ELLIS–Students and staff of Ellis High School won’t be in their classrooms Mon., Oct. 17. Instead, they will be scattered around town participating in the school’s fifth annual Community Service Day and helping those in need.
General cleaning and maintenance projects will be performed by the volunteers during EHS Community Service Day in conjunction with the Ellis City-Wide Cleanup Wed., Oct. 19.
Elderly residents and those who are unable to perform general cleaning or maintenance work and would like help, should contact EHS Principal Corey Burton at (785) 726-3151 or Leonard Schoenberger at (785) 726-1278.
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in France in late June 1944.
By SAMANTHA KENNER Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum, and Boyhood Home
ABILENE – A special display is planned to mark President Eisenhower’s 126th birthday. Beginning Wednesday, Oct. 12 the D-Day Planning Table will be removed from its case and displayed in its entirety including the additional leaves and chairs as well as the original rug. The display will be located in the museum military gallery through Tuesday, Oct. 18. The museum is open 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Visit www.eisenhower.archives.gov for admission details.
Birthday Party, Friday 10/14 – 3:30 p.m.
The public is invited to join the Eisenhower Foundation on Friday, Oct. 14 from 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. in the Visitors Center Auditorium in celebration of President Eisenhower’s 126th birthday. The gathering will include Mamie’s sugar cookies and punch.
VFW Vigil, Friday 10/14 – 4:00 p.m.
The VFW will open their annual vigil with a special announcement from the Abilene Post #3279. VFW posts from across the state will stand vigil overnight at the burial site of the President. The public is also encouraged to join this free event occurring in front of the Place of Meditation. There will be a document display showing the special relationship President Eisenhower had with VFW Post #3279.
Wreath Laying Ceremony, Saturday 10/15 – 10:30 a.m.
Saturday events begin with the Annual Wreath Laying Ceremony led by the 1st Infantry Division of Ft. Riley at 10:30 a.m. The procession from the Library building will include a number of dignitaries and proceed to the Place of Meditation for the placement of the wreath.
American Legion Pilgrimage, Saturday 10/15 – 10:45 a.m.
The American Legion Pilgrimage will be held at the center of campus in front of the statue. American Legion Riders Post #240 will provide the rifle salute for the ceremony. Representatives from every post around Kansas will gather to pay their respects to the President. This ceremony is free and open to the public.
Reserved Motorcycle Parking – South Lot
An area in the south parking lot near the Place of Meditation will be designated for motorcycle parking only. A number of veteran riding associations including the American Legion Riders and Combat Vets Motorcycle Association will attend in support of the Saturday events.
Legacy Gala, Saturday 10/15
The theme for this year’s Eisenhower Legacy Gala is Everybody Likes Ike, taken from the 1952 video produced by Walt Disney for Ike’s first presidential campaign. Campaign election memorabilia will be on display during the reception. The evening highlight will be the presentation of the Eisenhower Legacy Awards. This year’s presentation will honor the efforts of Kansas Governor Edward Arn, U.S. Senator Harry Darby, and founder of Hallmark Cards Joyce C. Hall, who were instrumental in securing funding to build the original Eisenhower Museum. Descendants of Governor Arn and Mr. Hall will be in attendance to accept their family member’s Eisenhower Legacy Award.
Another special guest for the evening will be presidential whiz kid, Macey Hensley, from Council Grove, Kan. who has appeared numerous times on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, astounding everyone with her knowledge of U.S. presidents.
This annual, invitation-only event is already sold out. Sponsors for this year’s event include First Bank Kansas and Waddell & Reed, April Barker. For more information on attending or being a sponsor for the 2017 Legacy Gala, please contact the Eisenhower Foundation at (785) 263-6771.
Partly cloudy skies and temperatures in the lower 70s will be accompanied by breezy, south winds today. There will be a disturbance that moves through the area and there is a chance for showers and thunderstorms tonight into Monday morning. The early part of the week will bring the return of warmer temperatures, mainly back into the low 80s. A cold front will move through Tuesday night and bring cooler temperatures.
Today: Mostly cloudy, with a high near 74. South wind 6 to 11 mph increasing to 13 to 18 mph in the afternoon.
Tonight: A 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly after 1am. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 54. South southeast wind 11 to 13 mph, with gusts as high as 23 mph.
Columbus Day: A 20 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms before 1pm. Mostly cloudy, then gradually becoming sunny, with a high near 78. South wind 13 to 17 mph.
