King Tut, daylight savings, Clay Chastain

If the King Tut artifacts at Union Station this month are only replicas, will the promoters accept replica dollars bills as payment?

I agree with the March 26 letter writer on daylight-saving time.

The earlier starting and later stopping of daylight-saving time saves very little energy.

People also have to worry about their children catching the school bus in the dark.

I say let’s go back to the original daylight-saving time to better serve the people.

Mark Twain once said, “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.” The House of Representatives and the Senate have Americans by the tail, and they need to turn loose or they’ll learn a lesson come election time.

I am looking forward to the day when Clay Chastain realizes that he no longer lives in Kansas City and no one here cares what he thinks or wants concerning light rail.

It was upsetting enough when the director of the Copenhagen Zoo allowed the slaughter of the young giraffe earlier this year. The excuse then was flimsy at best.

This time there is absolutely no excuse for the killing of two aging male lions and two cubs to bring in a new male lion (3-27, A3, “Zoo killing”). Inbreeding was cited as a concern. Really?

Is the facility so inept that its staff cannot prevent inbreeding, and just how sexually active are two old males and two immature cubs?

There is also the fact that lions are fast becoming an endangered species.

This zoo has some serious problems, with ethics being at the top of the list. Animals deserve better out of the very people on whom their captive survival depends.

The older lions were not in ill-health and should have been allowed to live out their days instead of being euthanized. As for the killing of the cubs, that was just cruel.

Why weren’t the cubs sent to another zoo? Which begs the question as to where the zoo is getting the new lion.

The goal is to preserve animals and to give people an opportunity to see them. It is not to keep them only as long as it is convenient.

A March 26 letter writer decided to bash our president and then bash anyone who voted for him by calling us ignorant voters. I assume the writer views us as uninformed because he gets all of his information via Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

That being said, I would like to inform the letter writer that I and many like me are informed, just not through the same right-wing, propagandist, misleading, oversensationalizing and contradicting source that he gets his news from.

All indications point to a good Royals season. But we’ll be subjected to another year of mind-numbing commentary from Rex Hudler.

His grammatical errors are maddening: “He don’t get cheated” and “He should have ran.” Rex’s catch phrases such as “Nine on the pine,” “The Moose is loose” and “It’s a beautiful thing” get old quickly.

Last year, we heard a lengthy explanation of why Rex liked the way Bruce Chen chews his gum. We now know Bruce chews confidently.

We were told a certain batter likes to hit to the opposite field. But sometimes this batter will hit to the other opposite field. Huh?

Viewers were informed that “all ballparks are different.”

Plus, did you know that it’s great to ruin an opposing team’s home opener, especially when it’s at its home field.

Also, when describing a player’s “makeup,” Hudler makes sure that we know he is not actually talking about the stuff one puts on one’s face.

But the best information Rex provided was that “no white players played in the Negro Leagues.” Who knew?

Rex, please consider doing what you told us Tony Pena advised you to do — use fewer words.

George Will’s March 27 opinion column, “When geography matters,” gave an example of Hitler’s progression into Austria, sequencing each later invasion with the excuse of protecting “my people.”

The Russian ego seems to never be complacent, so any warning of aggressive action is likely to be taken as a challenge.

To deflect Russians’ ego, I suggest a challenge to see whether they are with Ukraine like the U.S. and Canada have been for 200 years with our common-sovereign border and economy. Sharing a common border could be beneficial to citizens of both nations.

I would predict that if the U.S. government would proffer a need for some border land by force from Canada, you would hear an awful uproar from U.S. citizens.

On death-penalty executions, I suggest an alternative to current practice.

Thousands of patients die annually during operating-room procedures, and I don’t think that they suffer. Why not put the condemned convict unconscious under normal anesthetic procedure and have a team of doctors harvest organs for use by needy persons.

No one doctor would have violated his or her oath to “do no harm.”

The convict would partially redeem his or her action that caused the death-penalty conviction.

Why not? All gain, no pain.

A man was sent by the judge to get his license at a Kansas City, Kan., driver’s license office. He had everything he needed but was told by the clerk that he could not get the license because he had to speak English.

The man went back to the judge, who gave him 30 more days to get the license. The judge couldn’t understand this discrimination against the man. This kind of injustice against our families has to stop.

The judge wondered whether a miscommunication was involved. But the man said he took his son who speaks perfect English. The son asked the license clerk why she was discriminating against his father. She said in America the boy’s father had to speak English.

This is happening more and more to our families, and it has to stop. This is racist, unjust and against the law, period. This cannot go unchallenged. The clerk or clerks have to be dismissed.

Kansas Rep. Jan Pauls, a Hutchinson Democrat, introduced legislation (HB 2577) to amend the Kansas Safe Haven for Newborns law in February, following the mishandling of a Safe Haven baby relinquishment at a Wichita hospital in January.

Rep. Pauls heard a news report about the lack of anonymity for the mother in the Wichita case and promptly stepped forward with legislation aimed at strengthening the state statute. HB 2577 has passed unanimously in both the Kansas House and Senate.

As our country begins National Child Abuse Prevention Month, it is important to commend legislators who know what is right and then do it.

At a time when all too many elected officials hear about child abuse and child death cases and do nothing, a representative did something and has been successful in revising the law to ensure that parents who are unable or unwilling to care for a baby can remain anonymous if they choose to relinquish the baby at a Safe Haven location.

Safe Haven for Newborns is a primary child-abuse prevention strategy, and I offer special thanks to Rep. Pauls for her good work on this life-saving law.

This story was originally published March 31, 2014 at 4:55 PM with the headline "King Tut, daylight savings, Clay Chastain."