Page 4 University Daily Kansan, January 19, 1982
Opinion
ERA fight not over yet
Pro-ERA forces take heart.
Your battle, although far from being an easy one, is, at least, not over.
The Supreme Court indicated last week that it would consider a suggestion from the Justice Department to set aside a federal district court judge's ruling that would have tolled the death knell for the proposed amendment.
The ERA would place gender discrimination in the same forbidden category as racial discrimination.
Marion Callister, a federal judge in Boise, Idaho, ruled that Congress had acted unconstitutionally when it extended the ratification date of the amendment.
This ruling cast a long shadow over the final phase of the battle for ratification. The extended deadline is June 30, 1982.
In Callister's eyes, the ERA has been a dead issue since March 22, 1979, the original ratification deadline date set by Congress.
There is no provision in the Constitution that sets a time limit for ratification of constitutional amendments. If Congress had the power to set the original deadline
date, there should be nothing that stops it from changing that date.
And while anti-ERA groups might say that extending the date gave the proposed amendment an unfair advantage, others can say that setting any deadline date at all was a blow against it.
Callister, with his ruling, stepped well over the boundaries of judicial restraint into an area that belongs rightfully to the legislative branch.
He also ruled that states had the right to rescind previous ratification votes. The problems with this decision are not as clear cut, but they should also be left to congressional discretion, rather than the whims of one activist judge.
The Court has the opportunity to return the ERA to its rightful guardian, Congress.
The Supreme Court is now asking attorneys involved in the case to file responses to the Justice Department's suggestion, and a ruling can be expected as early as next week.
As worthy a proposal as the ERA, which would benefit not only women, but anyone suffering from the injustices of gender discrimination, deserves more than death by strangulation in procedural tangles.
Video game buff searches for meaning of quarters lost
I tried Electron Anon. But they only told me
you're hooked before you can kick the habit.
You're hooked before you can kick the habit.
No, I told them, I am not addicted. I can hold on to my quarters whenever I want. I am not on my mind.
Instead, I believe I am one of the legion of victims of a terrible, cruel character assassination. Every day another story about the video game craze appears, and each one further decries the effects of frequenting an arcade or dropping a coin into the slot of a machine at a bar. Our children's brains are turning to mush, so the stories go.
I always take bitter pleasure out of noting that the stories are written by non-players. They
CHRIS COBLER
probably don't even know the difference between Pac man and a Galaxian warrior. Why, I'm sure they couldn't clear a screen of space invaders if their very lives depended on it.
So it is that tremendous guilt is heaped upon me whenever I put down my books and pick up some quarters. Once, when I was overburdened with guilt I tried to pinpoint the source of my addiction. It was not a pretty story, but one I had to face.
I guess I was easy prey for the video fad. I had played pinball since B.C. (Before Computers), and my parents even encouraged it by buying a used pinball machine from a bankrupt (gasp)
But the prigigish mainstream members of society don't care that their eye-hand coordination is virtually non-existent. They only see shiftless, irresponsible youths destroying their minds and, what's worse, wasting their money. They cite studies showing that arcades lead to everything from sexual promiscuity to tooth decay.
My first encounter with a video game was certainly innocent enough. The simple, rythmic, bass sound of a Space Invaders machine enticed me to try while I was working part time at a
movie theater. I quit the job after a month, but by then I had scored 9,000 points and my first movie was "The Greatest Showman."
From there I indiscriminately played any video game that crossed my path. Asteroids, Galaxian, Missile Command were all recipients of a single challenge of quarters. I was an addict without a cause.
But Pac Man lifted me out of the maze of confusion and gave me a purpose. Blinky, Pokey and the rest of the Pac men gobbled their way into my heart and my wallet. I was determined to be more than just another Pac head; I was going to beat the machine.
After months of practice, I did it. I learned the ninth key pattern, which any true Pac Man affectiono knows is the secret to success. On one hand, the rules are indefinitely, the only limit being my endurance.
Then came the big contest. Showbiz Pizza Place was offering a free Pac Man machine, valued at $2700, to whoever could score the most points. The top 16 scores would be brought together for a brutal, pressure-packed Pac-off. In a series of head-to-head competitions the two managers would decide how many minutes would advance to the finals, where the two survivors would continue until one dropped.