Monday Night: Mostly clear, with a low around 52. South wind 8 to 13 mph.
photo by Elle Moxley- Helen Stoll answers questions at Vikingpalooza, a fundraiser for Shawnee Mission West High School athletics. Stoll, a Democrat, doesn’t think moderate Republicans can fix problems in Topeka.
Growing up in Shawnee, Tom Cox remembers looking up to “traditional Republicans.”
Politicians like Bill Graves, Bob Dole and Nancy Kassebaum – Kansans who were willing to reach across the aisle and set political ideology aside in the interest of public policy.
“My pitch at the door? ‘I’m running against a Brownback Republican, and I’m an anti-Brownback Republican,’” Cox said. “We need to save our state. We need to focus on tax reform, education reform and protecting local governments as a start.”
Running on a pro-public education platform, Cox unseated one of those Brownback Republicans, Brett Hildabrand, in the August primary. But the anointed Republican nominee for House District 17 still has to win in November.
In a lot of ways, though, Cox still sounds like he’s running against Hildabrand, which could be a problem.
Because his Democratic opponent, Helen Stoll, sounds like she’s running against Tom Cox.
“We keep referring to my opponent as moderate, but I don’t know that we know that for certain,” Stoll said.
Democrats also claim ‘moderate’ label
Stoll said the Kansas Democratic Party is the party of fiscal responsibility.
“I think what we see happening right now, the decisions that are being made, the tax plan, the way the bills are being paid and spending is being done, it is not conservative,” she said, alluding to the current Republican majority in the Legislature.
Photo by Elle Moxle Self-described moderate Republicans Tom Cox and Dinah Sykes unseated incumbents in the August primary. They’re hoping a pro-public schools platform resonates with general election voters too.
Paul Davis, the Democrat who challenged Brownback in 2014, won this Johnson County district.
That creates an opening for Stoll. She doesn’t think it matters that Cox and so many other moderates won their primaries.
“To my mind, nothing has changed because the problems are not fixed yet,” she said.
Stoll said there’s too much infighting in the Republican Party for moderates to move the state forward.
But most of the competitive matchups this fall aren’t between self-described “moderates” and Democrats. They’re between “Brownback Republicans” and Democrats.
“I always start off saying I’m the library director and I serve on city council,” said Adrienne Olejnik, a Democrat running in the expansive 51st House District. “That way, people hopefully realize I’m a pretty normal person. You know, I’m like them. I’m involved in the community, and I want to work with others. I also am very clear that party lines don’t mean a great deal to me.”
Olejnick has been knocking on doors in Shawnee, Riley, Wabaunsee, Pottawatomie and Lyon counties for months. She’s called herself a conservative Democrat, described her politics as “in the middle” and claimed to be the “real” moderate in the race.
“Regardless of which party you officially align yourself with, it labels you,” she said. “It defines you. So in some ways, you’re working against that all the time.”
If Olejnik can unseat conservative incumbent Ron Highland, it would be a big win for a Kansas Democratic Party trying to regain ground. Democrats haven’t had a majority in the state House for a quarter century. They haven’t had a Senate majority for nearly 100 years. It’s not going to happen this election cycle, either.
Democrats could give moderates a majority
But if moderates with a “D” next to their names can work with moderates with an “R” next to their names, the Statehouse looks very different come January.
“Every one of those conservatives that a Democrat defeats gives moderates more power in the Republican caucus to elect their own leadership and puts moderates in a position where they have to bargain less with conservatives,” said Patrick Miller, a political science professor at the University of Kansas.
Miller wasn’t surprised by how many moderates won in August. After all, moderates hold seats in Johnson County, and in far western Kansas where President Obama only got 15 percent of the vote.
“They can win anywhere in a low-turnout primary, no matter how Republican or conservative a seat is as long as it’s their voters getting out,” Miller said.
General election voters don’t turn out for down-ballot legislative races. They turn out to pick the president.
“If Trump keeps 1 percent of Republicans from coming out, if they stay home, that could be the difference in some of these races,” Miller said. “One thing we know about state legislative races, not just in Kansas but elsewhere, is voters don’t pay a lot of attention to them in November.”
That means the vast majority of Kansans won’t be casting anti-Brownback ballots. They’ll vote for Democrats or Republicans, not moderates.
Gene Policinski is senior vice president of the First Amendment Center.So, consider the internet to be one, big ole’ bucket of free expression — news and information pouring in constantly.
