In this letter to the editor, I am writing about a phenomenon in today’s politics that having no shame doesn’t seem to matter.

What in the world does it take to feel shame? For me, not a whole lot when I do something wrong and I know that to be true of all the wonderful, loving, morally responsible people I know personally in Kansas and Arizona. Most of us are willing to admit we make mistakes. Not true in national politics.

Hillary Clinton, running for president, has no shame. Does she even have a conscience? That appears not to be the case.

Why do I pick on Hillary? She’s an extension of Obama (who has no shame either) and that spells nothing but trouble for all of us if she becomes president. What in the world makes her think she has a divine right to be our next president?

In a number of previous letters, I have listed one failure after another of this administration. In the interest of space, I won’t again. Why would we want to go down the same path for another four years with Hillary and her liberal progressive socialist agendas no different than Obama’s? That would be insanity.

Hillary is shameless about how she is running her campaign. It is all a charade. There is nothing authentic about it. Everything is calculated to make her look good and for us not to see the real Hillary. People are selected before she talks to ask her soft questions, even children are recruited. It’s all staged. It’s all a dog and pony show designed to give us a side of Hillary that isn’t reality.

It’s all theatre with Hillary! Yes, you could say there is acting with all politicians running for president, but nothing even remotely close to what we see with Hillary.

What you see with Hillary is not what you get. Read Edward Klein’s book “Unlikeable: The Problem with Hillary.” She is brutal to people behind closed doors, especially her security. Liberal mainstream media is shameless showing her smiling wherever she goes in order to prop her up.

She is mean to her security detail. How many thousands upon thousands is spent of taxpayer monies to protect her, husband Bill, and daughter Chelsea yet she has no shame taking away the guns of law abiding citizens.

During her four year tenure as Secretary of State the world has become the biggest mess ever. From one end of planet earth to the other end our relations with rogue nations like Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, and others have never been worse. She has no shame denying the mess created by her and Obama. Nor has she had any major accomplishments in that role, but it is obvious she could care less about that fact.

Could her email scandal of using a private homemade server get any worse as the FBI investigates? Shamelessly she says” I never received classified emails on my private server” while 1300 classified emails have been found to date, and counting. She said a private email server was legal although a court said it was not. National security became compromised big time in the process. Virtually everything she said about her private email server has turned out not to be true.

Most of us, at the very least, would admit incompetence and stop lying about it. Not Hillary.

Hillary is anything but transparent. It is obvious she didn’t want, as a public servant for four years, anybody to know what she was up to. Could there be a conflict of interest between her tenure as a government employee while she and Bill’s wealth climbed into the millions? Chances are 100 to 1 that was the case.

What? Are you kidding me? She wants to be a woman’s greatest defender when being raped. Please! She is an enabler of her serial sexual abuser husband Bill, but neither one shows the slightest concern about his abominable past with women. Any other politician, Democrat or Republican, would be in a jump suit, but both get a pass on his predatory behavior. It’s the height of why shame should matter, along with all the other things mentioned.

There’s much more that Hillary should be ashamed of, like being the most honored politician of Planned Parenthood in the business of killing poor defenseless unborn babies. Nor does she have any qualms running a campaign program of giving away free stuff on your taxpayer dime and mine – for no other reason but to get votes. Etcetera – much more.

Perhaps worst of all, far too many Americans, including Christians, have no shame voting to put two corrupt people with one scandal after another and no moral principles back in the White House; two individuals in a shameful marriage who will do anything to get elected. God help us!

Les Knoll lives in Victoria and Gilbert, Ariz.

By RON WILSON
Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development

The world’s most popular airplanes. That’s one description of the planes built by the Cessna Aircraft Company, maker of more light aircraft than any company in the world. It was all started by a rural Kansas farmboy. And he’s the subject of today’s Kansas Profile.

Clyde Cessna was born in Iowa. When he was one year old, his family moved to Kansas and lived on a farm near the rural community of Rago in Kingman County. Rago is unincorporated. It’s located east of the town of Spivey, population 79 people. Now, that’s rural.

As a farmboy, Clyde learned to be a good mechanic and handyman. He helped area farmers with their equipment and then branched out into working on automobiles. He became an auto mechanic and then a car salesman in Enid, Oklahoma.

