feeling a Little Shipwrecked this New Year?
  If the economical and political tides have washed over you in the fall and left you feeling forlorn, I would recommend that you do what I have done—in my case, quite by accident—pick up a copy of Robinson Crusoe. [more]
  
  
• What Is It About Christmas on the Plaza?
  On a Saturday evening in early December, after watching a movie at the Plaza Cinemark, I left the adjoining parking garage and headed east on 47th Street. [more]
  
  
• It's Time to Rethink the 'Root Canal' Metaphor
  In his 2010 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama described the bank bailout as being as “popular as a root canal.” [more]
  
  
• Stumping Missouri with Todd and Newt
  It is not unusual to see on some of the more majestic lawns in Kansas City a string of Mitt Romney signs with a “Claire McCaskill for Senate” sign popping up like a weed among them. [more]
  
  
• Would Spielberg Make A Movie About Claire McCaskill?
  A few weeks ago, I was asked to emcee a fund-raising dinner for Rep. Todd Akin, who is rather famously running for U.S. Senate in Missouri, the state in which I live. [more]
  
  
• All Quiet on the Western Tax Front—Too Quiet
  With one or two notable exceptions, the grand political Poobahs of greater Kansas City have no idea of the financial bloodbath that awaits them. [more]
  
  
• Talk About Exceeding Customer Expectations
  Conventional wisdom holds that customers will tell 10 times more people about a negative retail experience than about a positive one. [more]
  
  
• Who's Telling the Story at the Museum of Suburbia?
  History isn’t always written by winners. [more]
  
  
• Why Kansas City Trumps London and Places Like it
  Visit almost any grand capital in the world and you’ll see how good we really have it. [more]
  
  
• So Sell Kansas City’s Water Department Already
  Neither business development nor the lure of home ownership will improve when water bills in Kansas City quad-ruple in the years ahead. [more]
  
  
• A Riddle for KC: What’s Greener Than Light Rail?
  Without spending a dime—for passenger fare or tax subsidies—Kansas City already has the Downtown connectors it needs. We call them ‘shoes.’ [more]
  
  
• The Unplanned Glory of Wornall Road
  Quaint it ain't, but the hum of commercial activity in Waldo should prove instructive for city planners and their good intentions. [more]
  
  
• Greater KC’s Forgotten Basketball Glory
  A game that would forge a piece of Kansas City’s economic identity has become a national obsession.  [more]
  
  
• Not Even Bain Capital Could Save KC’s Armco Steel
  The anti-capitalist spin on Mitt Romney’s record tells us more about the media than it does about the candidate. [more]
  
  
• Remember  the Citadel
  To position Kansas City as America's entrepreneurial capital, area leaders need to distinguish crony capitalism from the real thing. Happily for them, the ill-fated Citadel Plaza project has surfaced once again, and it makes for a splendid case study on that very distinction. [more]
  
  
• In Defense of Facebook
  Facebook users, now about half of all adults, defend their participation as guiltily as if they were dabbling in palm reading or pornography. Non-users think even less of users than users do of themselves. Just ask. [more]
  
  
• Planned Parenthood Cover-Up Dwarfs Penn State's
  In 2002, I was working with the irrepressible Mark Crutcher of Life Dynamics on a separate project when he shared with me the results of a soon-to-be released study. [more]
  
  
• HBO to Celebrate Tiller's Life?
  Writer/producer Alan Ball is changing genres from vampires, but he is sticking to the ghoulish. [more]
  
  
• Tiller Crony Admits Unreported Child Rape
  The Lawrence Journal World thought it was doing Dr. Ann Kristin Neuhaus, a long time associate of the late abortionist George Tiller, a favor. [more]
  
  
• Planned Parenthood Struggles to Contain Shreddergate
  For the first time in its inglorious history, Planned Parenthood is facing criminal charges. These originated with a case that former Johnson County, Kansas, District Attorney Phill Kline filed in 2007, charging Planned Parenthood’s suburban Kansas City clinic with, among other things, 23 felonies for falsifying copies of abortion reports. [more]
  
  
• Key Evidence Destroyed in Planned Parenthood Case
  In an explosive revelation that could bring down Obama Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Johnson County, Kansas, District Attorney Steve Howe announced on Friday that a state agency, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE), had destroyed records critical to Howe’s prosecution of Planned Parenthood. [more]
  
  
• Has Bleeding Kansas Begun to Heal?
  At a large pro-life dinner in Kansas City last Tuesday, radio pundit Laura Ingraham’s impassioned speech got most of the attention, but it was the seemingly casual remarks of Kansas lieutenant governor Dr. Jeff Colyer that may have the most lasting impact. [more]
  
  
• The Heartland Never “Overrated” Obama
  Some years back, before I abandoned my senses and became a conspiracy theorist, I used to contribute the occasional article to the Weekly Standard. [more]
  
  
• Chamber Shocker: Its ‘Big Ideas’ Are Good Ideas
  After years of wandering in the wilderness, the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce has found its way to a project that is not only logical, but also doable. [more]
  
  
• A Truth and Justice Commission for Kansas?
  As Kansas fishermen know, if they catch a bass less than 15 inches, it “must be returned to the water immediately, unrestricted.” It is forbidden as well “to refuse to allow law enforcement officers to inspect wildlife in possession.” [more]
  
