Help defeat out-of-state interests and keep Kansas air clean

Action Alert!

Legislators in Topeka recently introduced legislation to overturn Governor Sebelius' courageous decision last year to reject the Sunflower coal-fired power plant -- a plant that would be the largest new source of global warming emissions in the United States.

Kansas does not need this plant; over 80 percent of its power would be sent to other states. We need your help to beat back this terrible legislation and keep Kansas on track to move beyond dirty coal power!

The proposed legislation (HB 2711/SB 515) is a sweetheart deal for Sunflower and the coal lobby. Crafted in secret with coal industry lobbyists, the bill would increase the state's total global warming emissions more than 10 percent, at a time the rest of the country and the world are working to reduce global warming pollution. Coal plants have been rejected in multiple other states including Florida, Oklahoma, California, Washington and Idaho.

Under the proposed legislation the developers of those rejected coal plants would actually be encouraged to build their coal plants in Kansas, opening up the state to become the coal capital of the nation.

Kansas has the third best wind resource potential in the country; that is our future. This legislation will take us in the wrong direction. It's time for our state to move forward, to embrace technical innovation, clean energy and family-supporting jobs.

Please contact your legislators by clicking here and tell them to reject this bill favoring coal plants, and instead move Kansas forward to join the other states that are developing clean, renewable wind power.

Additional Actions you can take:

Take action with GPACE this week and let your voice be heard. In this email there are 3 actions that you can take without even getting off your computer.

Action 1: Go to www.GPACE.org and sign our petition to the Kansas Legislaure and Governor Kathleen Sebelius that lets them know you support a clean, secure, and profitable Kansas energy policy.

Action 2: Forward this email onto your friends and co-workers letting them know how important it is to stand together and fight for an open, honest, discussion about our future, and a chance to form a comprehensive energy policy that would embrace the variety of potential energy solutions the state has.

We individuals opposed to HB2711 and SB515 to contact their legislators and senators today! You can do so by clicking here.

If you have any questions, please feel free to call at 785-200-8010. You may also email Stephanie Cole with the Sierra Club at stephaniercole@gmail.com.

For more information on energy policy in Kansas click here

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Immigrants Come Here Because Globalization Took Their Jobs Back There
By Jim Hightower, The Hightower Lowdown
Thursday 07 February 2008
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Seal-the-border hysteria is everywhere. Instead of blaming immigrants for America's problems, let's look at executives on both sides of the border.

The wailing in our country about the "invasion of immigrants" has been long and loud. As one complainant put it, "Few of their children in the country learn English ...The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages ... Unless the stream of the importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious."

That's not some diatribe from one of today's Republican presidential candidates. It's the anxious cry of none other than Ben Franklin, deploring the wave of Germans pouring into the colony of Pennsylvania in the 1750s. Thus, anti-immigrant eruptions are older than the United States itself, and they've flared up periodically throughout our history, targeting the Irish, French, Italians, Chinese, and others. Even George W's current project to wall off our border is not a new bit of nuttiness - around the time of the nation's founding, John Jay, who later became the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, proposed "a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics."

Luckily for the development and enrichment of our country, these past public frenzies ultimately failed to exclude the teeming masses, and those uproars now appear through the telescope of time to have been some combination of ridiculous panic, political demagoguery and xenophobic ugliness. Still, this does not mean that the public's anxiety and simmering anger about today's massive influx of Mexicans coming illegally across our 2,000-mile shared border is illegitimate. However, most of what the politicians and pundits are saying about it is illegitimate.

Wedge Issue

There is way too much xenophobia, racism and demagoguery at play around illegal immigration, but such crude sentiments are not what is bringing this problem to a national political boil. Polls show - as do conversations at any Chat & Chew Cafe in the country - that there is a deep and genuine alarm about the issue among the nonxenophobic, nonracist American majority. In particular, workaday families are fearful about what an endless flow of low-wage workers portends for their economic future, and they're not getting good answers from Republicans, Democrats, corporate leaders or the media.