One day in 1910, he went to Oklahoma City and saw what was called an “air circus”: An exhibition by a group of touring stunt pilots. He was so intrigued by the airplanes that he quit his job and moved to New York to take a job in aircraft construction.

He learned the craft of airplane manufacturing and then moved back to Oklahoma to build his own planes. Cessna crashed on his first flight attempt but made his first successful flight in 1911, eight years after the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk. With that flight, he became the first person to build and fly a powered aircraft in the heartland of America, between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains.

Clyde Cessna tried to generate income by flying exhibitions, but money was scarce in those times. He finally moved his family back to the farm in Kansas, where the only building still standing was a barn. Believe it or not, the family moved into that barn temporarily. The family literally lived in the hayloft while Clyde worked on trying to build better airplanes. Each year he built a new and improved model.

In 1916, Cessna had a unique opportunity. A Wichita car-building company named “Jones Six” invited him to build an airplane in its auto factory to publicize the company. So, Cessna came to Wichita and built a new plane with the words “Jones Six” painted on the wings in giant letters which could be read from a thousand feet below.

It was the first airplane ever built in Wichita, Kansas – the first of more than a quarter million airplanes, which would help earn Wichita the name of Air Capital. Cessna continued to build and upgrade his planes. In 1917, his plane named Comet set the U.S.-national speed record of 124 miles per hour.

After World War I, Cessna joined with two legendary partners: Lloyd Stearman and Walter Beech, who was also a test pilot. In 1925, they formed a company called Travel Air Manufacturing.

This company became one of the nation’s leading airplane manufacturers. Two years later, Clyde Cessna set out on his own, to build a high-performance, single-wing plane that could outperform the biplanes of the time. His monoplane model would be able to reach speeds of 145 miles per hour and fly more than seven hours in length, a remarkable achievement for the time.

However, the Great Depression hit and the company put the business on hold. Clyde Cessna went back to the farm, but his nephew Dwayne Wallace was still working in aviation. Dwayne encouraged Clyde to restart the business and together, they did so. Clyde retired in 1936 but his nephew would continue to build the company.

The company grew and changed through the years. For example, the 1956 Cessna Skyhawk would outsell every other light airplane in the world. Today, the Cessna Aircraft Company is considered one of the world’s largest makers of small aircraft.

The world’s most popular airplanes. That was one description of the planes built by the Cessna Aircraft Company. We salute its founder and namesake Clyde Cessna for making a difference with entrepreneurship in aviation.

And there’s more. Before revitalizing Cessna, Dwayne Wallace had been working for none other than Clyde’s former partner Walter Beech who founded his own airplane company. We’ll learn about that next week.

Enrollments in foreign-language courses at U.S. colleges have fallen 6.7 percent since the fall of 2009. Some public universities have closed their German, French, Russian and even Spanish language programs as they chase after student tuition and abandon programs that serve the public’s interests. The next annual report due out from the Modern Language Association in February will likely show further erosion in American student enrolment in foreign languages.

“I think we should have some institution comparable in stature to West Point or Annapolis, where the curriculum includes every language used officially throughout the world. We should never send anyone to any country, who is going to have any direct contact with the people of that country, who is not fluent in the language of that country. I have sat in on many meetings in which interpreters were used. It is almost impossible to translate the precise meanings from one language to another under the pressure of a meeting.”

The biology building where I work is named “Breukelman Hall” after biology educator John Breukelman. He was very much a gentleman so I was therefore surprised at this forceful assertion. Professor Breukelman spoke fluent Dutch and Spanish and was exasperated that, while working on a biology textbook in Spanish in a South American country, he had to translate it into English for the U.S. Embassy where none of the staff spoke Spanish!

Linguistic stupidity has a price. In the hostage crisis where Iranians took U.S. Embassy staff captive at the end of the Carter administration, not one of our intelligence officers spoke Persian!

Failures in translation became clear to me when I arrived in China a week after the disastrous Wenchuan earthquake in 2008. Heartbreaking pictures were released of students buried in the collapsed schools. I watched both the Chinese and American news reports. As the bodies of high school students were recovered, our U.S. news kept calling them “middle school” students.
Therefore, American viewers presumed that Chinese education must be behind ours because these older students were only in middle school. The problem was that the Chinese name for elementary is “little school,” their name for our high school is “middle school,” and their universities are “big school.” I immediately explained this by e-mail to both the PBS network and National Public Radio—and they did absolutely nothing. High schools continued to be called “middle schools” because that was their literal translation. The Chinese interpreters used by PBS and NPR did not understand our American school system names.