  
• Kansas 'Rodeo Exception' Claimed Unborn's Life
  “Horses are my life and having kids would mess that up for barrel racing,” so said a 15 year-old who hoped to abort the healthy, viable baby that she had already carried for more than six months. [more]
  
  
• Kansas Hearing Shows Depth of Tiller Crime
  On Monday of this week, the Kansas Board of Healing Arts launched an inquiry into the medical practice of one Dr. Ann Kristin ( Kris) Neuhaus.If ever a civil procedure captured the essence of Hannah Arendt’s memorable phrase “the banality of evil,” it is surely this one. [more]
  
  
• American Health Care From The Inside Out
  For the last twenty or so years I have been talking about health care systems, researching them, writing about them, even marketing them, but I learned more about American health care in a few days this summer than I had in the last few decades. [more]
  
  
• Let My Gamblers Smoke
  In a rare moment of celestial alignment, I found myself agreeing with the core thesis of a column written by The Kansas City Star’s Mike Hendricks—”Hypocrisy, like cigarette smoke, fills the air.” [more]
  
  
• Reckless Endangerment - Kansas City Style
  In a new bestseller, “Reckless Endangerment,” by The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning business reporter Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner, Kansas City gets a surprising amount of attention—none of it good, but much of it juicy. [more]
  
  
• Time to Rethink Our Fire Departments
  Every time I drive down Lee Boulevard and see the much-too-pretty fire trucks of the Leawood Fire Department, I think to myself, "Maybe it is time to re-imagine the art and politics of firefighting." [more]
  
  
• Senate, Vote No on Sebelius’s Boy
  Barring the unforeseen, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee will vote along party lines today, Thursday, to approve the nomination of Stephen Six to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. [more]
  
  
• GOP May Keep Abortion Enabler Off Bench
  Former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline, if not exactly optimistic, is at lest hopeful that the Republicans in the U.S. Senate will stand as one to block the appointment of Stephen Six to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. [more]
  
  
• Will a New Murphy’s Law Save Urban Education?
  Everything about John Murphy is big, including his ideas. His plan to amend the Missouri Constitution to permit tax credits for donors to high schools and grade schools is, of course, a big one, and it could be the best thing to happen to Missouri education since Judge Russell Clark retired. [more]
  
  
• Escape From New York
  Nothing fosters one’s appreciation for what it means to live in Kansas City quite like a visit to New York. [more]
  
  
• How the Public Library Transformed Kansas City
  If you read a hundred tourist guides for a hundred major cities, you will find not a one that boasts of its public library. For the moment, this includes Kansas City, but it ought not. [more]
  
  
• What Our Candidates are Not Talking About
  For evening entertainment this winter I have been watching, courtesy of NetFlix, all five years of the HBO series, The Wire, easily the most honest look at urban crime and politics ever produced. [more]
  
  
• Pro-Life Kansas AG Shames Inquisitors
  If the Kansas disciplinary board for lawyers had a ten-run mercy rule as in Little League, the three-lawyer panel sitting in judgment on the “ethics” of former state attorney general Phill Kline would have called its hearings off after day one . . . [more]
  
  
• Supressed Report Saved Planned Parenthood
  As I reported last week, the abortion industry has waged a multi-pronged, multi-million dollar campaign to rid itself of the one prosecutor in America who dared to file criminal charges against Planned Parenthood. . . . [more]
  
  
• Stacking the Deck for Regional Transit
  On one of the nastiest days of early December, with the wind whipping out of the north and ice coating the sidewalks, I walked about 10 feet or so to my carport, clicked into my Ford Fusion, and put the butt warmer on double warm. . . [more]
  
  
• Why God Created Christmas Eve
  Have you ever been to a Wal-Mart? These are big suburban stores with wide-bodied customers and even wider aisles to accommodate them. . . .[more]
  
  
• Ghost of Pendergast Past Haunts KC Elections
  Kansas City Democrat Will Royster is likely the only Missouri House candidate to have been featured on the TV classic "To Tell the Truth." . . . [more]
  
  
• A Star is Born in Kansas
  Other than say nuclear war or the Holocaust, there are few things worse than a victory party staged for a losing candidate . . . [more]
  
  
• Maybe the Consolidation Bug Should Spread South
  For the last year, the media have been desperately trying to hang the “racist” tag around the Tea Party movement as a way to discredit it. This past weekend, they would seem to have finally succeeded. [more]
  
  
• The Day Time Really Did Stop in Kansas City
  When the grand poo-bahs from the great media empires of the east set out to find out what middle America is thinking, you can bet they're really looking for confirmation of what they suspect is wrong with us. [more]
  
  
• Will Somali Pirates Hijack The Election?
  Former Naval fighter pilot Will Royster asks a good question, “If we won’t allow Somali pirates to hijack our ships, why do we allow them to hijack our elections?” [more]
  
  
• Good Intentions, and Planners, Can Sap a City's Soul
  I recently spent some back-to-back time in two cities, one run by merchants and one run by planners. [more]
  
  
• Heartland Bankers Blast DC "Demagogues"
  or the last ten years in my role as executive editor of the Kansas City regional business magazine, Ingram’s, I have been moderating what we call the “Industry Outlook.” [more]
  
  
• NAACP, Media Owe Tea Parties Major Apology
  Blacks will know they have achieved full acceptance in America when the media begin to treat the NAACP as the hack left wing political group it has obviously become. [more]  
  
  
• Memorializing George Tiller's Evil
  In reading David Kupelian’s exceptional new book, How Evil Works, a worthy sequel to his bestseller, the Marketing of Evil, I had to ask myself a basic question. [more]
  