For the GOP candidates in this year's presidential run, the contest is coming down to who can be the most nativist knucklehead. They accuse each other of not wanting to punish immigrant children enough, of not being absolutists on "English-only" proposals, of having coddled illegal entrants in the past with amnesty proposals and sanctuaries, and of not being hawkish enough on sealing off and militarizing the border.

The leader of the anti-immigrant Republican pack is Tom Tancredo, a Colorado congress-critter who based his ill-fated presidential campaign on immigrant bashing. This goober is so nasty he'd scare small children. His website screeched that immigrants are "pushing drugs, raping kids, destroying lives," and his campaign slogan is a sledgehammer demand: "Deport those who don't belong. Make sure they never come back." As for illegal immigrants, Tom thinks that the term "illegal" is too soft, preferring to demonize immigrants as "aliens." Tancredo doesn't merely rant, he foams at the mouth, maniacally warning about waves of Mexican terrorists who are "coming to kill me and you and your children." Accused of trying to turn America into a gated community, he exulted, "You bet!"

At least he's taken a position, even if it's un-American and loopy. Democratic leaders, on the other hand, have mostly tried to do a squishy shuffle, wanting to beef up law enforcement against illegal immigrants while also mouthing soothing words about the good work ethic of our friends south of the border and offering a bureaucratic rigmarole to allow some of the younger ones to gain permanent residency in our country. Worse, such corporate Democrats as Rep. Rahm Emanuel urge the party's candidates either to adopt the Republican's punitive message or simply to try ducking the issue.

Which brings us to the wall, both figuratively and literally. The fact that we are resorting to the construction of an enormous fence between two friendly nations admits to an abject failure by policy makers, who are so bereft of ideas, honesty, courage and morality that all they can do is to try walling off the problem.

We've had experience here in Texas with the futility of tall border fences. Molly Ivins reported a beer-induced incident that took place in 1983. Walling off Mexico had been proposed back then by the Reaganauts, and a test fence had been built way down in the Big Bend outpost of Terlingua. This little town also happened to be the site of a renowned chili cookoff that Molly helped judge, and it attracted a big crowd of impish, beer-drinking chiliheads.

There stood the barrier, 17 feet tall and topped with barbwire. It didn't take many beers before the first-ever "Terlingua Memorial Over, Under, or Through the Mexican Fence Climbing Contest" was cooked up. Winning time: 30 seconds.

Yet here come the border sealers again. Bush & Co. (including Democrats who have allowed the funding) is putting up an initial $1.2 billion to start building this version of the wall, which is projected to cost up to $60 billion over the next 25 years to build and maintain. It's a monster wall - two or three 40-foot-high rows of reinforced fencing that take a swath of land 150 feet wide and stretch for 700 miles.

The Mexican government and people are insulted and appalled by the wall; ranchers, mayors and families living on either side of the border hate it; environmentalists are aghast at its destructive impact on the ecology of the area. Still, it's being built. Indeed, a 2005 federal act contained a little-noticed section authorizing Bush's Homeland Security czar to suspend any laws that stand in the way of building the wall. Current czar Michael Chertoff has already used this unprecedented authority to waive 19 statutes, including the Endangered Species, Clean Water and National Historic Preservation Acts.

All this for something that will not work. As Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona put it, "Show me a 50-foot wall and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder." People have literally been dying to cross into the United States, and it's not possible to build a wall tall enough to stop them. They will keep coming.

Why?

The question that policy makers have not faced honestly is this one: Why do these immigrants come? The answer is not that they are pulled by our jobs and government benefits, but that they are pushed by the abject poverty that their families face in Mexico. That might seem like a mere semantic difference, but it's huge if you're trying to develop a policy to stop the human flood across our border.