My friends who once soffeted at my frivility became envious. I was the top seed in the contest after scoring more than a million points in the preliminaries and boldly quitting with three men left. I knew that if I made it into the finals I could outlast any of the other finalists. This would make a great moral to my story, I gleefully told myself.
At last I saw my vindication. Pac Man no longer interested me. I had beaten it. But if I won the contest and sold the machine, I would pocket any easy $2700. I could walk away a winner in the intentionally designed no-win world of video games.
But I lost. There was no warm to my story. For weeks I went cold turkey on all video games as I was unable to play them.
I finally found the answer in a hole-in-the-wall bar in McPherson. A friend of mine took me there and casually pointed to a video game standing against the dingy wall. "Want to try Donkey Kong?" he asked. We played for an hour. It was fun.
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Who's running this place anyway?
What's going on at the White House these days? After a year of seemingly endless smooth sailing and unlimited victories, problems are setting in, serious ones that could cripple the Reagan administration's effectiveness.
I m not talking about the Stockman and Allen problems, nor the foreign policy clashes between Alexander Haig and the White House Troika. Political indiscretions and personality problems are inevitable. But now the added difficulty is that I have trouble coordinating basic policies.
For the second time in six months, the administration has been forced to retreat on a major policy change because of political turmoil in Florida and its surrounding Security. This winter, it's tax exemptions.
The recent change in the tax exemption policy for private schools not only has dramatic implications for civil rights, but it also raises questions of who really is in charge.
This latest episode started Jan. 8 when the Justice and Treasury Departments, seemingly with the White House's blessing, announced that the Internal Revenue Service would no longer deny tax exemptions to non-compliant states that discriminated on the basis of race.
The discarded policy dates back to the Nixon administration, when three Federal District Court judges declared in 1971 that the state had no duty to tax exemptions to discriminatory schools.
The political fallout from the reversal was enormous and immediate. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynahan (D-N.Y.) called the change "immoral." Groups like the Council for American Private Education and the NAACP also denounced the move.
three blacks in the administration, Reagan announced that he was in favor of legislation that would supercede the IRS. But the policy change is still intact—and that is the reason for his withdrawal.
Several congressmen, including Kansas Senator Bob Dole, have pledged to draft legislation that would deny tax-exemptions, but it could take months, and there is no guarantee that it could pass in the conservative climate of Congress.
Last Tuesday, after hurriedly meeting with
Over the weekend, there was a new twist to all this. The White House said there was a
DAN TORCHIA
"It was just given to him for information," Meesae said.
lack of communication that fouled things up. Edwin Emee, presidential counselor, was the only one of the troika who knew about the decision. James Baker, chief of staff, and Michael Deaver, deputy chief of staff, were unable to it until it was too late to make changes.
What about the president? At the last minute he was told about the changes, but he didn't.
And everybody thought they were getting rid of a nasty old Carter policy. It wasn't until they read the papers that Baker and Deaver found out it actually was a Nixon policy.
Two examples of schools that would be rulers are the ruling are: Bob Jones University in Greenwich, CT and
Christian Schools, in Goldsboro, N.C. Bob Jones lost its tax-exempt status in 1970. It prohibits interracial dating and marriages. Goldsboro has never been granted status. It does not admit blacks. Both cite fundamental Christian doctrine for their policies.
Both have been in the news lately as, defendants in a case that was supposed to have been heard by the Supreme Court. As a result of the policy reversal, the Justice Department is asking the Supreme Court to vacate the suit against both schools and declare lower court rulings against them moot.
In doing this complicated governmental two-step, the Reagan Administration tripped over itself. It appears that the administration did not anticipate the controversy. It looks as though it was changing the policy that was that they thought Carter started it, surely a knee-jerk response.
Who really is running things over there? There is nothing wrong with Reagan delegating authority, when the mechanism works correctly. But it appears that Reagan is rubber-stamping aides' decisions. The White House has not been able to dispel this notion.
