OPINION
November 16, 1984
Page 4
The University Daily KANSAN
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily Kauran (UKPS 60640) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Stuart Flint Hall, Lawen Kauran 60643, daily during the regular school year and Wednesday and Friday during the summer session, excluding Saturday, Sunday, holidays and final periods. Second class postal payment at Lawen Kauran 60644 Subscriptions by mail are $15 for six months or $2年 in Douglas County and $18 for six months or $2年 outside the county. Student postals are free on request. Postmaster's address changes to the University Daily Kauran 60643, 118 Stuart Flint Hall, Lawen Kauran 60644
DON KNOX
Editor
PAUL SEVART VINCE HESS Managing Editor Editorial Editor
DAVE WANAMAKER Business Manager
DOUG CUNNINGHAM Campus Editor
LYNNE STARK MARY BERNICA
Retail Sales National Sales
Manager Manager
JILL GOLDBLATT Campus Sales Manager
SUSANNE SHAW
General Manager and News Adviser
JOHN OBERZAN Sales and Marketing Adviser
Voting in a Student Senate election is a bit like trying to pre-enroll. The lines are long, the paperwork is confusing and any pitfalls the participants have been told to anticipate always are replaced by unanticipated pitfalls.
Paper ballots
This is not to say that this week's election hasn't been well organized. In truth, the Senate Elections Committee has done many things to prevent a rerun of last year's election fiasco.
Despite all the precautions taken and the changes made, however, the Senate's system of voting by paper ballot is archaic and continues to threaten the goal of fair, speedy elections.
Some administrators and students have suggested ways the Senate could improve its elections. Students could vote with computer cards, or optical scanning machines could be used to tabulate votes made in pencil on specially printed ballots. Voting machines could be rented or even purchased, considering the fact that the Senate has more than $135,000 in its unallocated account.
All the while, the possibility of error or tampering has remained.
Yet the Senate remains content in its holding pattern. Each year the Senate has had to spend hundreds of dollars to print ballots. Each year it has had to rely on dozens of students to work at polls and to count ballots.
In interviews with the Kansas Editorial Board earlier this week, none of the candidates for student body president identified balloting as a significant problem. However, the responsibility of bringing Senate balloting into the 20th century will lie with the newly elected president, and not with the current chairman of the Elections Committee, who says there is nothing "inherently bad" with the paper ballots and continues to defend their use.
Stamp of approval
Neither snow nor rain nor a Reagan appointee shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
When the board of the U.S. Postal Service chose the new postmaster, it rejected White House appeals to give the job to the director of the Reagan-Bush campaign committee. It chose instead a postal manager who knows the business.
The board's choice, Paul Carlin, has spent the past few years running the Postal Service's largest region, which covers 13 states in the central part of the country.
ed Rollins, the president's choice, has spent his time helping Reagan win re-election.
The postal board, however, was wise enough to realize that getting a president re-elected and running the country's postal service were two different matters.
Although the appointments have in the past been based largely on cronyism, this time the board opted for experience.
The appointment is welcome news for people who have put up with rising postal rates and declining services.
He has promised to make similar improvements in the entire postal system and to base some of his moves at the multi-billion dollar agency on ideas from "In Search of Excellence." a best seller about business principles.
Should he succeed, even those at the White House address might be glad that a man who knows the business was put in charge.
House conservatives gear for struggle
WASHINGTON — Whatever else the results of the congressional elections signal, conservative members of the House are likely to interpret the outcome as an endorsement of their political views.
When the new Congress convenes next year, the conservatives can be expected to return to their old stand in the House; recite the conservative agenda on matters of defense, the budget, foreign affairs, school prayer and abortion, and demand that the House get in step. Their persistence will provide the usual irritation to the Democratic leadership and could pose a problem for the Republican leadership as well.
Re-election proved an easy matter for all the hard-core conservatives, such as Walker. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga; Robert Walker, R-Pa; Vin Weber, R-Minn; Connie Mack, R-Fla, and William Dannemeyer, R-Calif.
In addition, one of the most fabled House conservatives — Robert Dornan, of California — will be returning after a two-year absence. Dornan gave up his House seat in order to try, without success, for the GOP to win the state, but he defeated Democratic incumbent Jerry Patterson, who many viewed as too liberal for his district, which consists of Orange County.
Having been reassured by their own re-election, the conservatives also can be expected to point to the overwhelming victory of President Reagan as a sign that the nation has chosen the conservative path and that Congress should respond accordingly.