Although you never hear it mentioned in debates on the issue, you might start with this reality: Most Mexican people really would prefer to live in their own country. Can we all say, duh? Pedro Martin, who has seen most of the young men and women in his small village depart for El Norte, put it this way: "Up north, even though they pay more, you're not necessarily living as well. You feel out of place. Here you can walk around the whole town, and it's comfortable. Life is easier."

Their family, language, culture, identity and happiness is Mexican - yet sheer economic survival requires so many of them to abandon the place they love.

Again, why? Because in the last 15 years, Mexico's longstanding system of sustaining its huge population of poor citizens (including small self-sufficient farms, jobs in state-owned industries and subsidies for such essentials as tortillas) has been scuttled at the insistence of U.S. banks, corporations, government officials and "free market" ideologues. In the name of "modernizing" the Mexican economy, such giants as Citigroup, Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods and GE - in cahoots with the plutocrats and oligarchs of Mexico - have laid waste to that country's grass-roots economy, destroying the already-meager livelihoods of millions.

The 1994 imposition of NAFTA was particularly devastating. Just as Bill Clinton and the corporate elites did here, Mexico's ruling elites touted NAFTA as a magic elixir that would generate growth, create jobs, raise wages and eliminate the surge of Mexican migrants into the United States. They were horribly wrong:

• Economic growth in Mexico has been anemic since '94, and the benefits of any growth have gone overwhelmingly to the wealthiest families.
• Since NAFTA, Mexico has created less than a third of the millions of decent jobs it needs.
• Average factory wages in Mexico have dropped by more than 5 percent under NAFTA.
• Unemployment has jumped, and unskilled workers are paid only $5 a day.
• U.S. agribusiness corporations have more than doubled their shipment of subsidized crops into Mexico, busting the price that indigenous farmers got for their production and displacing some 2 million peasant farmers from their land.
• Huge agribusiness operations, many owned by U.S. investors, now control Mexican agricultural production and pay farmworkers under $2 an hour.
• Since NAFTA passed, there has been a flood of business bankruptcies and takeovers in Mexico as predatory U.S. chains have moved in. U.S. corporations now control 40 percent of the country's formal jobs, with Wal-Mart reigning as the No. 1 employer.
• Nineteen million more Mexicans live in poverty today than when NAFTA was passed.

So, here's the deal: Thanks to Mexico's newly corporatized economy, wage earners there get poverty pay of $5 a day (about $1,600 a year), while a few hundred miles north, they might draw that much in an hour. What would you do?

The Wrong Debate

In our national imbroglio over Mexican immigration (yes, some illegal migrants come from elsewhere, but more than three-fourths are from Mexico), our "leaders" have set us up to look down at impoverished working people forced to leave their homeland and risk death in order to help their families escape poverty.

Instead of coming down on them, why not start looking up - up at the executive suites on both sides of the border. Up is where the power is. The moneyed elites in those suites are the profiteering few who have rigged all of our trade and labor policies to knock down workers, farmers and small businesses, not merely in Mexico but in our country as well.

In the United States, the middle class feels imperiled because ... well, because it is imperiled. Politicians, economists and the richly paid pundits keep telling us that the American economy is robust and that people's financial pessimism and anxieties are irrational. At the kitchen table level, however, folks know the difference between chicken salad and chicken manure. Yes, these are boom times for the luxury class, but the middle class is imploding. In a recent letter to the editor, a working stiff in California put it this way:

"We've replaced steaks with corn flakes; we can't afford to get sick; our kids can't afford health insurance; we hope that our 10-year-old van keeps running because we can't afford a new one; our kids can't buy a home because housing prices are exorbitant; our purchasing power continually regresses; and worst of all, the poverty and near-poverty classes are growing."