  
• The Democrats' Media Hatchetmen
  Amidst the early morning cacophony at the McDonald’s on 14 th and Prospect in Kansas City’s urban core, Sonny Gibson calls the meeting to order with a gavel that commands attention--the blunt end of a hatchet. [more]
  
  
• Censure Andre Carson
  Spittlegate is a media and political scandal that should not be allowed to die, at least not until the congressmen who provoked it are censured and the reporters who enabled it are fired. The censuring should begin with Rep. Andre Carson of Indiana. [more]
  
  
• Did Tea Party Smear Spark KC Riot?
  If there was any one individual at the center of the smear of the Tea party protest on March 20 outside the Capitol, it was Kansas City congressman Emanuel Cleaver. [more]
  
  
• "Spittlegate" and Its Consequences
  On Monday evening, April 5, my home phone rang. The caller ID said, “Freedom, Inc.,” the name of the black political club that ushered my congressman, Representative Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), to power.[more]
  
  
• Campus Cotton Ball Hysteria Has Consequences
  The Thought Police on the Missouri University campus are playing out the Orwellian equivalent of the 1968 Chicago convention. [more]
  
  
• Shhhh! Talk of Earnings Tax Will Frighten Children
  A Kansas City Star article that just might have been ghosted by the brothers Grimm describes a potential City Council vote on the city’s 1 percent earnings tax with these words: “alarming,” “alarmed,” “nightmare,” “demise,” “threat,” and “frightening.” [more]
  
  
• What really is the matter with Kansas?
  Yes, Dorothy, there is a good deal the matter with Kansas. No state that borders Kansas is governed as insanely. No nearby state faces anything like the Kansas fiscal crisis, and no one in the media cares to say why. [more]
  
  
• What Wall Street doesn't know can kill you
  In his current bestseller, On The Brink, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson tells of convening a meeting of Wall Street CEOs during the scary, sobering days of 2008 and asking them, "How have we gotten to where we are?" [more]
  
  
• How One Word is Changing Higher Education
  From the look on their faces, when I proposed a dissertation topic to my Ph.D. Committee at Purdue titled “The Capitalist as Hero in the American Novel,” you would have thought I had peed on their shoes. [more]
  
  
• This is What Comes of Behaviorists Behaving Badly
  There are people in this world who think they have a better idea about how each of us should live than we do. One influential subspecies of this type goes by the name "behavioral economists," and you don't have to look too far to find them. [more]
  
  
• When the Feds Swipe Swiping Power
  With yet another venture into the world of “badly needed reforms”—this time involving the financial sector—Congress shows once again that it’s not really about policy at all. This one is all about power. [more]
  
  
• Gary Forsee Goes Rogue, with Predictable Results
  On Nov. 17, University of Missouri system President Gary Forsee startled the academic community and the Missouri media when he dared to send the state’s congressional delegation a letter protesting the climate change legislation known as “cap and trade.” [more]
  
  
• Hidden Document Clears Hounded Kansas AG
  In the same week that the state of Kansas was trying the admitted killer of late-term abortionist George Tiller, its judicial establishment was continuing to hound the man who almost brought Tiller to justice, former attorney general Phill Kline. [more]
  
  Tiller and the Tradition of Frontier Justice
  Although no one would guess it from the fussy local coverage of Scott Roeder’s trial for the murder of Wichita abortionist George Tiller, the Kansas-Missouri borderlands have a long-storied tolerance for frontier justice. [more]
  
  
• How the Media Have Mangled the Pro-Life Story
  This past year, I found myself chief chronicler of the two of the year's most important stories involving the pro-life movement. 
  One was the inspiring saga of the 2009 March For Life, the largest in its 36-year history. The second was the dispiriting saga of the recently murdered late-term abortionist Dr. George Tiller. [more]
  
  
• The New New Deal?
  Students of History May recognize a few similarities between Barack Obama’s view of what America should be and Franklin Roosevelt’s. But beyond similarities, they should be paying attention to outcomes. [more]
  
  
• Tiller Killer Plans "Necessity Defense"
  Scott Roeder, the accused murderer of late term Wichita abortionist George Tiller, admitted killing Tiller earlier this week in an interview with the Associated Press. Roeder told the AP that the shooting was provoked by "the fact [that] preborn children's lives were in imminent danger." He plans to plea “not-guilty” and hopes to use this “necessity defense” at trial. [more] 
  
  
• In The Land Where the Customer is King
  In the inescapable health-care debate, we hear a good deal about the Canadian health system, the British system, the French system.What we do not hear about, however, are Canadian health consumers, British consumers, French consumers, or American consumers, for that matter. [more] 
  
  
• Dissent is Still Patriotic, Isn't It?
  Jackson Sherard is exactly the kind of citizen who makes America great and exactly the kind of citizen who would keep me from ever running for office. [more]
  
  
• Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender be
  If Ms. Sanchez were trying to make a point about the foreclosure epidemic, she failed.  A reporter does not get a handle on the problem by studying exceptions, however compelling their story. A reporter gets it by studying—and understanding--the rule. [more]
  
  
• What Would Happen After The Star?
  "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated," Missourian Mark Twain said a century ago, and exaggerated too might be the reports of the Kansas City Star's impending demise. [more]
  