If you only speak English, you could come to China with me this summer. As long as you stayed on campuses, you can manage quite well speaking English. China makes English a school requirement. Students begin study of English in early elementary school. If every American began studying Chinese, we could not match them because they have more than 332 million students studying English!

But foreign students who grow up in their culture and study English do not fully understand America. Nor would American students who studied foreign languages fully comprehend other cultures. It takes both sides working together to prevent stupid misunderstandings that can escalate into conflict.

American education is not doing our part. Half of Europeans speak two or more languages. That is seven times the rate of foreign language fluency found in the United States. Unfortunately, if all of the students in our foreign language classes became language teachers and all of their students became language teachers, it would take several generations to scale up foreign language teaching to achieve the European or Chinese level of biliteracy. So what can we do?

Even in California where there is a maximum population diversity, there are not enough foreign language teachers to staff each school. But they promote biliteracy of their multi-lingual graduates by placing a “seal of biliteracy” on their high school diploma. According to Education Week, 13 states now offer such a reward for demonstrating language fluency and at least ten more states are working to add that recognition. All states should join them. This likewise gives recognition to our 5 million students who are English language learners and who can continue their bi-cultural biliteracy.

“Wo men ke neng!”—that is Chinese for “we can do it!”

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One of the misfortunes of progress in education is the demise of the small country school. As I look back on all the attributes of attending a two-room school during the first eight years of my life, I wonder if we may have lost something we can never replace.

The small school I attended was located in western Sheridan County. The name of the community was Seguin. Our little German Catholic community boasted 50 hardy souls.

While mostly made of wood, our two-room school sported a stucco coating on the exterior. No bell tower adorned the top of Seguin Grade School. Instead, students took turns calling us to class, announcing recess and signaling the end of the school day by ringing a large, brass bell fitted with a black wooden handle.

The Sisters of St. Joseph provided us with a solid, top-notch foundation during my early years or education – nearly 55 years ago.

The main subjects included reading, writing, arithmetic and English. The last subject I enjoy even to this day. I especially liked to diagram sentences on the black board and they were black back in those days. I wrote as neatly as I could with a piece of long, white chalk.

Because we lived in the sparsely populated western part of Kansas, we looked forward to school every day. It was fun to be with other kids. More importantly, we enjoyed learning.

After attending mass at St. Martin of Tours, we walked approximately a quarter mile across native buffalo grass to our school located at the northwestern corner of our small prairie town.

We entered school through double doors on the east side of the building and climbed up the stairs to our classroom. Huge, double-hung windows covered nearly every inch of the west side of each classroom. These rooms were located on the second floor of the building so we could see for miles. Some days we could see the Colby elevators 24 miles to the west.

Each room contained approximately 20 ink-stained wooden desks. Each had a hole in the upper right-hand corner to hold a bottle of black ink.

A large American flag stood in the right corner in the front of our school.  The black board stretched the entire length of the front wall and a portrait of George Washington hung in solitary splendor on the left side.

Every day we began the day with the Pledge of Allegiance. We included the phrase, “One nation, under God” and each one of us stood at attention with our right hand covering our heart.

I’ll always remember my first day at school. Once I found my desk, I promptly began to whistle. I’d grown up listening to Mom whistle while she worked around our house, so I just naturally began whistling at school.

This conduct resulted in a visit to the cloakroom where we hung our coats and stored our lunch boxes. Here the door was closed behind me and I spent the next few minutes crying aloud.

How was I to know a happy student wasn’t to whistle while he worked?
Well, that unhappy experience hardly proved a bump in the school highway. I loved reading, listening and learning and most of all my teachers.

Throughout my eight years in Seguin, enrollment at my two-room school never exceeded 35 students. I spent all three years with two classmates, Dorothy Meier and Virginia Wegman. I can’t remember a class with more than five children.

