The following are posted articles and commentary from members.

God Save Us From These "Christians"

THE PRAIRIE POPULIST - Frank Smith
Diogenes was the leading Greek philosopher of the school of the Cynics. He was said to have searched, throughout his life, with a lantern in the daylight, endlessly looking for an honest man. He didn't expect to find one. The absence confirmed his strongly held belief in the fallibility of man

Should he somehow return, 2400 years later, and search through the Kansas Congressional delegation or our state Board of Education majority, he might find little had changed.

Todd Tiahrt, our 4th District Congressman, says that his long-time benefactor, Tom Delay, hadn't "done anything wrong." This was despite the fact that the bipartisan House Ethics Committee rebuked Congressman DeLay three times last year. DeLay has now been indicted for felonies including money laundering. "The Hammer's" response has been to claim Austin's District Attorney is being "partisan." The right wing spin machine has cranked up into overdrive to pound that message into talk radio dittoheads and throughout the nation's press and television though former DeLay staffer Michael Scanlon has already turned state's evidence.

Todd is also the beneficiary of full color, mailed promotions from the non-profit "Christian" Family Research Council. As he regularly reminds us, he prominently identifies himself as a "Christian."

Senator Pat Roberts is also manning the barricades. Last year, he appeared to have successfully prevented any investigation as to why the White House and its appointed functionaries were asleep at the wheel up until the time Osama sent his own true believers to attack symbols of American might. Recently, Senator Harry Reid used a rare parliamentary maneuver to demand that the long-promised second phase of the investigation finally go forward. It appears the investigation shall finally proceed. This year, Roberts' task has been to obfuscate the fact that the White House had concealed information that called every bit of supposed evidence about Saddam's alleged connection to al Qaida into question. Similarly, Roberts doesn't want us to realize that everyone in the White House should have known there were no current Iraqi "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and that the sources upon which our "intelligence" was based were astoundingly mendacious. Roberts appeared on television billionaire "Reverend" Pat Robertson's show to denounce Reid's speech and actions thusly: "It is a diatribe. It is like Howard Dean without a rabies shot."

Roberts gets 100% support ratings from various ultra-right wing organizations such as Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, the Christian Coalition, and the Eagle Forum.

The John Birch Society is an organization that called President Eisenhower a "conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy." They gave Roberts a similar 100% rating last year. William Buckley, one of the country's leading conservatives, once called their ravings, "paranoid and unpatriotic drivel." It received its funding from the family patriarch of Roberts'
personal mainstays, the oil billionaire Kochs of Wichita, who follow in their father's footsteps.

Senator Sam Brownback is still another religious oddball that we've sent to Washington. Converted to Catholicism, he joined Opus Dei, an extremely conservative sect. It was founded by a flagellant and has never rejected that self-flogging.

But taking the cake of late is the six-person majority on the Kansas Board of Education. Chairman Steve Abrams, a veterinarian from Arkansas City, recently defended fellow fundamentalist, "born-again" Connie Morris, from charges your Prairie Populist submitted in person to the Board. Claiming he couldn't "see any evidence" that she had padded her state expense account, Abrams ignored my provision of dozens of pages of documentation. Morris apparently charged the state to regularly feed her husband on a junket to Miami Beach, probably rented an ocean view suite at a posh hotel so that her daughter could stay with them, filling out "receipts" in her own handwriting for $147 for two supposed taxi rides to and from the airport. She later admitted her husband rented a car at the times and dates she claimed she was taking the "cabs." Morris reimbursed the state for $2,890.14, moments after I presented my findings to the Board. I provided duplicate copies of the evidence to the Board, but apparently Abrams did not see fit to distribute them to the other members.

Ken Willard, Board Member from the Hutchinson area, didn't feel there was need for any additional scrutiny for these junkets. His own tab for travel was the second highest on the Board, after Morris. Willard has gone along with all of the most bizarre Board actions, including recently hiring a Commissioner with virtually no experience in management or education to run the by far most expensive department in the state bureaucracy. The new ideologically-driven Commissioner reciprocated by taking widespread, thinly veiled, taxpayer-funded campaign trips with Morris and Willard. They pretended to be fact-finding missions. Unless there are a lot of facts about education to be found at airport rallies, we weren't fooled. Department employees have just been quizzed on their personal beliefs about vouchers, a mechanism intended to further defund public schools. U.S. Grant, the founder of the anti-patronage civil service system, may be rolling over in his grave.

The Board majority has a varied but a fairly consistent overall common agenda. No education for children born to illegal immigrants, despite the U.S. Supreme Court ruling otherwise. An installation of "intelligent design" in science classes, or "creationism in a tuxedo." The Court also ruled against creationism being taught as "science." That escapade alone has caused Kansas to become the laughingstock of the world. The majority seems to seek termination of bilingual education for kids who have English as a second language. It promotes ending useful sex and health education, our necessary prevention tool in this age of AIDS and burgeoning unwanted teenage pregnancies. The xenophobic Morris even wants to downgrade world history.

As I'm traveling to Topeka to observe the State Board ayatollahs make collective fools of themselves, I can't help but wonder how they ignore the obvious, as I pass road cuts on the Kansas Turnpike. Any child could easily
see layers of Pleistocene ice-age deposits. Do the majority really think
the word is less than 7,000 years old when 10,000 year-old mammoth bones are excavated from under Wichita's Kellogg Avenue? Ken Willard wrote me, after a long delay, with all certainty, to tell me that there was an absence of evidence for "macroevolution."

We are blessed in Kansas to have the most extraordinary collection of Cretaceous mosasaurs, found here, preserved and displayed in Hays. They once hunted in the shallow seas covering the whole state. I sit reading the current Scientific American's splendid article about ancient tetrapods, describing evidence that genus first crawled from the ocean 360 million years ago. I wonder if Willard has read any non-fiction in recent decades?
Is he familiar with the feathered dinosaur fossils found in China? Has he avoided this month's news of the identification of the transitional fossil, Dallasaurus turneri - adorned with limbs, rather than flippers? How does Willard manage to ignore the omnipresent evidence of our beginnings?

How indeed? How does Abrams look at receipts that show "2 guests" eating huge quantities of food, and claim that he sees "no evidence" of expense account padding?

Diogenes surely wouldn't be disappointed by Kansas politicians.

By kansas_progressives at 12/19/2005 - 10:32am