  
• Conservatism for Dummies
  More than once, I have been approached about writing a book on the subject of conservatism. I have chosen not to because I don’t need a book to explain it. I need a paragraph. [more]
  
  
• In Lean Times, Sacred Cows Grow Fat
  “In honor of Earth Day,” proclaimed U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, the city was receiving a $350,000 grant from the Economic Development Association (EDA) to plan for a “Climate Sustainability Center.” Although I was not at all sure what a “Climate Sustainability Center” was, I do know a sacred cow when I see one. [more]
  
  
• Sebelius Must Share Blame For Tiller Murder
  For the six years that Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius governed the state of Kansas, she enabled Wichita abortionist Dr. George Tiller to flout the state’s tough abortion laws and get away with it.  On Sunday morning, regrettably, a kind of crude frontier justice caught up with Tiller. [more]
  
  
• It's Torquemada Time in the Heartland
  In the late 15th century, the government of Spain, in defiance of the pope’s call for due process, decided it was time to root out the heretics and subversives in its midst. And so they contracted with one Tomás de Torquemada, appointed him Grand Inquisitor, and let him loose. [more]
  
  
• Understanding ModerateSpeak
  When I accepted an invite to lunch at a leadership summit sponsored by the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, one of America’s better chambers, I had no idea I would hear a veritable Gettysburg Address of passive-aggressive “moderation.” The speaker was David Dillon, the CEO of the Kroger Company, America’s second largest retailer. [more]
  
  
• More Thought-Policing In Mid-America
  This week, The Kansas City Star has renewed its assault on the Kansas City area’s most effective conservative preacher, Jerry Johnston of the First Family Church in the Kansas suburbs. [more]
  
  
• Time To Take Harder Look at Kathleen Sebelius
  Calling it an “inadvertent omission”—a phrase that rings about as true in confirmation circles as “wardrobe malfunction”-- Democratic Health and Human Services nominee Kathleen Sebelius fessed up on Tuesday. [more]
  
  
• The Etiquette of Economic Distress
  Some years back, I found myself scrubbed up in a surgical suite, interviewing a doctor as he extracted a gall bladder from the poor sucker on the table in front of us. The interview proved useless as we could not see the doctor’s lips move behind his mask—duh!--and the viewer had no way of knowing who was talking. [more]
  
  
• How Sebelius Subverted the Tiller Abortion Trial
  On Friday afternoon, March 27, it took a Wichita jury just 45 minutes to acquit Dr. George Tiller of 19 misdemeanor charges relating to his prolific late-term abortion business. Tiller needed help. And for those paying attention, the real help came not in the courtroom but in the proverbial back room...[more]
  
  
• Why George Tiller is on Trial in Wichita
  The lead in Monday’s Kansas City Star tells the morally deaf in progressive America all they want to hear about a trial that will begin next Monday in Wichita, Kansas.“After years of protest, pleading and petitions, anti-abortion groups today will get what they’ve long sought: the start of a criminal trial against Wichita abortion provider George Tiller.” [more]
  
  
• My Two Gregs
  Two of my favorite people in the world are named “Greg.” [ . . .]As fate would have it, they both found themselves working in the same industry, one for 20 years, the other for just a few weeks. I knew there was much the one could learn from the other. [more]
  
  
• Sebelius Mocked Abortion Law On Way To HHS Post
  A century from now, Kansas students will wonder how a state that was founded to keep the west free from slavery allowed itself to become the world capital of an even greater affront to life and liberty, late term abortion. [more]
  
  
• The Good Old Days Weren't
  In February 1975, just before I moved to Kansas City, my old black and white TV arced while my wife and I were watching it. “Arc” is an industry euphemism. What it means is that without warning your TV erupts violently and spectacularly into electrical flames. When this happened, as it occasionally did back then, you knew it was too late for Frankie’s Fix-It. [more]
  
  
• America's Best Urban Neighborhood
  On Tuesday, November 4, I left my house at 5:50 AM to walk to the church where I have voted for the last twenty years.A neighbor happened to leave his house at the same time, and so we walked over together. One sign of a good neighborhood is that you can and do walk places, even in the dark. [more]
  
  
• Community Organizers I Have Known, Not Loved
  My future was decided on an elevator in a New York City hotel. I was there for the Modern Language Association convention, to which would-be profs came to find jobs, me among them. [more]
  
  
• Kansas Exiles Abortion-Busting DA
  Today, in Washington D.C., on the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Liberty University law professor Phill Kline will be joining scores of thousands of other protestors in the annual March For Life. [more]
  
  
• Greg Hawley: A life well lived
  On Thursday evening, I drove out to the Beacon Heights Community of Christ Church in Independence, Missouri to attend a memorial service for a fellow who incarnated all that was best about America, Greg Hawley. [more]
  
  
• Mr. Donovan, Pistols at Dawn?
  This past month I have found myself in a minor dust-up with The Kansas City Star that I was prepared to let drop until my normally prudent, apolitical, university professor wife told me it was time to bitch-slap these mothers.  And when my wife talks, I listen. [more]
  
  
• Will the Eddy Manifesto Make a Difference?
  After four years on the Kansas City SchoolBoard, Dr. Bill Eddy, the retired dean ofUMKC’s Bloch School of Business, has given up the ghost. [more]
  
  
• Abortion Industry Eyes Kansas DA Election Anxiously
  Part 5: DA Kline Tackles Planned Parenthood
  Kansas is one of only six states that allows its citizens to petition to form grand juries. The seeming complicity of Attorney General Paul Morrison and other abortion industry beneficiaries with the clinics suggests why this law can be useful. [more]
  
