Letters: Readers discuss KU on ESPN+, fake impeachment and Fox News’ climate blinders
Pay to play
Rock chalk, Jayhawks, PU! That’s my opinion of needing to subscribe to the ESPN+ streaming service to watch many KU basketball games.
For your information, coach Bill Self, this service requires us to pay $4.99 per month. I wonder why the program, at a tax-supported institution, needs these additional funds (from ESPN, Adidas and others) to function.
Something stinks.
- Patrick McGarry, Overland Park
It’s been worse
Many letter writers from both sides of the state line have expressed their dismay over their Republican senators’ positions on President Donald Trump’s impeachment, strongly urging them to call witnesses and hold a real trial as opposed to a collective partisan dismissal.
In 1841, historian Thomas Babington Macaulay had similar concerns about the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the United Kingdom’s governor-general of Bengal in India. Macaulay wrote: “It is certain that no man has the least confidence in their impartiality, when a great public functionary, charged with a great state crime, is brought to their bar. They are all politicians. There is hardly one among them whose vote on an impeachment may not be confidently predicted before a witness has been examined.”
As Ecclesiastes 1:9 says, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Our modern-day pundits are well-advised to study history.
One Star letter writer even admitted how ashamed he was of his Kansas senators. (Jan. 2, 10A) He, likewise, is well-advised to research the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson and how the vote of a lone Kansas senator, Edmund Ross, saved Johnson’s presidency — with the help of a presidential slush fund that smelled of patronage and bribery.
Our current senators’ behavior pales in comparison to such shenanigans.
- Mike Kalny, Shawnee
Fake impeachment
I found the second-to-last sentence of Tuesday’s editorial, “Sen. Josh Hawley’s ‘loony’ plan to dismiss impeachment is unfair to everyone — even Trump,” hypocritical and ludicrous: “The facts and the law must determine the outcome.” (7A)
After all, Reps. Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler disregarded the rule of law and the constitutional process with this charade that has cost taxpayers dollars. On top of that, there is no impeachable offense. It’s all fabricated.
We elected officials to get things done to make the lives of Americans better.
- Geoff Alston, Prairie Village
Purposeful care
Since the passage of the Kansas Mental Health Reform Act of 1990, our state hospitals have experienced almost constant function and funding crises. We have a 30-year history of rescuing this dysfunctional hospital model with funding patches. As the old saying goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
The mission of state mental health hospitals ought to be to serve people who require more specialized, intensive and secure psychiatric care and treatment than can be provided in lower levels of care. Those hospitals should offer cutting-edge procedures and treatments in state-of-the-art facilities staffed by the best and the brightest mental health professionals and direct care staff.
The hospitals will not effectively and consistently deliver on this mission without commitments by the governor, the Legislature and the mental health system to create and adequately fund hospitals that are centers of excellence.
At the very least, the state should consider relocating the hospitals so they are conducive to recruiting staff and engaging with our universities. The system should be hospital-focused, data-based and focused on the long range.
- Stephen H. Feinstein, former National Alliance on Mental Illness board of directors president, Louisburg, Kansas
Unfit to print
I regularly read the Fox News website, as well as CNN’s and the BBC’s. It is pretty easy to see that each has biases, but there is one glaring omission in Fox News’ reporting: It has been virtually silent on the major disaster in Australia — the massive and uncontrolled wildfires ravaging much of the country.
I haven’t seen even a lower-level headline, whereas the other networks are running major news stories, videos and interviews with victims. The fires are all over the news, except on Fox.
I believe this is because the severity of the fires might be a result of climate change, a taboo subject on Fox. Fox News likes to publish anti-liberal political stories, of course, but otherwise stays away from anything that could upset its audience. It appears to have decided that climate change is a liberal hoax and could scare its audience. Science reporting is definitely not a strength.
- James Meyer, Lenexa
This story was originally published January 9, 2020 at 5:00 AM.