A glance at Kansas:

Two brothers won $ 75,000 in a lottery, claimed their money, bought some marijuana and some crack cocaine and went home to celebrate. A butane leak ended up blowing up their house. One brother went to the hospital. The other one wet to jail.

A 17 year old and a 20 year old were messing around with a hand gun. The gun went off and one man was shot in the foot. At first, the men told police it was the result of a drive-by shooting. They lied. Later they confessed.

A State legislator claims he was robbed outside his hotel room, beaten up in the process. Video tape of the hotel corridor doesn’t support that legislator’s claim. He lied.

Opinions from the Wichita Eagle:

“I thought minimum wage was supposed to be reserved for high school kids while they live with their parents.”

(JRM Comment: Good one!)

“We are witnessing the out of control government our Founding Fathers warned us about.”

(JRM Comment: Site your sources, Dumbo.)

“We keep hearing about a divided Republican Party. But take a look at the Democratic Party, which does not exist anymore. It has been completely taken over by the socialists and just hasn’t changed its name.”

(JRM Comment: Surely this is evidenced by the way Obama nationalized the banks, the auto industry, and usurped the courts and the legislature to make his own laws. Oh, wait! None of that has happened. Meanwhile, we have someone opining that the Dems are a socialist organization - which isn’t true - while ignoring that the Republican Party seems to be, in fact, a divided party.)

Apparently someone leaked a plan from the White House to proffer a solution to the immigration situation. Indeed, the White House may have staged the “leak” so that it would generate discussion about the matter. Regardless, laws are still made by congress. The increasing feeble-mined John McCain has now attacked the White House. Good one, John. Divert attention from the inadequacy of congress - especially Republicans - to tackle the matter of immigration. We have waited through all the Bush 43 years and the first fur years of the Obama administration for your party, John, to craft meaningful legislation. Turning your disgust toward the White House does not alter the facts. Congress makes the law. Congress has failed to craft immigration law. John, get off your high horse and get to work.

To Marco Rubio, I have this to say: I hope a cereal company comes out with a new product, Trickle Downs, and you become their chief spokesperson.

My neighbor’s dogs have access to their back yard. On warm days, I can hear them barking at the odd and occasional stray cat, adventuresome squirrel or at me if they spot me hauling trash out to the dumpster.

The dogs are ‘house-broken’ as the saying goes. That means that they don’t relieve their bowels or bladders inside the house. Outdoors is a different matter, especially when I take them for a long walk.

The great outdoors becomes an adventure, as well as a place to leave canine messages. These pups stop to pee on a tree stump, then a few feet along the path they find a bush, or lamp post, or a curb, or some other object that needs to be watered. I can walk three blocks and count at least ten stop ’n’ spray diversions.

What if humans were more akin to canines. Say a man goes to a club, dances, plays pool, does a Karaoke rendition in a voice that sounds like a moose on crack, but every so often he pees on the leg of his dance companion, or the chair leg at the table where he and his companion sit, or the leg of the pool table, or the Karaoke microphone?

So, ladies, even is the klutz you are with often acts like a dog, be grateful if he doesn’t emulate the old canine stop ‘n’ spray technique, at least in public.

Another thing, I wonder if a dog can leave a stop ‘n’ spray message that simply ‘un-friends’ some other canine in the neighborhood?

From the Wichita Eagle Opinion Line

“An increase in the minimum wage sounds good until you have to pay more for what you buy and more in taxes.”

If we raise the minimum wages, prides go up. If we keep minimum wage as if, prices won’t go up. If we lower the minimum wage, prices should go down. Why not eliminate all wages ad see what happens?

“Minimum wage is not supposed to be a wage you can support nine kids on. It is for those just entering the work force. If minimum wage isn’t cutting it for you, obtain some skills that are deserving of higher wages.”

This person’s ignorance also smacks of Ronald Reagan and his mythical Welfare Queen.

Minimum wage is relative solely o an individual and his/her labor. It does not regard one’s color, creed, age, gender, marital status.

The first minimum wage law was in Massachusetts in 1912. It was deemed necessary to insure proper wages for women and children. Be that as it may, all state and eventual federal, minimum wage laws applied to individual wages, guaranteeing most workers - would have the benefit of receiving at least that minimum hourly rate.

The minimum wage certainly IS NOT intended to provide for a family with nine kids, because being married or single, having children or not, is not part of the equation.