  
• Abortion Industry Eyes Kansas DA Election Anxiously
  Part 4: DA Kline Tackles Planned Parenthood
  After nearly six months of dithering on the charges against Dr. George Tiller, Attorney General Paul Morrison re-interpreted the state’s tough late term abortion law to mean that it did not matter whether a woman had a legally justifiable need for an abortion as long as two unaffiliated doctors said she did. [more]
  
  
• Abortion Industry Eyes Kansas DA Election Anxiously
  Part 3: Kline Refuses To Roll Over
  After abortion industry champion Paul Morrison beat incumbent Phill Kline in the 2006 attorney general race, the largely conservative Republican precinct captains of Johnson County shocked the media and their moderate brethren .[more]
  
  
• Abortion Industry Eyes Kansas DA Election Anxiously
  Part 2: Abortion Battle Heats Up
  Upon taking office as Kansas attorney general in 2003, Phill Kline began to review the KDHE (Kansas Department of Health and Environment) reports to see just how it was that late term abortions had actually increased in Kansas after a tough law had been passed to stop them. [more]
  
  
• Abortion Industry Eyes Kansas DA Election Anxiously
  Part 1: Kansas Bleeds Once More
  Not since 1859, when the citizens of “Bleeding Kansas” approved the Wyandotte Constitution enabling Kansas to enter the Union as a free state, has a Kansas election grabbed the nation’s attention as the one about to take place. [more]
  
  
• The Man Behind the Curtain: How the Abortion Industry Has Come to Control Kansas
  In his May 2008 column in the archdiocesan paper, The Leaven, Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas publicly chastised Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius. [more]
  
  
• Kline v. Kansas (video)
  
  
• Advertising Gets Personal
  Until recently the words "advertising" and "personal" conjured images of loveless bachelors describing their humble charms. . . . [more]
  
  
• Higher ED
  A stormy St. Patrick’s morn, a skittish day on Wall Street, and a no-nonsense Kauffman Foundation symposium on innovation conspired to make me a wee bit jittery about America’s place in the world and Missouri’s place in America.
  But only for a moment. As I walked to my car, I set my mind to charting Missouri’s economic future and, mirabile dictu, I had the whole megillah worked out before I left the Kauffman parking lot. [more]
  
  
• Lights, Camera, Recession
  As a way of proving the fragility of the American mind, pundits like to point out that millions among us believe the 1969 moon landing was actually filmed in a Houston television studio. Truth be told, I have never met a one of these millions. [more]
  
  
• Two Guys from KCK
  The most conspicuous glow emanates from the Village West area around the new Kansas Speedway. Now the number one tourist destination in the state, Village West has realistic ambitions of becoming the number one destination in the Midwest. [more]
  
  
• Kansas DA fires opening salvo against Planned Parenthood
  In a public hearing on Wednesday, January 16, Johnson County, Kansas District Attorney Phill Kline asked that two attorneys representing Planned Parenthood be disqualified from representing the organization during a likely criminal trial in the near future. Those who rely on the mainstream media for their news would have thought this just another self-defeating publicity stunt by the anti-choice zealot Kline. [more]
  
  
• Reconsidering the Region: Wyandotte County REBORN
  KCPT documentary on Wyandotte County premieres at Kansas City Public Library [more]
  
  
• How the grinch stole my wi-fi
  A few weeks back, during high autumn, I chose to take the more scenic route up I-81 from Virginia to my brother’s digs in rural western New Jersey. I was feeling rather special, having attended a splendid shindig in DC the night before. [more]
  
  
• Kansas Abortion Politics Take Amusing Twist
  This holiday season was supposed to one rollicking good time for the progressive, pro-abortion forces that dominate Kansas media. But it hasn’t exactly worked out that way. [more]
  
  
• Board, out of their minds!
  Kansas City Star editorial writer, Yael T. Abouhalkah, headlines a recent and self-explanatory column, “A Great Defeat for Billboard Blight.” Abouhalkah here celebrates the failure of the much-maligned billboard industry to collect enough signatures to overturn the Kansas City, Missouri city council’s tough new anti-billboard ordinance. [more]
  
  
• Anti-anti smokers speak up
  First the City Council of Kansas City came for the Minutemen—Minutewomen to be precise—and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Minuteman, let alone a Minutewoman. (Well, actually I did speak up, but obviously not loudly enough). And then they came for the smokers. [more]
  
  
• Understanding Merchant Capture
  In the course of this October’s Banking and Finance Industry Outlook, First Community Bank president Greg Bynum asked his colleagues, “Do you have merchant capture?” What intrigues the uninitiated is that Bynum asked this question as casually as if he were asking, “Do you have ATMs” or “Does your bank have a vault?” His colleagues responded equally as casually. [more]
  
  
• Kansas City's Prime Buzz interview with Jack Cashill
   Prime Buzz features a weekly Q&A with a behind-the-scenes political player. Today we have Jack Cashill, a local conservative writer, video producer and executive editor of Ingram's magazine. [more]
  
  
• Tiller Abortion Racket Withers in the Light
  After 22 year-old Michelle Armesto finished testifying last Friday, Wichita abortion doctor George Tiller had to wonder how much more money he would have to pump into Kansas politics to keep his late term empire afloat. [more]
  