The conservatives will doubtless get some argument on that point. Democrats note with great satisfaction that Republicans gained only fewer than 20 seats in the election, but then the GOP had lost in 1982 and had no popup again in order to revive an alliance with conservative Democrats.
House Speaker Thomas O'Neill,
D-Mass., was quick to say that
Reagan's victory was only a measure of his personal popularity, not an endorsement of conservative Republican philosophy.
However, the band of House conservatives, who have adopted the name "Conservative Opportunity
ROBERT
SHEPARD
United Press International
Society," agree with very little of what O'Neill has said and can be counted on to pursue doggedly their call for the House to vote the way they and Reagan would like.
The conservatives could be in for a disappointment Because Republicans did not win enough seats to establish ideological control of the House, the administration will probably have to compromise with the Democrats in order to get any of its programs through.
That prospect is made even more likely by changes in the Senate, where Democrats picked up two seats. The Republican margin was narrowed to 53-47. Liberal Republicans are willing to join the Democrats on some key issues, so the administration cannot rely on the almost automatic Senate backing it has enjoyed so far. Reagan will be under pressure to be more accommodating.
House Republican leader Robert Michel appeared in post-election interviews to recognize the situation the GOP faces and the difficulty of
trying to puscle the administration program through Congress without deviation.
Nevertheless, members of the conservative band in the House likely will remain steadfast in their goals and persistent in their attempts to persuade the House to their view.
Lacking any real power, such as committee charmships, the conservatives favoured tactic is to make speeches in the House. They play to a potentially vast audience of television viewers who watch House proceedings on C-SPAN, a public service cable channel
Despite their zeal, however, the conservatives should expect few clear-cut victories in their ideological war with the liberal camp that runs the House.
WELL IT APPENS THAT ONTO THE BRIDES OF RETURNS FROM THE EARLY PRESENTS THE SANITARIUS AS WILL CONTAIN OVER 80 PERCENT OF THE POPULAR VOTE!
CLICK!
Pot Shots
Such an influx of out-of-towners clogs traffic and parking and leaves our undermanned law enforcement agencies paralyzed. Too many people from out of town
If I live until the next time the state of Nebraska comes to Lawrence, I'll watch from a safer city.
I don't mind if a few Nebraska fans rumble down from the North to see their boys. That is, a few. Read, Husker fans: 20,000 of you is NOT a few.
Shopping on a bright, fall Saturday afternoon, I pass through the check-out line and head for the exit. Sitting in front of the exit are elderly men, waiting without question for their wives to walk the aisles and with sacks full of treasures and burgars.
They sit in their jackets and their wool hats, staring into the recesses of empty space, bearing no trace of anxiety or cry. They are not aware of balance or checkbooks, make no phone calls.
showed up. We surrendered our stadium, our campus and our city to those 20,000 or so lattices, and I didn't like the ordeal at all.
I'd rather see 20,000 empty seats than 20,000 Nebraska fans in our stadium. Such a fire sale on tickets further highlights the fact that KU football attendance is anemic. At Deeborne the vans was towed. O happy day if it teaches those obsolete Nebraskas a lesson.
I couldnt park my car in a lot that I'm subsidizing (i went home and returned after the game started) because it was full of cars that had Nebraska plates but no parking permits. None of them were ticketed I knew Parking Services official sigged and said: 'I'll be over in a few hours.' Like food poisoning is over in a few hours.
Laurie K. McGhee
There's a quiet, simple kind of bond I can sense in the elderly couples — the kind we all want to know as each of us grows older together with a spouse, sharing life's rewards with a partner through the years, seeing all of life and becoming the wise for
I seem reassuring in these days of high divorce rates to witness such a phenomenon—the one thing that, each time I see it, reinforces my faith in the institution of marriage.
They only wait patiently and seem perfectly content, as if this were their only reason for existence
Their twinkling eyes and the lines on their faces make them seem kindly, generous and patient from the years of living with the women we can only imagine as they skim through the store. The women do not even have to worry that their husbands will be there, waiting for them, as another shopping sneeze comes to an end.
I originally welcomed the invention of watches that had little alarms on them.
My brother's watch alarm gave me reprieve from the harsh jangle of his Big Ben alarm clock that went off in the next room an I before I had to roll over and shut my own door.
However, I have changed my tune after too many rude interruptions from an invention that people use inappropriately.
The quietest of watch alarms is distracting when it goes off during a concert or a play.
Margaret Safranek
Hearing the beep-beep of the watch just seconds into an actor's closing lines cheats all those sitting near the offending watch-wearer.
Many printed programs now ask the audience to turn off the blasted things.
Although I have yet to hear a professor make the same request, the time may be crucial.