And then consider what would you want poured into that bucket? What would you keep out?
Those two simple questions likely will occupy much time and talk over the next years, if not the next decades, as we are forced to consider the nature of the stuff — speech, news and information — that goes into and comes out of the World Wide Web.
If you live in the United States and live under the First Amendment as it currently stands, the immediate answer to “in-out” questions, with very few exceptions, is “Whatever I want.”
Nothing in the 45 words that define our core freedoms provides for limits or gives specific guidance to anybody. And so for at least the last 100 years, the tilt has been toward more speech, more protections for a free press and more informational “stuff” for everybody.
Google, Facebook and their e-contemporaries, as private not government operations, are free to post, block or remove content as they will — on our behalf. Most cite “community standards” as reasons for impeding the free flow of information through their products and services.
But “going global” via the web raises new issues and new standards, often in contradictory ways.
Several reports over the past few days highlight the old and new complexity behind “simple” editorial decisions and algorithmic applications of group standards in planetary systems.
Journalism think tank Poynter reported a few days go on a large surge in requests to U.S. news outlets to remove past items, for reasons ranging from not-guilty verdicts to plain embarrassment — a manifestation of something engagingly called “the right to be forgotten.”
And a European human rights group called on the United Kingdom to prevent news outlets in the UK from reporting whether or not terrorists are Muslim, as a means of fighting Islamophobia and countering violence against law-abiding Muslims.
Consider the implications eliminating negative information and images from our varied web personifications. Sure, news reports of that humiliating court appearance continue to sting, even if the case was dismissed. Or paying a fine disposed of the legal aspects of that relatively minor traffic violation. Even in more serious matters, once one has paid their “debt to society,” as it was once politely referred to, what’s the value in continuing to be connected to a past act?
For one thing, such reports are an independent record of what actually happened, not subject to future spiteful revision or gossipy inaccuracies. When contained in a public record, such accounts also serve to hold public officials accountable, particularly when aggregated to show trends, spending patterns and perhaps questionable discrepancies and unfairness.
Scrubbing news reports of religious references when terrorism is involved — in the name of preventing slurs and violence aimed at an entire faith community — has a noble ring to it. But taking a shortcut through a full reporting by a free press as a means of combating the seamy side of societal bigotry and overreaction seems an unlikely and largely ineffective path to a better world.
Where does such an approach stop? Should those periodic bursts of armed conflict between India and Pakistan be vaguely reported as “things that kind of happen between two nations that don’t seem to like each other,” ignoring the faith-based, Hindu-Muslim nature of the long-extant dispute? Should violence flare again in Northern Ireland, are news operations to be required to treat it as a kind of “skin-and-shirts” intramural contest gone awry, not a battle between Protestant and Catholic extremists? When tribal identity and tensions in Africa result in war, should the media just say it happened “well, because some people didn’t like other people”?
“Forgetting” factual reports or preventing the free flow of information as uncomfortable and inconvenient as it may be will create information “holes” where unfounded rumor, false data and outright fiction will reign unrefuted.
Credible information, freely reported and freely discussed, is the foundation for self-governance and democratic societies, which survive and thrive on “facts” on which to build discussion and decision. And a credible record of the past is required to measure the present and realistically prepare for the future.
To revise history in the name of personal comfort, or to limit the flow of information to deal with unwanted outcomes, risks transforming the vaunted “marketplace of ideas” — that crucible in which we debate, disagree but hopefully discover the best ideas for the public good — into little more than a carnival sideshow.
And such moves could well turn the World Wide Web, with its optimistic promise of making more information available to more people than at any time in human history, into a New Age version of that Shakespearian vision in Macbeth of “a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.”
Gene Policinski is chief operating officer of the Newseum Institute and senior vice president of the Institute’s First Amendment Center. [email protected]
PRATT – Fall hunting seasons may have started, but there’s still time to get into a Kansas Hunter Education class near you. October is chock-full of opportunities, and with Internet-assisted courses, finding one to fit your schedule has never been more convenient. The easiest way to find a class near you is to visit ksoutdoors.com and click “Hunting,” then “Hunter Education.” Students must be 11 or older to be certified. However, hunters 15 or younger may hunt without hunter education certification provided they are under the direct supervision of an adult 18 or older. Otherwise, anyone born on or after July 1, 1957 must be certified by an approved course before they can hunt in Kansas.
