Regional/
Kansas City :

• 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)