It's this economic fragility that anti-immigrant forces play on. But even if there were no illegal workers in our country - none - the fragility would remain, for poor Mexican laborers are not the ones who:

• Downsized and offshored our middle-class jobs.
• Perverted our bankruptcy laws to let corporations abrogate their union contracts.
• Stopped enforcement of America's wage and hour laws.
• Perverted the National Labor Relations Board into an anti-worker tool for corporations.
• Illegally reclassified millions of employees as "independent contractors," leaving them with no benefits or labor rights.
• Subverted the right of workers to organize.
• Turned a blind eye to the re-emergence in America of sweatshops and child labor in everything from the clothing industry to Wal-Mart.
• Made good healthcare a luxury item.
• Let rich campaign donors take over both political parties.
• Passed by hook and crook a continuing series of global-trade scams to enrich the few and knock down the many.

Powerless immigrants didn't do these things to us. The richest, most-powerful, best-connected corporate interests did them. Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies at the University of Missouri, offers this example of Iowa Beef Processors (IBP), the largest meatpacker in the United States, now owned by the multibillion-dollar conglomerate Tyson Foods:

Until the late 1970s, meatpacking was a high-wage industry, with highly skilled workers in charge. Factories were in union cities, union contracts provided good wages and benefits, and unions set professional standards for everything from worker training to safety conditions. Then IBP's executives transformed this beneficial model into today's profiteering system. The factories moved to nonunion cities and rural areas, and lower-skilled workers were hired to do repetitive cuts on speeded-up assembly lines. With Reagan as president, meat-industry lobbyists were able to emasculate labor laws, and unions lost their influence over the workplace, which became much less rewarding and more dangerous. IBP began intensive recruiting of Mexican workers (legal or not) to do what had become very nasty work. In only 20 years, meatpacking wages dropped by roughly half, the union was ousted, and the rate of workplace injury became one of the highest of any industry (more than a fourth of meatpacking workers now suffer "accidents").

The Fix

Immigration reform cannot be separated from labor and trade reform. We can't fix the former without dealing with the other two. We must stop the exploitative NAFTAfication of such aspiring economies as Mexico and instead develop genuine grass-roots investment policies that give people there an ability to remain in their homeland. Then we must enforce our own labor laws - from wage and hour rules to the NLRB - so as to empower American workers to enforce their own rights.

Eliminating the need to migrate from Mexico and rebuilding the middle-class ladder, here is an "immigration policy" that will work. But it requires us to go right at the corporate kleptocracy that now owns Washington and controls the debate.

We must challenge Democrats, especially, to broaden the debate and to recognize that they must choose sides - to be for workers or for more trade imperialism. Right now, the Democratic leadership is siding with imperialism and exacerbating the economic causes of Latino migration. For example, just last month, Speaker Nancy Pelosi engineered a vote to extend NAFTA to Peru, a corporate favor that could be called the Tom-Rahm Bipartisan Axis of Immigration Stupidity, for it drew enthusiastic support from both Tom Tancredo and Rahm Emanuel.

America's immigration problem is not down on the border, it's in Washington and on Wall Street.

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From "The Hightower Lowdown," edited by Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer, January 2008. Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker and author of the new book Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow. (Wiley, March 2008)

2008 Kansas Legislative Session with Senator Reitz and Representatives Carlin and Hawk.

Useful State Contact Information:

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800-432-3535

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insurance Commissioner's Office
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What is Obscenity?

Originally read on 1 March 2007
by Christopher E. Renner

This week the Kansas legislature’s right-wing darling, Rep. Lance Kinzer, Republican from Olathe, under the banner of “obscenity” lead a direct attack on free speech. Rep. Kinzer so values our basic freedoms that he wants parents to be able to sue teachers for exposing their students to ideas the parents find objectionable, which is what HB 2200 would allow.

HB 2200 would amend several criminal statutes relating to obscenity. The bill would limit the ability of elementary and secondary schools and teachers to assert the defense that the materials they used in class had literary, educational, artistic, political or scientific value to a change of obscenity. Under current law, this defense is provided to public and private schools, as well as, colleges and universities. It is called academic freedom and protects educators from being dragged from their classrooms and thrown in jail for educating children and presenting ideas that some might find offensive.