Class schedules are organized by format: traditional or Internet-assisted. Traditional hunter education courses are 10 hours long and are usually held over two to three days. Internet-assisted courses are designed to meet the needs of individuals with busy schedules by providing online classwork that can be done at home. After the Internet work is completed, students must attend a field day, which often includes live-fire, trail-walk and safe gun handing exercises before final testing and certification. Students must register for an Internet-assisted course (field day) before completing the online portion.
Classes fill up quickly, so early registration is encouraged. Sign up today and we’ll see you in the field!
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — A 27-year-old man has been charged in the death of a Wichita woman.
The Wichita Eagle reports that Dane Thomas Owens is charged with first-degree premeditated murder in connection with the shooting death of 22-year-old Rowena Irani. He’s also charged with aggravated burglary.
Owens made a first appearance in Sedgwick County District Court on the felony charges, and is being held on $500,000 bond. His next court date is Oct. 20. It’s unclear if he has a lawyer.
Authorities say Irani was found unconscious Monday with a gunshot wound to her head. She died later at a hospital.
GEARY COUNTY – A man was injured in an accident just after 4p.m. on Saturday during a pursuit by law enforcement.
The Kansas Highway Patrol reported a 2002 Honda motorcycle driven by Devin C. Booth, 20, Peoria, IL., was merging onto Interstate 70 westbound from Kansas 18.
The driver accelerated to a high rate of speed, attempted to flee and elude police while driving in excess of 100mph.
The motorcycle exited J Hill Road at a high rate of speed. The driver was unable to make a right turn at that speed. The motorcycle flipped and tossed the driver.
Booth was transported to Geary Community Hospital. He was wearing a helmet, according to the KHP.
Details on what prompted the chase was not released.
LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — The University of Kansas’ chancellor knows firing a gun on campus areas with pressurized gas cylinders, rocket fuel and other combustibles might be disastrous. But she says the school can’t ban guns in such places.
State-run universities in Kansas must begin allowing concealed weapons onto campuses next July. Schools must submit proposed policies to the governing Kansas Board of Regents by October.
The Lawrence Journal-World reports that Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little told the University Senate on Thursday there are high-security labs and other campus areas where shooting a gun would be dangerous. But she says the state’s attorney general has told the school it can’t make those places exceptions to state law.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Investigators are asking people for their assistance as they continue to look for a Kansas City area woman who has been missing since Sep. 8.
Detectives are hoping area residents who have trail cameras will review their footage.
Trail cameras are used to observe wildlife or trespassers and are usually motion activated.
The Kansas City Star reports detectives investigating the disappearance of 21-year-old Jessica Runions want anyone in the Kansas City metro area with trail cameras to review their video footage from Sept. 8 and Sept. 9 to see whether they have footage of a dark-colored SUV or anything out of the ordinary.
Runions was last seen leaving a party on Sept. 8. Her SUV was found burned in Kansas City.
Twenty-eight-year-old Kylr Yust was arrested and charged with burning the vehicle, but not in the Runions’ disappearance.
A judge entered a not guilty plea on Yust’s behalf.
PITTSBURG, Kan. – Jacob Mezera threw for five touchdowns and ran for another to lead Fort Hays State to a 54-41 win over Pittsburg State in front of 10,238 at Carnie Smith Stadium Saturday afternoon. Mezera completed 31 of 38 passes for 446 yards and rushed for 62 yards as the Tigers back to back games in Pittsburg for the first time since 1970 and 72. The Tigers have now won four straight and improve to 5-1 in the MIAA.
Chris Brown Postgame Press Conference
Jacob Mezera Postgame Intervicw
Raheeme Dumas Postgame Intervicw
Game Highlights
Mezera connected twice with Charles Tigner and once with Kenneth Iheme as the Tigers built a 24-20 halftime lead. He hit Iheme and Shaquille Cooper the ran for a nine-yard runs as the Tigers scored touchdowns on their first three possession of the second half to build a 21-point lead.
Mezera completed passes to nine different players including eight to Charles Tigner who led the Tigers with 160 receiving yards.
The Fort Hays State defense forced punts on the Gorillas first two possessions of the third quarter and Reheeme Dumas intercepted two passes.
SUBMITTED
Partly cloudy skies and temperatures in the lower 70s will be accompanied by breezy, south winds today. There will be a disturbance that moves through the area and there is a chance for showers and thunderstorms tonight into Monday morning. The early part of the week will bring the return of warmer temperatures, mainly back into the low 80s. A cold front will move through Tuesday night and bring cooler temperatures.
KDWPT