With such a small enrollment, each room combined classes. First and second grade studied the same subjects while third and fourth did likewise. Because we were in the same room, I could listen to and learn from both classes. Something I did with gusto.

As a youngster and throughout my 18 years of education, I have always been a sponge – absorbing everything I could sink my teeth into. Learning and listening has always come naturally for me. Although I don’t think it hurt that our teachers, the Sisters of St. Joseph, were strict. In fact, talking in class resulted in an automatic ticket to the cloakroom, or time spent at the chalkboard after school.

One of my favorite periods throughout grade school occurred immediately following lunch. That’s when students read aloud. Books came from our extensive library.

The first book I chose to read during my 5th year in Seguin was Lorna Doone by R.D. Blackmore. I couldn’t put this book down and I wanted to share this story with my classmates.

Lorna Doone is a simple tale about the outlaw Doone family who lived and pillaged deep in the depths of Bagworthy Forest, the blackest and the loneliest place of all that kept the sun out.  Here the beautiful maiden Lorna Doone lives and weds John Ridds, whose father was killed by the Doones on his way home from market.

Quite a read, if you haven’t already.

And who can forget all the games we enjoyed during recess?

We played circle, pom pom pull away, fox and geese, Annie Annie Over and of course every one of us turned into a monkey on the steel playground equipment.

What a wonderful time. What a wonderful place. What a wonderful experience.

John Schlageck, a Sheridan County native, is a leading commentator on agriculture and rural Kansas.

While thousands of Kansans probably made New Year’s resolutions to lose weight or learn French—or maybe just remember to put their empty rum and wine bottles in the recycle container in 2016—about 330,000 Kansans have already achieved their resolution.

That’s to not bother paying any Kansas income tax on the 2015 non-wage earnings of their LLC or small corporation or farm profits.

But while we read that most of those New Year’s resolutions last about two weeks, those non-Kansas income taxpayers may have to worry about the next maybe 80 or 90 days for the Kansas Legislature to meet, adjourn and leave them alone for another year.

That might just be possible for a legislative session that is focused on the upcoming elections…unless someone figures out how to get the roughly 550,000 other voters interested in the issue. We’re assuming that the 330,000 income tax-exempt Kansans are a little self-conscious about it, but are smart enough to vote to maintain that status.

Now, that margin, roughly 550,000 Kansas voters who pay taxes and the 330,000 who don’t, becomes a little trickier this session.

The governor says he’s not raising any taxes. Intellectuals and tenured professors maintain that the tax exemption for those businesses is bad for Kansas’ economy, and Gov. Sam Brownback says they’re wrong.

But…with the governor asserting that his signature tax cut plan of 2012, retouched slightly in 2013 and bailed out last year with massive sales tax increases and dramatic paring of the value of longstanding tax deductions, you gotta figure that he’s vetoing any rollback of that tax cut.

Which means, of course, that it’s not just a simple 21 votes in the Senate and 63 votes in the House that get those 330,000 Kansans back in the business of paying income tax. If he’s dead-set against a rollback, then to override a veto it takes 27 Senate votes and 84 House votes.

That would create a showdown that hasn’t been seen since the slap-fight over Brownback’s veto of the bill that required those Internet-summoned Uber taxi drivers to have insurance for their riders, when the Senate mustered a 35-4 vote and the House followed with a 96-25 tally.

So, does the Legislature—not its leaders, but the other elected minions—try for a tax imposition on those 330,000 Kansans? Depends, of course, on who those 330,000 are.

In hindsight, legislators probably ought to have made those who take advantage of the small-business tax exemption declare their political party affiliation or whether they are stalwart Republican primary election voters, which would make the voter reaction to any tax bill predictable on election day.

Makes you wonder whether that tax-free status for those small businesses will last a little longer? Doesn’t it?

Well, lawmakers can’t reach back into just-expired 2015, and 2016 looks a little shaky, this election business and all, so you have to wonder whether there is any half-step possible.

Or…whether this year, that taxless status actually boosts state revenues, through new jobs and buying more equipment to expand their businesses. And, then it turns out that Brownback was right, lower taxes yield a stronger economy and more revenues for the state and more money to spend on education and infrastructure.

But we’re thinking those chances are slim, and it may again come down to pitting income vs. consumption, and the choices there—liquor taxes were rejected last session, though they really aren’t charging what most liquor is worth—and smokers didn’t quit because of the 50-cent a pack hike last session.