Basically, Kinzer was able to get the House Federal and State Affairs committee to approve HB 2200 which would remove all academic freedom protections in the state’s obscenity laws for K-12 teachers.

Under Kansas law, material is deemed obscene if an average person, applying community standards, would find that it “appears to the prurient interest” and involves “patently offensive” depictions of sex or nudity. Also, the material must lack “serious literary, educational, artistic, political or scientific value.”

So what “obscene” books are children being force to read in rich, white Johnson County schools that have these parents so upset?

According to Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools their poor little privileged white Christian children have to read such books as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Color Purple, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Slaughterhouse Five, The Norton Anthologies of American Literature, Tony Morrisons’ Song of Solomon and Beloved, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, there’s also Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, --- do you see any pattern here?

Maybe the parents are upset that their children have to read at all. Heaven forbid their children might be exposed to real life experiences that require rational thought and challenges their parents’ irrationality and un-American theocratic beliefs.

For those of us who believe in freedom of speech, press, and religion, we know the origins of the Blue Valley parent’s concern was really one book: Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden.

The American Library Association designated the book a "Best of the Best Books for Young Adults." The School Library Journal included the book in its list of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century. But having the book on its library shelves ended up costing another Johnson County school district - Olathe - $160,000.

Back in 1993, the LGBT organization Project 21 donated Annie on My Mind, along with Frank Mosca's All-American Boys, to forty-two high schools in the Kansas City area.

Because both books included homosexual themes, some parents objected that the books were made available to high school students.

In the ensuing controversy, opponents showed their respect for our nation’s Bill of Rights by burning copies of Annie on My Mind.

Around the time the good old-fashioned Nazi book burning took place, author Nancy Garden was at a writers' conference. When asked if she had had trouble with Annie on My Mind she answered “no.” Soon after, she learned of the burning when she received a call from Stephen Friedman, who asked, "Did you know your book has just been burned in Kansas City?"

Garden reportedly said: “Burned! I didn't think people burned books any more. Only Nazis burn books.” Good choice of a descriptive adjective to use for those trying to shove theocracy down our throats, Nancy.

Then, on December 13, 1993, superintendent Ron Wimmer, of the Olathe School District, ordered the book removed from the high school library. Wimmer said he made his decision in order to "avoid controversy," like the public book burning had produced.

The Olathe School District refused to accept other copies of the book, even removing a copy that had sat on its library shelf for over ten years. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union joined several families and a teacher to sued the school district for removing the book.

Two years later in September 1995, the case went to trial. In November 1995, U.S. District Court Justice Thomas Van Bebber ruled that while a school district is not obligated to purchase any book, it cannot remove a book from library shelves unless that book is deemed educationally unsuitable. He ruled Annie on My Mind to be educationally suitable, and called its removal an unconstitutional attempt to "prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion."

The school district announced it would not appeal the court's decision in 1999, and restored Annie on My Mind to library shelves. The entire proceeding had cost the district over $160,000. So that is why Rep. Kinzer introduced HB 2200. To provide an end-run around the rights you and I enjoy thanks to the US Constitution and the Constitution of the State of Kansas.

HB 2200 is another example of the social conservatives’ agenda to limit free speech, limit access to knowledge and portray our public education system as somehow being the cause of the moral decay of our nation they scream about at the top of their lungs. How many social conservative Christians have been exposed as frequenting prostitutes, or consuming pornography and drugs have there been now anyway? Oh, I digress….

What is even more upsetting to me is the following fact: according to the Lawrence Journal World, the only Representative on the House Federal and State Committee to vote against the bill was Ann Mah, a representative from Douglas County.