The original state minimum wages were directed toward those who were already employed. It would, as a consequence, have an impact on people entering the work force after the enactment date of any minimum wage law.

Additionally, the individual who submitted the above opinion may assume that it is easy to live on a modest wage and still have sufficient time and funds to obtain skills that would ultimately produce a more desirable wage. A further assumption is that a person desires a different kind of employment or a better wage. That may be, but some people are content with the work they do. And, for the most part, individuals are not in a position to demand that their government enact minimum wage laws.

Many corporations have starting hourly wages that exceed minimum wage. Such wages may not be significantly higher, and advancement opportunities within some corporations may not be plentiful. But the fact remains, that the person who penned the cited opinion didn’t do much research, but was content to unfurl their banner of ignorance, proudly.

****

Gasoline is up 75 cents a gallon over last month. Probably because that "socialist" mentioned increasing the minimum wage in his State of the Union Address.

Don't laugh. I'm sure some Rebublican and Tea Party folks would be nodding their head in agreement.

Ever vigilant, Miss Dolly Dalrymple is keeping an out for marauding bandicoots and bandersnatches.

Public Broadcasting Funds In Danger

Brad Cooper, The Wichita Eagle, Topeka Bureau, February 11, 2013

Little by little, Kansas public broadcasters feel the pinch of state budget cuts.

At High Plains Public Radio in Garden City, the air sometimes goes dead or programs play twice on consecutive days.

Broadcasts at Radio Kansas in Hutchinson shut down from midnight to 6 a.m. so the station can cut its electric bill.

In Kansas and across the country, public broadcasters find statehouses reluctant to help with the bills for two reasons: There’s simply less money to spare, and Republican-dominated legislatures see the radio and TV stations as too liberal.

“The real question is: Is it a dinosaur that’s dying?” asked state Rep. Pete DeGraaf, a Mulvane Republican and chairman of the General Government Budget Committee.

Managers at public stations face even more gaps in their budgets if the Kansas Legislature agrees with Republican Gov. Sam Brownback’s plans to cut funding even more.

“We would take a pretty good hit. All the stations would,” said Deb Oyler, the executive director for High Plains, which serves a large swath of western Kansas.

In a world with hundreds of cable TV stations, satellite radio and the Internet, public broadcasting faces increasingly tough battles to win government money.

Across the country, cash-strapped states have cut their support for public broadcasting. Brownback tried to eliminate it outright during his first year in office, but legislators went along only with lesser cuts.

This year, the governor wants to cut state support for public TV and radio stations by 40 percent, or roughly $400,000.

For some rural Kansas stations such as Smoky Hills Public Broadcasting in Bunker Hill or High Plains Public Radio, the state’s contribution can make up between 11 percent and 16 percent of their budgets. For stations such as KCPT in Kansas City, state funding makes up about 2 percent of the overall budget.

The Brownback administration has urged public broadcasters to look elsewhere for money, something station executives say they are doing.

Station managers say they are trimming staff, asking employees to take on multiple duties and stepping up fundraising.

Cuts proposed for Kansas mirror a national trend of states getting out of public broadcasting, whether because the outlets are viewed as too liberal, anachronistic in a world overflowing with media or not a core government service.

Amid the billions of dollars that government spends, public broadcasting is easy picking for lawmakers who want to limit government expenses.

Many conservatives see public radio as outside traditional government responsibilities that should be limited to things such as schools, social services, public safety and roads.

But they also see something more sinister: state-run media.

“The fundamental problem is we need to separate news and state,” said David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a free-market think tank.

“It is inappropriate for the government to be involved in news and ideas,” Boaz said. “The First Amendment is designed to protect the free flow of information and the free flow of ideas, but not to have the government producing the ideas.”

Local public broadcasters say they remain relevant to modern life. They say they deliver local public affairs shows or documentaries that cannot be seen anywhere else.

“Those commercial stations that are owned by absentee owners are not doing local history, local arts or any of those things,” said Eugene Williams, general manager at KTWU in Topeka.

About half the states have cut money to public broadcasting in recent years. Those cuts neared $37 million — to $177 million from $214 million — from fiscal 2011 to fiscal 2013, according to data compiled by the National Educational Telecommunications Association.

At least four states — New Jersey, Virginia, New Hampshire and Florida — completely ditched funding for public broadcasting.

