Letters: Kobach needs to let 18,000 people vote

Kobach, voting

The federal judge should order Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to step aside and allow his undersecretary to register the 18,000 people who qualified under the federal motor-voter law (5-18, A13, “Kansas proof of citizenship law rejected”). When Kentucky clerk Kim Davis refused to do her job and would not allow her undersecretary to do it, she was sent to jail to allow the work to proceed.

That would be appropriate here, as well. We don’t have time before the election for endless appeals

Eric M Peck, M.D.

Olathe

Brownback fix

Thanks Gov. Sam Brownback for providing Kansans with a real life example of why Milton Friedman, 1976 Nobel Prize winning economist, said “The government solution to a problem usually is as bad as the problem and very often makes the problem worse.”

Jim Kudlinski

Overland Park

School webcasts

The viewing audience for the Shawnee Mission School District Board of Education webcasts is probably not large. It would be easy to miss basic curriculum changes in the district.

One such change is the mutation of libraries into “maker spaces.” Another is the replacement of librarians with so-called “innovation specialists.”

At the May 23 board meeting, Ray Marsh Elementary School librarian Jan Bombeck addressed these developments. She expressed concern about three new job listings for “Innovation Specialists” in lieu of librarians. Ms. Bombeck noted that candidates for these positions were not asked “about their vision for a school library, how they would stay up-to-date on trends in children’s literature, or even encourage children to read.”

With justifiable umbrage, she cited a school administrator who belittled librarians, saying that innovation specialists “would do more than just read stories to children and check out books.”

Yet these new positions require no more than classroom certification, while Ms. Bombeck holds a master’s degree in Library Information and Management.

She offered a powerful argument for the value of libraries, reading, and storytelling in education.

To view her comments, please visit http://flash.smsd.org/?catid=9 (min. 29:48).

Let school board members and administrators (in all districts) know that an education without libraries and librarians is no education at all.

Robert F. Sommer

Overland Park

Move state border

I recently read that a number of University of Kansas and Kansas State University coaches, including Bill Self and Bill Snyder, avoid paying Kansas income tax by setting themselves up as LLCs, or limited liability companies.

If this practice works for coaches making more than a million dollars per year, why doesn’t every worker in Kansas do the same? Maybe we could even get the border moved so that those of us living on the other side of the state line could avoid paying state income taxes, too.

Mike Mendon

Kansas City

Sanders for president

The odds may actually be with Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, despite what his political foes, some of his fellow Democrats, and even the media are stacking in favor of Hillary Clinton as the presumptive Democrat nominee for president.

The system has been working for her, that’s for sure. She seemed to have most of her superdelegates sewn up before Sanders even took the field, or perhaps, knew the ropes, and she looked like a sure winner.

But now that doesn’t look so certain. Oh, she is still ahead in the delegate count, but Sanders has been winning state primaries lately, lots if them.

And guess what else? Super delegates who pledge too early have been known to change their minds. And as the unfavorables continue to stack up for both Clinton and the presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, Sanders looks better and better. He has few unfavorables, certainly, and virtually none in the “trustworthy” department. While his social agenda may seem wildly unrealistic to some, so did that of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s.

Sometimes fairness wins out, and Sanders’ moral compass is based on it. Meanwhile, his team is working every day, and diehards like me remain determined to campaign as hard as we can for him to become president, should his candidacy gradually go from not-very-likely to possible to real.

The country needs Bernie Sanders’ integrity, his passion and his determination to do what is right for the little guy. Hopefully he will get the chance to see what he can do.

Janelle Lazzo

Roeland Park

Airline security

Now, everybody is worried about longer lines at airports. In the light of today’s security issues and airplanes disappearing over the world’s oceans, we have demanded that the Transportation Security Administration tighten its security procedures.

And guess what? By doing their jobs, as we have demanded, and by answering the clarion call for more security, airport lines grow longer. Some say that privatization of the TSA is the answer, but outsourcing national security never ends well.

Why not just require everybody to check every piece of luggage? Provisions can be made to allow baby seats, carriages, handicap appliances such as wheelchairs and crutches within the passenger area. But if the airlines limited the passenger cabins to just electronic appliances, purses and brief cases, check-in security line time frames would be greatly reduced, limiting line size to what’s manageable.

Air travel would be much safer, and lines and missed flights, much smaller. Shifting the waiting from the front end of air travel to the back end just makes sense.

And those who complain and are so put upon for being “inconvenienced,” because they might have to spend an extra 20 minutes securing their luggage at checkout, should remember that they are not the center of the universe or that important.

They should gladly assist those who are on the front line of defending both your freedom and safety.

Tom Davis

Merriam

This story was originally published May 31, 2016 at 4:58 PM with the headline "Letters: Kobach needs to let 18,000 people vote."