Our own representative, Tom Hawk, who sits of Federal and State Committee and is a retired teacher, voted for HB2200! Rep. Hawk reports that he voted for HB 2200 because he thought that as amended the bill would provide protections to teachers. He now regrets his affirming vote. He realizes that the parents from Blue Valley who had contacted him for his support of their censorship bill were doing an "end run" on their school board for the books they did not like in the high school curriculum. If you want to express your opinion to Rep. Hawk, his office phone number is: 785-296-7665.

But lets get back to the issue of what is obscene.

KSU took a public relations beating this past week from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in what is clearly an example of the obscenity that Rep. Kinzer is trying to stamp out: Total disregard for life - throwing live chickens onto the basketball court.

Gandhi once said: “The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” Surely KSU students are more creative and intelligent than thinking that throwing live animals is the best way we can show our resolve to defeat our greatest rival.

But even more “obscene” to me is the lengths that Kansas State University will go to promote homophobia and how that homophobia is tolerated by KSU officials.

In the lead up to the same great chicken toss game against KU, t-shirts appeared sporting the registered trade mark of the Power Cat and the following quote: “KU = gay.”

Now according to the “values” espoused by Kansas State University, such blatant prejudice isn’t one of the Core Community Values this institution of higher learning is supposed to be instilling in its students. Moreover, since the Power Cat is a registered trade mark, didn’t someone in the University have to approve the use of the KSU symbol to promote this irrational prejudice and bigotry? So why did the university allow this? By equating all KU students as homosexuals, just what did KSU gain?

Other than once again demonstrating for the rest of the world that we lack basic civility, respect for others, and knowledge of the complex world we live in, KSU gained nothing. The t-shirts were an insult to KSU and the state of Kansas. But I doubt if anything will be done to address this most recent example of institutional promotion of homophobia, unless people complain to university officials and in the press.

But maybe, if HB 2200 passes as amended which also removes academic freedom for university professors, KU students could sue KSU for it’s promotion of “obscenity.” The shirts obviously had no serious literary, educational, artistic, political or scientific value. Now wouldn’t that just get Rep. Kinzer’s goat? A bunch of liberal college students using his law to sue a state institution over homosexuality. I’m sure the social conservatives didn’t see that one coming.

Sources:
"Books in Trouble: Annie on My Mind", National Coalition Against Censorship, May 1996.

Miner, Barbara. "When Reading Good Books Can Get Schools In Trouble: First of Two Articles", Rethinking Schools: Online, Spring 1998.

Stang, Debra L.. "Annie on My Mind: Let Love Win!", suite101, November 1, 2000. Retrieved on 2007-02-25.

Your Civil Rights

Originally read on 22 February 2007
by Christopher E. Renner

It has been an interesting week for those of us who value our civil rights as outlined in the U. S. Constitution and in particular the Bill of Rights. President Bush and his cronies continue to do everything in their power to eliminate those rights, from the right to a fair trail to our right of privacy.

Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) introduced legislation last week that seeks to eliminate online privacy by requiring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to maintain detailed records on each of their subscribers’ online activities. The bill would give Attorney General Alberto Gonzales broad discretion to determine what records ISPs must keep and for how long. In addition, it would require "sexually explicit" websites to post warning labels or face criminal sanctions.

Marvin Johnson, Legislative Counsel for the ACLU Washington Legislative Office said:

"Legislation like this is like swatting a fly with a bazooka. Such sweeping measures do little to stop online crime; instead, they overwhelm law enforcement agents with mountains of raw data and have a chilling effect on ISP subscribers’ First Amendment rights. There is no limit to the amount of information Attorney General Gonzales can require ISPs to keep, from instant messages to private emails to web searches, and he can require that they be kept forever. This represents an incredible invasion into our privacy and freedom to use the Internet without the government reading over our shoulders."

And that’s not all. In May 2006, USA Today revealed that since shortly after 9/11 at least two major phone companies - AT&T and Verizon - have been voluntarily granting the National Security Administration direct, mass access to their customers' calling records, and that the NSA had compiled a giant database of those records. This program extends to all Americans, not just those suspected of terrorist or criminal activity. In short, phone companies are voluntarily turning over millions of customer records to the National Security Agency.