I wouldn't blame a guest lecturer, a teacher or a panel moderator for making a mistake.
I have heard the alarms sound in several heard the lectures and on time during services.
And yes, you might have guessed that, if the watch alarms irritate me, the pagers, or beepers, that are worn by doctors and anyone else in an "on-call" position drive me nuts.
I was ready to ask for my money back after an evening at a dinner theater at which a hospital medical staff had come for its Christmas party.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Reagan victory gives cause for mourning for those who will suffer
To the editor:
The results of the presidential election have for me stirred shock, sorrow and embarrassment.
I am shocked that the voting majority of our nation has voted for a personality rather than for the policies of the person who will be governing the United States for another four years. Personally I find nothing attractive in President Obama's ability to could care less style, but even if I found him a heartthrob of an actor, I wouldn't think of voting on those terms.
I am saddened because I think that in re-electing Reagan we have inadvertently mandated the continued suffering, death and destruction in the lives of many groups of people whose well-being and basic rights are being sacrificed by Reagan's policies. Among these are the Nicaraguan people and others in Central America who are being tortured and killed by U.S. weapons, the economically poor in our country who have felt the largest burden of the cost of bomb production, minority
peoples whose just causes are being curtailed, women whose personal rights are being threatened, students whose chance for higher education is in jeopardy, and ironically, senior citizens who, unlike Reagan, are not receiving needed support and artists who, unlike Reagan, are struggling to paint a realistic, just and beautiful picture for the future.
This list is only the beginning of those with whom I would mourn our tragic mistake. Finally I would mourn with the Soviet people and indeed the entire world that our country has re-elected a man ardent in the escalation of our annihilation process, and that our forces in a cooperative effort to defuse the universal threat we have built up.
Lastly, I find it embarrassing that we have re-elected the "joker" as "king" I find it humiliating that a man whose actions say, "They have been beaten," has been reinstated after four years of experience. In the eyes of the world, I
India has been mourning the death of a great, woman leader who was assassinated, and the world joined in expressing sorrow over India's tragedy. In a country that has never had that and is not yet ready to have a woman or minority leader as our president, I felt compelled to mourn the death of Indira Gandhi. I now feel compelled to mourn our nation as we remember the nation, namelessly at the hands of the U.S. government. To those who join in mourning the shame of this nation and the sadness spread across the earth, I hope that we can find constructive expression for our grief.
think that the United States has deservedly lost much respect.
Newton graduate student
Kamala Platt
Class is proper
To the editor:
To the editor:
I read first with amusement and
then with irritation the asinine accusations made by the left-wing Praxis group about the terrorism class taught by Felix Moos and Maynard Shelly. It is most appropriate that Praxis should use yellow paper for its yellow journalistic rag.
I have a child taking this class, and we have discussed the "terrorist" activities at some length. They are indeed merely hypothetical "raids," totally on paper. Moreover, several months ago, I was employed by the anthropology department. During this time I happened to have the responsibility of putting the textbook for the class on the computer. I am very familiar with the content of the book as well as the attendant notes and research sources. Under the circumstances I can say with no equivocation whatsoever that the course is an excellent analysis of the thought processes of terrorists and an in-depth study of the aberrational psyches of individuals likely to engage in terrorist activities.
The temptation to sink to Praxis!
level and accuse it of being the mindless tool of the Kremlin is almost overwhelming. However, because it is highly unlikely that the Soviets and the KGB are even aware of these budding baby Bolsheviks, I can only conclude that they have nothing better to do but look for excuses to forment trouble where none exists.
To fight terrorism, one must know something about it — "know your enemy" Perhaps that is precisely what the Soviet sycophants of Praxis fear.
Pious concern
To the editor:
Carmela M. Sibley '77 Lawrence graduate student
It is true, you know. what Mark Cole says about homosexuality
leading to death (Nov 7, letter,
"Question is love") I, mean, gree
whiz, it's even been historically
documented. Take Nazi Germany,
for instance. Homosexuals it, seems,
consistently died after having their
arms and legs severed, without
anesthesia, by Nazi physicians
dutifully testing human response to
extreme battle shock.
Really, Cole's patronizing pattern about whether any "moral law" requires student funding of Gay and Lesbian Services of Kansas would be comedic if it were not so frighteningly personal. If he were viling interference in people's private lives with pious compassion, I hate to say, makes it no less obscene.
Ignorance is bliss, so they say. Reading the disturbing glut of letters similar to Cole's in this semester's Kansan, one can't help but detect, high atop Mount Oread, a certain embarrassing surplus of rapture.
Karl Gridley Lawrence senior