Missouri is going in a different direction. Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon has recommended putting $800,000 into public broadcasting for fiscal year 2014 from the state’s tax on non-resident athletes and entertainers. That’s up from the current $100,000.

KCPT in Kansas City receives about $22,000 a year from Missouri, but that could increase to about $225,000 under Nixon’s proposal. KCPT has a budget of $7.2 million.

KCUR receives about $3,400 for arts reporting from the Missouri Arts Council and $50,000 more from the University of Missouri-Kansas City toward its $4.2 million budget.

Public radio advocates say it’s hard to characterize the debate over simply as conservative vs. liberal or Democrat vs. Republican.

“It’s a complicated story,” said Josh Stearns, public media campaign director for Free Press, a nonprofit group that examines how the media influence public policy. “In the same states where we’ve had Republican governors going after this funding, we’ve seen Republican lawmakers standing up vehemently to protect it.”

In places, for instance, such as Kansas.

The state has been trimming public broadcasting since 2009. After taking office in 2011, Brownback wanted to eliminate or further cut grants to public stations. Yet the Republican-controlled Legislature resisted and stopped the governor from cutting as deeply as he wanted.

One Republican who supported public broadcasting was Sen. Carolyn McGinn of Sedgwick, who until this year was chairwoman of the Ways and Means Committee.

She questioned how the state could cut funding for an amenity that benefits the very rural areas where the governor is trying build population.

“The communities that are hurt the most are rural areas,” McGinn said. “If you don’t have cable TV, you can’t get any other kind of information or channels you might want to watch.”

One thing going for public broadcasting this year is its funding source. The governor wants to pay for it from gambling money instead of general tax dollars, which satisfies conservatives who don’t believe in sending tax dollars to public broadcasters.

Public broadcasting will get about $1 million from the state this year, down from about $1.5 million the year before.

NETA president Skip Hinton said there may have been occasions when politics drove cuts in public broadcasting. But most of the cuts, he said, reflected tough state finances.

Kansas lawmakers eye every spending decision in the context of income tax cuts projected to cause revenues to plummet more than $700 million in the next fiscal year.

Nevertheless, some Kansas public broadcasters still hear complaints inside and outside the Capitol about their perceived liberal inclinations.

“If that’s true, we need to look at what we’re doing and make sure we’re not leaning one way or the other and presenting it as close to the middle as we can,” said Mark McCain, general manager at KMUW in Wichita.

State Rep. Virgil Peck, a Tyro Republican, is among those Kansas lawmakers who oppose using general tax dollars for public broadcasting.

“They do have a political bent just like MSNBC, but that’s not the reason I oppose it,” Peck said. “Should we give money to Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh and all these others who are right-wing groups? No. If they can survive on their own, God bless them.”

But there are other conservatives who are more supportive of public broadcasting.

“I think it’s particularly important in rural communities that don’t have the same level of access to educational and cultural presentations in any format,” said state Rep. John Rubin, a Shawnee Republican. “I would rather look elsewhere to realize savings in the budget.”

 

(JRM COMMENT: Mr. DeGraaf. Isn’t the Republican Party the real dinosaur?)

The following article was written by Wichita Eagle Staff writer, Becci Tanner. It was published on February 10, 2013.

He was the man who mortally wounded President Abraham Lincoln’s assassin – and was perhaps one of the most colorful and certifiably insane figures to emerge in Kansas history.

Thomas “Boston” Corbett’s life was indeed complicated.

With recent popularity of the movie, “Lincoln” and its nomination for 12 Oscars, it seems fitting to look at the story of murder and mystery and how it eventually included Kansas connections.

Corbett was born in London in 1832. His family moved to New York in 1839, and as a boy, he learned how to be a hatter.

There is a theory that the mercury used in the hatter’s trade may have caused some of the Corbett’s mental problems as he aged. Some of the symptoms associated with mercury poisoning include irritability, exaggerated responses to stimulation, emotional instability, and fits of anger with violent often irrational behavior.

In 1858, Corbett had moved to Boston.

He had been married but his wife died during childbirth. And that’s when he turned to religion for solace.

Corbett became an evangelical Christian during a Boston revival and started growing his hair long to look more like Jesus. He changed his first name to Boston to celebrate his baptism.

He became an itinerant street corner preacher.

And when the 26-year-old Corbett was mocked and tempted by local prostitutes, he first studied the Bible (the 18th and 19th chapters of Matthew), before taking out a pair of scissors and castrating himself.