There is something dreadfully wrong when no one recognizes the implications of a policy, when two out of the three aides who report directly to Reagan don't know about it and when no one feels the matter important enough to require a presidential decision.
No matter how decisive the early victories were, the eventual success of the Reagan administration will depend on how it handles the small tasks. Judging from the past two weeks, some changes will have to be made. It's credibility, which will affect the success of any policy it tries to enact, could be at stake.
Cold weather no longer a small-talk topic
Hi. How ya 'doin? *Mighty cold weather we've been havin' lately,n't it?*
I had to drive to Kansas City Friday night, and that cold wind blasting down from the Arctic slopes almost blew me and my little Pinto off the road. I had to steer so hard against the wind that my car felt like one of its rear wheels was flat, so I pulled over to check it. No flat, so I got back into the car and drove on, fighting against the wind. My car was already something really had happened to my car and I'd tried to walk for help through the wind-cilled 15 below zero weather. Brr.
As I thought about that, my imagination started feeling all sorts of shaking and rumbling in the car and hearing all sorts of strange sounds. It was not right, it was wrong. Something was wrong. I got so nervous that my foot started shaking on the accelerator. It was shaking so violently that I had to pull over and calm myself. I sat listening to that wind and thought that nothing was wrong. Nothing was wrong.
Usually I hardly notice the weather unless I run out of conversation. We don't notice weather unless it is especially terrible, like the weather has been for the past two weekends across the United States, with its record-breaking below zero temperatures. At last count, I heard that 213 people throughout the nation had died from heat-related illnesses in the United States since the death count keeps rising. Sunday, the first weather-related death was reported in Kansas City.
Mighty cold weather we've been havin' lately,
isn't it?
We notice the weather when it threatens human life and safety. And when it has threatened human lives and safety, it has indelibly impacted on human history.
For example, 77 people died Wednesday when an AirFlair Boeing 737 crashed into a Potomac River bridge in Washington, D.C. Although officials haven't determined what caused the crash for certain, the weather is the leading suspect. Eyewitnesses have said that heavy ice
heavy ice builped on the plane's wings may well have caused the crash.
And the crash would not have taken as many lives as it did if the weather hadn't been so bad that the federal government closed down early that day and sent all its employees home. It was their cars that jammed the bridge when the plane crashed into it.
Mighty cold weather we've been haven’t, lain’t
im’t it? Wail slick outside, Watch your step.
Wednesday's crash, though, wasn't the worst aviation disaster since 1927. March 26, 1977, a dense
JoLYNNE WALZ
covering an airport in the Canary Islands prevented the pilot of a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines B747 from seeing the approach of another aircraft to the two planes collided. The death count was 877.
Bad weather doesn't cause only aviation disasters. though it causes crop failures, too.
Fog's thick as pea soup today. You could cut it with a knife.
datasets, though it causes clairties too, and is a form of misuse that was plagued by a series of scorching summers and severe winters that ruined crops. The common people started grumbling about their lot and talking about how good the kings and queens and the royal court had it, living high off the hog. Eventually, they become disgruntled enough to have their lives reduced toocracy, and the French Revolution had begun.
Mighty dry summers we've been havin' lately. The harvest don't look too good again this
Today, the people of Poland are standing in bread and meat lines under the shadow of a statue.
talking about how good the high Communist party officials have it, living high off the hog. The common people don't have enough food largely because it has been their duty as a satellite nation to export much of their food to the Soviet Union.
There, too, the people are standing in bread and meat lines. The average Soviet citizen eat 70 percent as much meat as the average Polish citizen. The Soviets don't have enough flour for bread and grain for cattle because they had noor harvests in 1973 and 1980.
Do you believe this weather we've been havin' latex?
Well, last Friday night, my foot finally stopped shaking on the accelerator pedal as I sat in my car at the side of the road, trying not to worry about the weather. I put my car into drive, and I found that the wind was highway again. That Arctic wind blowing in with its record-breaking low temperature tried to blow my car off the road and, I had to fight against it. All the way to Kansas City, I fought against the wind that kept blowing my car across as easily as it could if he had been a drift of loose snow.
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