  
• After Newark, Race-Baiting Lost its Charm
  This is a tale of three cities: the one in which I was born and raised, Newark, New Jersey; the second in which I live, Kansas City, Missouri; and the third in which I have spent some time of late, Los Angeles.   At the heart of this tale is the procrustean effort by Hispanic activists to impose the black civil rights paradigm on their undocumented amigos. To do this, however, they need black support, and that is slipping away. [more]
  
  
• Jay Nixon's War on Terror
  Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon is running for governor of Missouri and expects to win. Most local pundits expect the same. [more]
  
  
• Swimming in Brush Creek
  As August settles on Kansas City like a steaming Oshibori, I would recommend that readers seeking relief chill out along Kansas City’s great under-appreciated attraction, Brush Creek. [more]
  
  
• New Council Proves Itself 4-Star Chamber
  When new mayor Mark Funkhouser tried to impose his own adventuresome idea of diversity on the city of Kansas City, the new city council stood up almost as one and said, “N y e polozhna.”  Not permitted! [more]
  
  
• Midwest Cooling Silences Media
  The one season Kansas City residents dread most is summer. It typically starts early, ends late, and gets very hot in between. The average high in July, for instance, is 91 degrees. Old timers still talk about the 1930s, when one consecutive summer after another of 100-plus heat famously turned the plains west of here to dust. [more]
  
  
• "Good Kansans" Enable Abortionist Tiller to Stay in Business
  Fortunately for Kansas—or so the media told the Rotarians--popular Johnson County District Attorney Paul Morison heard the outcry of the people, switched parties to run as a Democrat, and stopped the “out-of-control” Kline in his tracks. [more]
  
  
• Can Micro-Credit Restore Life to the Vine?
  Today, nearly 40 years after the birth of state-sanctioned “minority capitalism,” there is, in the inner cities of KCMO and KCK, close to no minority capitalism at all. [more]
  
  
• Leading Psychiatrist Blows Open Tiller Abortion Files
  Sometimes you have to go look for major stories, and sometimes they just fall right into your lap. This story belongs to the latter category. Based as I am in Kansas City, I was asked to help produce a video by some folks trying to get justice in the case of Dr. George Tiller. [more]
  
  
• The Myth of the Moderate Moore
  Holden, executive director of the Hotel and Lodging Association of Greater Kansas City, is an unusual duck. He is one of the very few “Republicans for Dennis Moore,” who is an actual walking, talking, quacking Republican. He is one unhappy duck as well. . .  [more]
  
  
• The Nelson Cows start mooing
  About ten years ago I produced a documentary on Kansas City for KCPT-TV called “Remember Me, KC.” It was the first project that I had done in-house, and so I was watched pretty closely. . . . [more]
  
  
• Packaging KC History
  Last month, a classy new National World War I Museum debuted at Liberty Memorial. All boosterism aside, the museum should have sealed Kansas City’s status as America’s most significant historical center west of Washington.  So you’d think. . . . [more]
  
  
• "Progress" triumphs in Kansas
  The chief editorial honcho at the Kansas City Star had been in the mood to gloat. Along with her colleagues at the Star and her corporate kin at the Wichita Eagle, she had helped Republican turned Democrat Paul Morrison upset conservative Phill Kline in Kline’s bid to be reelected Kansas Attorney General. Yippee!. . . {more]
  
  
• Rise of the procreative class
  When I first visited San Francisco 25 years ago, the city dazzled me. Having grown up in Newark, I had presumed that the inexorable fate of cities was decay. San Francisco had reversed the process. And as I deduced, it was the gay in-migration that had caused the reversal. . . [more]
  
  
• Flying into KCI
  No matter where I fly from, or how long I have been gone, it always feels right to fly into KCI. The landscape around KCI is always greener than I remember it and hillier and more thickly treed. There is something soothing about returning here, something reassuring and orderly . . .[more].
  
  
• KC's bestest and mostest
  For nearly six years now Ingram's has been staging what may be the most informative look at Midwest business culture ever to see print . . .[more]
  
  
• The "Build Stuff" party
  Say it ain’t so, Mark! Former Kansas GOP Chair, Mark Parkinson’s decision to jump ship and sail away as Democrat governor Kathleen Sebelius’ first mate has irked me, but not for the reasons you might expect. [more]
  
  
• Missouri U venerates monster Mao
  When I completed "Hoodwinked," my book on intellectual fraud, in spring 2005, I thought I had the cultural waterfront pretty well covered. That was until I read "Mao: The Unknown Story," [more]
  
  
• First, get rid of the toughs
  “The most powerful people in education today,” Martha Jackson wrote me, “are the least co-operative students.” That one sentence convinced me that Ms. Jackson — name changed to protect her from reprisal — was insightful enough to merit at least a phone call. [more]
  
  
• The conflict to come
  In one of those cool moments of cosmic justice, the success of Thomas Frank’s preposterous critique of red state America—What’s The Matter With Kansas—has inspired a retaliatory book, What’s The Matter With California, that yours truly has been contracted to pen. To that end I spent a good chunk of this past month in . . . [more]
  
  
• Don't blame the parade or downtown
  Imagine that it is Kansas City’s bicentennial year, 2050. To honor the bicentennial, and to commemorate the recent completion of the Performing Arts Center, a swarm of academics descends on these parts to write a history of our maddeningly schizophrenic burg.To grasp the ethos of the city circa 2006 they zero in on one particular event, the Downtown St. Patrick’s Day’s Parade. They begin with the newspaper of record, The Kansas City Star. Here, they learn that police seized several guns  . . . [more]
  