Acting without a court order or the knowledge or consent of their customers, phone companies are providing the government with potentially intimate details about who you know and who you talk to - details that are stored in giant databases, and perhaps mined by the NSA's supercomputers to scan through each of our associations and interests for "suspicious" signs, whatever that may be.

The goal of this program, according to media reports, is to "create a database of every call ever made within the nation's borders." This information can easily be linked to determine your identity, your friends, and your interests.

I don’t know about any of you, but I lived in Europe before the fall of Stalinism, or “hard” communism in Eastern Europe. The tactics described above are the same tactics that were used by those governments to spy on their citizens, arrest them for such illegal activities as voicing their own opinions and “speaking against the state.” Is it just me, or have we completely lost all sense of the reason why our nation exists -- it’s called democracy people and once it is lost, it is very hard to get it back. The Bush administration’s desire to spy on the American people is illegal and un-American, and immoral. It is time it stopped!

Moreover, this past week it was revealed that both AT&T and Version are attempting to obstruct discussion of their collaboration with the government by appealing to the Securities and Exchange Commission for permission to block the proposed shareholder resolutions.

As owners of publicly traded corporations, shareholders have a right to vote on issues they feel are vital to preserve their company’s reputation and protect the long-term value of investments and maintain customer privacy. AT&T and Verizon customers, board members and shareholders must be aware of all the issues inherent in assisting the government with its spying. So the “free market” isn’t really free after all.

Closer to home, conservatives in the Kansas Senate gained approval of Senate Bill 169 which will require all Kansans to show photo-identification to vote as well as proof of citizenship to register to vote.

SB 169 was introduced by Senator Tim Huelskamp, R- Fowler in southwest Kansas, an area that the South Poverty Law Center has reported for several years as having KKK activities and known to openly discriminate against the Hispanic population living there.

SB 169 is nothing more than an effort to impose a poll tax on the citizens of the state and to disenfranchise poorer Kansans from the election process because the conservative agenda is to further the gap between right and poor and to allow no means for the economic disadvantaged to petition their government to alleviate their suffering.

It cost $12.00 to get a copy of your birth certificate in Kansas and the cost of a passport is now up to $97.00. For many of our listeners these are probably not expenses that seem exorbitant. However, if you are living on the Kansas Minimum Wage, or the current Federal Minimum Wage, they are.

If you earn $5.25 and work 40 hours per week, 52 weeks of the year your total annual income would be only $10,712. If you are a typical low wage earner - a single mother - $12.00 represents about three hours of work. It represents feeding you family for a day. $97.00 represents going without health care.

Why do we need SB 169?

SB 169 is yet another example of the conservative’s agenda to limit the civil rights of all citizens by placing one obstacle after another in the pathway to full participation in the democratic process. It makes a problem where there isn’t a problem and will without a doubt make things more difficult at the polling place, slow down the process, and cause people to be denied their right to vote. But after all, isn’t that what the conservative want?

And if that wasn’t enough to think about, this past week also showed how low Kansas State University will go to promote homophobia. In the lead up to the “big game” against KU, t-shirts appeared sporting the registered trade mark of the power cat and the following quote “KU = gay.”

Now according to the “values” espoused by Kansas State University, such blatant prejudice isn’t one of the Core Community Values this institution of higher learning is supposed to be instilling in its students. Moreover, since the power cat is a registered trade mark, didn’t someone in the University have to approve the use of the KSU symbol to promote this irrational prejudice and bigotry? So why did the university allow this? By equating all KU students as homosexuals, just what did KSU gain? Other than once again demonstrating for the rest of the world that we lack basic civility, respect for others, and knowledge of the complex world we live in. The t-shirts were an insult to KSU and the state of Kansas. But I doubt if anything will be done to address this most recent example of institutional promotion of homophobia unless people complain to university officials and in the press.