Still, most Statehouse habitues are figuring that we’re going to hear more French spoken this year than belts being tightened, while those tax-free Kansans ponder whether they can fit a little bigger car into their garages.

Syndicated by Hawver News Co. of Topeka, Martin Hawver is publisher of Hawver’s Capitol Report. To learn more about this nonpartisan statewide political news service, visit www.hawvernews.com.

Yup, you just never know when you might need it

Joyce and I have been known to attend a garage sale or two and often I just find a shady spot to park and wait her out. If it is an “intentional” event and we have a map or newspaper listing, I’ll occasionally browse along with her if something in the list gets my attention. Often, however these stops are merely spur-of-the-moment and I’ll only get out with her if something I see looks interesting. Such was the case one Saturday morning last fall in Hutchinson.

It was a nice day and we happened to be in town so Joyce’s radar was actively seeking garage sale signs as we headed through town. We followed signs to a garage sale in a nice neighborhood a little off the beaten path and in the yard sat one of those “u” shaped ladders used to get in and out of a raised swimming pool. It had my attention and for the four dollar price tag I reasoned that certainly we could use it for something (you know how that goes; you never know when you might need it!) Evidently the owner was having a difficult time getting rid of it, so when she saw my interest, she immediately made her way over to me.

A couple minutes later, she told us “we’re selling it because we built a deck around our pool and have no need of that ladder now, so if you want it, just take it;” our kind of deal.

Fast forward to last week; even though conditions are far from ideal with frozen ground most mornings and mud by evening, I want to try setting a few coyote traps again. One spot I have near town is at the far edge of a pasture/hay field and is easy to drive to. When scouting that spot, it appeared the coyotes were coming from the adjoining wheat field, still owned by the same farmer, but getting in three was going to be a slight problem.

The wheat field is a couple feet higher than the hayfield and fence surrounds the entire field. Now I encounter lots of electric fence and barbwire also for that matter. But this was four strands of new barbwire stretched tighter than grandma’s purse strings and fastened onto new “T” posts, the top strand catching my six foot three frame across the top of my chest. In short, I wasn’t climbing that fence!

As I pondered how this was ever going to work, guess what popped into my mind… the pool ladder from the garage sale. I hauled it out there and lifted one end over onto the other side of the fence and viola; I could now scale the fence without permanent physical damage to certain anatomical extremities.

The top wire on the fence is just high enough that it makes the ladder a little tipsy but it will still work just fine.
I’m sure some of us have sheds full of stuff we cabbaged-onto because “You just never know when you might need it,” and usually it turns out that you never do. This was one time however that one of those treasures actually filled a need, and to think it was free!

It just doesn’t get much better than that….Continue to Explore Kansas Outdoors.

Steve Gilliland, Inman, can be contacted by email at [email protected].

I have two questions for you, and I want you to seriously consider your answers.

If you wanted to make progress on one community challenge, what would it be? How could the Hays Area Chamber of Commerce help you make progress?

As the New Year stretches ahead for us all, so do many opportunities — opportunities such as applying for Leadership Hays, attending legislative coffees and forums, networking at the numerous Chamber events or simply engaging in healthy community conversations.

Along with New Year resolutions, a lot of planning takes place this time of year. All of this, mixed with the hope of new beginnings, creates exciting energy and ideas. However, since we all know more heads create more ideas we truly encourage you to share with us your thoughts. In other words, we believe the answers to your questions will aid us in preparing quality programming that helps you reach your goals.

Being able to target the Chamber’s products and services to best meet the needs of our Chamber members is always our goal. If we could sit down with all of you for a personal visit or even implement a survey to determine your greatest concerns and challenges, we know these would generate great dialogue. Unfortunately, we don’t have the resources to launch this level of effort. But we do encourage you to contact us directly to share your answers.

The chamber is here to assist you in making progress, so that you experience the greatest success possible.

When you can, please email me the answers to these questions at [email protected]. If you would like to chat over a cup of coffee, that works also. I hope to hear from you and thank you for partnering with the Hays Area Chamber into the New Year.

Tammy Wellbrock is executive director of the Hays Area Chamber of Commerce.