  
• Who will save Zachary Dick?
  Life is so much easier for film stars like Tommy Lee Jones than it is for real people like Brady and Myrna Dick of Raymore and their infant son, Zachary.  Like so many of his ideological pals, Jones deals with a tough moral issue by preening his way through it . . . [more]
  
  
• Snow Blind
  New UMKC Chancellor Guy Bailey will know he has an institution-rattling decision to make by the time he finishes reading this column.  The dilemma that confronts him is this: Does he hope that no one else of consequence will read what follows? Or does he preemptively cart UMKC’s Edgar Snow Exhibit off to the school’s dimmest recesses and slap a major asterisk on its tightly padlocked door?. . . [more]
  
  
• The unkindest cuts of all?
  “Missouri is a mess,” read the candidate’s campaign literature in the 2004 Missouri gubernatorial race. Among the most glaring signs of that mess were “nearly 50,000 lost jobs and falling wages, the biggest budget crisis in Missouri history, and dramatic cuts to higher education.” When young governor Matt Blunt took office, he addressed the aforementioned budget crisis by lopping roughly 9% off the top of the state’s Medicaid rolls . . . [more]

• When "academic freedom" gives way to absurdity
  In the chilly, pre-dawn hours of Dec. 5, two angry men apparently staked out the Lawrence home of Kansas University religion professor Paul Mireck i. . . The two "Christian thugs" – as the nation's leading leftist blog described the still unidentified pair – followed Mirecki in their archetypal "large pickup truck." . . . [more]

• Merry Christmas, Jackson County
  This Christmas, I have decided to make Jackson County the primary recipient of my holiday largesse.   In full Santa mode, I am planning to give the County . . . [more]

• Mirecki now mum on alleged beating
  On Monday morning, December 5, 2005 embattled Kansas University professor Paul Mirecki was allegedly beaten by two men who did not appreciate his publicly expressed views on Christianity . . . Now, however, he is no longer taking phone calls or talking to the press about the incident . . . [more]

• Kansas University kills anti-ID course
  Moved in no small part by articles in WorldNetDaily and a few other online publications, Kansas University Chancellor Robert Hemenway effectively killed an anti-intelligent design course planned for the spring . . . [more]

• Religious Studies professor slurs Christians, Jews
  The Harvard-educated Paul Mirecki serves as the head of the Religious Studies Department at Kansas University – at least for the time being. By the time a KU administrator finishes reading this article – much of the information revealed here for the first time – Mirecki's job may be in jeopardy [more]

• Union Station Bushwhack
  Earlier this summer I attended a wedding reception in the grand hall of Union Station, an excellent site for a reception by the way. Unescorted that evening, I strolled through the entrance gate, tuned my Celtic honing fork in on the bar and followed my instincts towards it. . . .     [more]

• Kansas, the wild kingdom
  A short time back, an eye-popping documentary about the Moinjang tribe of the White Nile stopped me dead in my channel-surfing tracks . . .     [more]

• Death of a salesman
  Two years ago, while my wife and family were abroad, everyone I knew forgot my birthday. Everyone except Joe Solscheid. Joe's card arrived on the day of my birthday, as it did every year, except this year I noticed it and appreciated it ...  [more]

• Scopes reconsidered in Kansas
  As Sixty-Third Street crosses the state line from Kansas City, Missouri into Kansas, the speed limit drops from 35 to 25, stop signs pop up at every other corner, and police cars lurk behind the topiary. Welcome to Johnson County . . . [more]
  
  
• The state of embarrassment
  "I'm embarrassed to tell you," said the professor.  "I'm really embarrassed."  I had just asked this stately, sixty-something woman a simple question: "Where are you from?" . . . [more]
  
  
• Smoke and mirrors
  To clear a place for me to sit, Philip Klein picks up a life-size gorilla suit off the couch and throws it in a pile in the corner. I place my Coke alongside a miniaturized circus tent, and we begin to talk. About Oz. . . . [more]
  
  
• Explosive memo reveals Darwinist strategy for Kansas
  This week, the leading lights of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement—Drs. Jonathan Wells and Michael Behe among them—will make their way to Topeka, Kansas. There, they will make an appeal to the state’s elected school board to allow in-class criticisms of Darwinism and its derivatives, which are now taught not as theory, not even as fact actually, but as something close to dogma. . . [more]
  
  
• Who's watching the watchdog?
  Leonard Zeskind owes Kansas City an apology. A big, fat one. The mischievous Zeskind has bamboozled The Kansas City Star and The Jewish Chronicle into believing his prattle about the "abyss of mayhem and murder" America faces at the hands of its "white nationalists." And in the process, he has scared thousands of otherwise sane Kansas Citians half to death. . . . [more]
  
  
• The feds give us back our future
  Not since Panamanian boxer Roberto Duran held up his gloved hands and whimpered "No mas" has the world seen such a willful and unexpected surrender of power as it did on Wednesday, November 17.  On this quietly historic day, Federal District Judge Dean Whipple not only dismissed outright the 22-year-old school Kansas City desegregation lawsuit . . . [more]
  
  
• Johnson County: America's first divorce-free zone?
  At the climax of the insidiously entertaining movie, Pleasantville, the teen protagonist consoles his distraught, divorced mom on being dumped by her latest boyfriend.  “It’s not supposed to be like this,” she weeps.  “It’s not supposed to be like anything,” he answers. . . . [more]
  
