Readers share views on the Royals, obstacles to mail and welfare restrictions
Baseball high road
No baseball player likes to be hit by a pitch, or cleated in a slide (4-25, A1, “Nice KC now has bad-boy baseball”). And probably, if either is determined to be intentional, there should be penalties imposed, as there are for flagrant fouls in college basketball.
What should not be done, in my opinion, is to join in provoking a crowd reaction to incidents of this kind. Baseball is a sport.
Witness all the young people in the stands at every game. What should be encouraged is better sportsmanship.
Profanity and physical violence have no place here. Their use doesn’t make players any more manly when men display them anywhere.
I don’t think commentators like Rex Hudler are helpful when they see retaliation and players’ overreaction as somehow indicators that the Royals are no longer “soft.” Hudler usually uses good judgment, and I enjoy his color comments, but not this time.
I hope he and others in the Royals organization who have influence on the fans will encourage them to see that the tougher the Royals are, the better they can behave. Let the team continue to prove this point with its excellent pitching, hitting and fielding.
I am proud of them just as they are.
Janelle Lazzo
Roeland Park
Obstacles to mail
Neither rain, nor snow, nor dead of night shall keep the the U.S. postal worker from his appointed rounds. It seems I’ve heard that somewhere. Apparently, what does keep the mail from getting delivered is an AT&T truck parked in front of the mailboxes.
Robert Gjertson
Overland Park
Life and liberty
Our Constitution was created around the concept that individuals know better how to live their lives than the community at large does. Individual rights and self-reliance are supposed to be the central forces in our form of government.
Yet the pro-life movement rests entirely on the concept that the community knows more about the debatable issue of when life actually begins than any individual. The concept that the community holds dominance over individual beliefs would make communist philosophers such as Georg Hegel and Karl Marx very proud.
Our Founding Fathers, whose fear of the tyranny of the majority helped shape our government, would shudder. I sometimes wonder about what direction these powerful right-wing politicians really want to lead this country.
George Lafferty
Fairway
Welfare restrictions
I wonder whether welfare recipients in Kansas will still be able to patronize “bingo parlors” like they have in the past. Especially in Wichita.
Gerald Barker
Spring Hill
Bullying then, now
Back in the 1950s, my parents taught me this little rhyme: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names and faces will never hurt me.” No disrespect, but those words never rang true, Mom and Dad. They still don’t.
Labeling people and sneering disparagingly at them does hurt. They were two of a bully’s most powerful and destructive tools then, and they are two of a bully’s most powerful and destructive tools now.
Sue Wright
Liberty
Greed in Kansas
Who would Jesus tax? Who would Jesus shoot?
The 2012 Kansas Legislature exempted income from partnerships and similar firms, self-employment, trusts, rents, royalties and farms, causing $400 million in tax losses per year. About $150 million goes to the rich having $1 million incomes while wages of ordinary workers with W-2s are all taxed.
Supply-side tax cuts have failed, causing large federal deficits. Gov. Sam Brownback and his supporters now bring these deficits to Kansas. Having sold their souls to Grover Norquist and the Koch brothers, they are lost.
They refuse medical care for the poor under federal Medicaid expansion.
Jesus would not give tax breaks to the rich and deny medical care for the poor. Brownback and his conservatives are Christians in name only. They support more and more guns contrary to Christ’s teachings of nonviolence. They are controlled by the dark money from Americans for Prosperity and the National Rifle Association.
The federal evils of tax cuts for the rich and large deficits that harm social programs are here. What was wrong with Kansas is now even worse.
Ordinary Kansans must see these voodoo economics for what they are — a tyranny of greed casting its shadow over Kansas government.
David Prager III
Topeka
Steve Rose column
Steve Rose’s April 26 column, “An east vs. west clash is growing in Kansas,” has some hits but also some misses. An east-west split in Kansas is unnecessary. A better understanding of agriculture for some is necessary, and that burden is on us, as Kansas farmers and ranchers.
Ninety-eight percent of Kansas farm operations are family owned. There are not many large agricultural corporations because Kansas law prohibits them except in certain circumstances.
It’s sensible — and constitutional — that property taxes on agricultural land are calculated differently than on urban land. A farmer or rancher can’t put a shopping center or other commercial business on a rural piece of land.
Agriculture contributes 37 percent of our state’s economy, employs 12 percent of the Kansas workforce and has a positive economic effect in all 105 counties.
In addition to growing abundant and safe food, fiber and fuel for all Kansans, farmers also provide a $53 billion economic boost to the state economy.
We believe we can work closely with our many urban friends in the Legislature to do what’s best for Kansas without pitting one part of the state against the other.
Rich Felts
President
Kansas Farm Bureau
Manhattan, Kan.
Taxpayers’ burden
The push is on for our nanny government to help the people who cannot or will not pay their student loans.
What that means is that I will have to pay for kids to go to college.
I already did that once upon a time.
No one pointed a gun at these people and made them take out these loans.
The government is really the reason these for-profit schools even exist — student loans guaranteed by the government.
These people who now have worthless degrees in underwater broken-stick sorting, or something, cannot find jobs in their fields of expertise.
Maybe the student might have researched his or her field of endeavor before securing $100,000 in student loans.
In other words, maybe that student might have done something for himself or herself.
The government, of course, is eager to do two related things: One, it will want to fleece the taxpayers to pay for people who were not smart enough to think for themselves and, two, it will reap the benefits of thousands of new voters who now think our liberal leaders are great.
Larry Dickstein
Lone Jack
Cellphone intrusion
This may not be a popular topic, but I will be the rag wiping a worn spot.
I consider cellphones a third arm, interrupting the flow of efficiency in the workplace.
In each job I have worked, there were always issues about the cellphone policies and the people who violated them, but they were never held accountable.
I can find no justifiable reason for having a cellphone out and ringing at my desk.
Even with concessions in place about emergency personal calls, I have met resistance at many jobs from superiors asking what I’m doing with my phone out.
I read a nasty departmentwide email an hour after one such incident, containing a new policy that told employees to leave cellphones in their cars — in the wintertime.
It’s completely unnecessary when no one is going to follow the rules and no one in a position of authority is going to enforce them.
Each day, I’m going to sit down and turn my phone off because I need to turn my professional side on — and it gets much better reception.
Megan Travelstead
Riverside
This story was originally published April 28, 2015 at 10:02 AM with the headline "Readers share views on the Royals, obstacles to mail and welfare restrictions."