After performing the operation, Corbett then went to a prayer meeting, ate a hearty meal and then walked awhile before seeking medical attention.

Boston Corbett’s medical records from Massachusetts General Hospital indicate Corbett was hospitalized from July 16 through Aug. 15, 1858, where he recovered from his self-imposed injury.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Corbett enlisted first in the 12th New York Volunteers and then to Company L of the 16th New York Cavalry. In mid-1864, he was captured by Confederates and held five months in Andersonville, one of the deadliest prison camps of the war. He was eventually released but not before his fellow prisoners periodically complained about the loud prayers that came from his tent each evening.

When he was released, he was emaciated and suffered from scurvy, diarrhea and fever.

After spending three weeks in an Annapolis hospital recovering, he rejoined his regiment in Virginia.

On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre.

The next day Corbett was selected with 26 other cavalrymen to pursue Booth.

On April 24, 1865, the soldiers cornered Booth in a Virginia tobacco barn. Federal officials wanted to take Booth to court.

A fire was set to the barn to flush Booth out. But as the president’s assassin moved inside the barn, a shot rang out and as the barn doors were opened, the soldiers found Booth dying of a wound to the neck.

Corbett claimed to have shot Booth through a crack in the barn boards, although people at the scene said it couldn’t have been him.

Corbett said he had seen Booth raise his pistol, and shot. Corbett was charged with disobeying orders but freed by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton who was quoted as saying, “The rebel is dead. The patriot lives.”

Corbett would later say, “Providence directed my hand.” And the nation’s media turned him into a hero. He was photographed by famed Civil War photographer Mathew Brady.

He received more than $1,600 in reward money but then immediately was discharged from the Army.

In 1878, Corbett moved to Concordia following a mental breakdown. For a time, he lived in a dugout on 80 acres and kept to himself. Some said he lived in fear of being assassinated.

There were instances recorded by local newspapers that claim Corbett pulled his pistols threatening to kill local boys playing a baseball game, on the sheriff and when he was brought to court.

When acquaintances believed Corbett had been slighted recognition by the government for killing Booth, they found a job for him in Topeka.

In 1887, Corbett was appointed assistant doorkeeper of the Kansas House of Representatives in Topeka.

On Feb. 15, 1887, after a prayer, Corbett – believing the prayer had been mocked – pulled out his revolver and waved it. He was arrested, declared insane and sent to the Topeka Asylum for the Insane.

He escaped a year later, briefly visited a friend in Neodesha and was never heard from again.

A monument to Corbett stands near Concordia in a pasture.

An the Academy Award for best costume go to ....!

This scenario - the pope resigning - certainly calls for conspiracy theories to abound.

I can hear the ghost of Ronald Reagan saying, "There you go again! A pope resigns in the 1400's and again in 2013. It's a slippery slope, my friends. Next you know, with such a fast pace a this, we'll have resignations here, and resignations there, and resignations everywhere. Where will it end?"

I hope the new pope will have a name befitting the attitudes of THE CHURCH.  Pope Sexist, Pope Pedophilius, Pope Innocents Beware-ious, Pope Semper Fi Medievalius.

I would like to see THE CHURCH appoint Ralph Lauren to design some new gowns.

I'd like the corporate headquaters of THE CHURCH move to Spain, there to take up residence in Gaudi's,  basilica and expiatory of the Holy Family. To exemplify the humble approach to life and faith, THE CHURCH should be mindful having offical garb, and an official residence, that presents the seriousness believing in a pedophile and rapist sky creature, an innocent virginal victim and an illegitimate son.

Pope Bene is going to resign. Wow! An old Nazi with a conscience, after all. I suggest the next pope should be a Black lady with a divinity degree from Liberty University or Oral Roberts University. Another idea would be to break up the church and establish separate groups around the globe. The America Catholic Church doesn't always seem in lock-step with the Vatican cabal.

The Grammy Awards: Adele looked like an over-stuffed chair with an atrocious slip cover. I never saw so many very unattractive gowns, on some otherwise attractive women, in all my life.

Time to rake some leaves. I would do, but the feral cats like to snuggle in the rustling leaves and watch the world go by. The gray cat is Mister Brisket. Brisket comes inside upon occasion. He is really friendly and loving.

The other cat won't let me come with twenty feet before it runs off to hide. I haven't name this cat. I don't know if it is a boy or a girl.