  
• Bread and circuses  . . . or else
  I think it all started to go wrong for me over lunch at Crown Center. There I was, eating my ritualistic chocolate yogurt with granola, when the T-Shirt first caught my eye. The shirt was displayed proudly, smack dab in the front of Crown Center's Women In Sports exhibit, presumably to get everyone psyched for the Women's Final Four. It read: . . . [more]
  
  
• The BBC does suburban Kansas City
  On December 29, prime time, British TV viewers visited a strange new world, suburban Kansas City, more specifically the 3rd Congressional District of Kansas.  Forget about Mission Hills, Leawood, Overland Park and all that. What the British viewer saw--at every introduction--was a land as flat and drab as the Clutter's Holcombe, as monochromatic as Dorothy's back 40, and so deep fat fried in country music it makes one want to deport Earl Scruggs to wherever . . . [more}
  
  
• Rashomon meets Chinatown in Kansas City, Kansas
  About the only thing everyone agrees on is that Kansas City, Kansas police officer, John Cheek, shot Milton Foster Jr. four times at Ziffel's in Bonner Springs and killed him. Beyond this, all is murky and contested. Sorting through events that October in 1994 is like watching the classic Japanese movie Rashomon: each participant has a story to tell, and each tells it as though there were no other. . . [more]
  
  
• Sex, Lies and Fire Escapes
  My best friend is a fire chief.  For the last 25 years, he has fought uncountable fires in the arson-scarred ghettos of one of the ten most dangerous fire cities in the world, a city whose name will go unmentioned for reasons that soon will be clear. . . [more]
  
  
• The new reconstruction: How the federal government is taking over Kansas City
  No one knows how it happened. Hell, very few know that it's happened. But it has. Oh my, has it ever. Indeed, not since the last disillusioned Yankee regulator stashed his fabled carpetbag on the Chesapeake & Ohio headed north has the Federal government weighed in on a region the way it does now on Kansas City . . .[more]
  
  
• Sacrificial lambs
  Despite his imperfect English, Tariq Al-Ataby had to be aware of the December death of John Tvedten, a Battalion Chief with the Kansas City Fire Department. . . .[more]
  
  
• Just when did John Ashcroft join the Nazi party?
  Over the holidays, I had the opportunity to visit with some of my more progressive friends, and several alerted me to a rather scary development: U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has become a Nazi—“another Hitler” as one fretfully described our former governor and senator.  This all came as news to me. . . [more]
  
  
• Dunking Socks: The casual betrayal of the American student
  It all came clear to me a couple months ago.  I was sitting in my kitchen, watching the local news, surrounded by a few of my daughters’ hovering, indifferent, mostly college-age friends. They paid no attention to the news—Why would they?--until the reporting switched to the University of Kansas. This perked them up . . . [more]
  
  
• UMKC thrills our bones
  Kansas City holds a rather bizarre distinction. It is the largest metro in America to feature, as its most widely embraced institute of higher learning, a junior college.  With all due respect to Johnson County Community College, this should not be. . . [more]
  
  
• Save the Kansas City Star
  I had decided not to talk about this issue when a fellow I know brought it up unbidden.  “What,” he asked, “has happened to The Kansas City Star?”  The fellow matters if for no other reason than he is a veteran blue chipper on our bi-annual power elite lists. What has “happened,” from his perspective, is that The Star has ceased to be the paper of record for the area, has ceased to keep citizens informed on critical issues, and has thus dumbed down the democratic process. . . [more]
  
  
• Why Kansas Catholics Opposed the Teaching of Evolution
  Time after time at the now famous Topeka hearings on Kansas state science standards, the so-called "science educators" would cite Pope John Paul II to support their evolutionary position. And time after time, nearly apoplectic, the Catholic representatives at the hearings would just about jump out of their chairs . . . [more]
  
  
• The fossil record has yet to prove Darwin right
  In challenging the teaching of evolution, the Kansas State Board of Education has exposed not just the cracks in the Darwinian dam but the gaping holes in the nation's commitment to representative democracy. Among those most troubled by this unexpected breakout of democracy is the state's Republican governor, Bill Graves. Expressing "great consternation . . . [more]
  
  
• Why Kansas City is not New Orleans
  Post-Katrina New Orleans served up something of a national Rorschach. When we looked at its images, we all saw different things, sometimes even wildly different things. What I saw I don’t imagine many others did . . . [more]
  
  
• Showdown at state line
  It didn't have to be like this. If, in 1867, those agents from the Chicago, Burlington & Northern had followed logic's course they would chosen to span the Missouri upriver, at Leavenworth, the proudest and most populous city on the Missouri's storied bend . . . [more]
  
  
• Election '99 -- Jack's picks
  Not much to choose between.  Both KWB and GB are big government liberals who would love to take both your tax dollars and your guns and stash them far far away.  A further liabilty for Kay is her board membership on The Mainstream Coalition . . . [more]
  
  
• Votes in a Moat (1999)
• Rehabilitating the Religiious Right (1999)
• Kansas City:  February 29th, the Year 2000 (1999)
• The Strange Case of Sam Gahne (1999)
• Warning: Tobacco Settlements May Endanger the Integrity of Your Elected Officials (1999)
• A 1998 View of Jack Cashill: After Conquering KC Area, Cashill to Ride on Moscow (1998)