4
Tuesday, August 31, 1976
University Daily Kansan
Comment
Opinions on this page reflect the view of only the writer
Med Center doing well
For the second time this year, the KU Medical Center has passed a test.
This spring, after two heart surgery teams resigned, saying conditions at the Med Center were standard and unsanitary, the Med Center was inspected by three outside heart surgeons. Although the surgeons suggested some changes, overall they gave the Med Center passing grades.
IN JULY, some Med Center employees and the mother of a patient complained to an interim legislative committee visiting the center that the Med Center was understaffed, excessively dirty and lacking adequate equipment.
Last weekend, a team from the Department of Health Education and Welfare made an unannounced visit to the Med Center to check on these charges. The team declared the charges unfounded.
So, for the time being at least, the Med Center is officially considered adequately staffed and equipped and sufficiently clean.
ODDS ARE, however, that the passing of another few months will see another set of charges and another investigation. A college medical center simply tends to draw such charges more often than private or public hospitals do.
Although the Med Center meets all the minimum requirements for equipment and sanitation, it may not look all that well-equipped or clean to an observer who's comparing it with many public and most private hospitals.
THIS IS because the Med Center is still basically an educational institution and works on a different philosophy and, more importantly, a different budget from other hospitals. It is intended to give medical students an education and medical patients comparatively cheap treatment.
It doesn't really have the money to do much more.
The same lack of money that may be responsible for the center looking comparatively dirty may also be responsible for the tendency to mediate orders to state legislative committees. Complaints made now may more money later.
So don't be surprised if there is a headline in the December 1 issue of the Kansan about new charges at the Med Center.
And don't be surprised if the charges eventually fade away.
By Jim Bates
Editorial Editor
Carter stand sensible
By CHUCK ALEXANDER
Democratic presidential nominee Jimmy Carter had just gotten the taste of shoe leather out of his mouth when he seemingly thrust his foot~shoe and all~back into his mouth by telling the American Legion's National Convention last week he favored pardoning Vietnam war draft evaders.
But, in doing so, he showed himself to be a man of compassion.
Pardon, amnesty and clemency apparently mean the same thing to many
Americans—including Republican vice presidential nominee Robert Dole, who told the same American Legion convention 24 hours later that no difference existed between amnesty and pardon. Dole went on to say the president wouldn't grant any blanket pardons or blanket amnesty to Vietnam draft dodgers.
Although at first glance it seems clear where the two candidates stand on the issue of pardoning draft evaders, a second glance shows both candidates playing a game of words.
Carter said "amnesty means
that what you did is right.
a pardon means that what you
did–right or “wrong to”
pardon, “pardon,
yes-annexed, no.”
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN
Editor
Debbie Curr
Published at the University of Kansas daily August 13, 2015
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Carter, since his last foot-iment mouth remark about "ethnic purity," has been careful about what he says. His words on the controversial amnesty issue were one of the few things Noah Webster would probably disagree with Carter's definition of amnesty and pardon—both words, according to "Webster's Dictionary," more essentially the same thing as mentioning Carter's intention or the distinction he made between pardon and amnesty.
Managing Editor
Vast Abohlahkai
Editorial Editor
Jim Bates
Campus Editor
Stephen Stewart
Assoc Campus Editor
Bill Shufman
Assistant Campus Editor
Bishwt Badham,
Chuck Adams
Photo Editor
Dave Reger
Staff Photographers
George Millerle,
Ivo Ewolfe
Business Manager Terry Hanson
Assistant Business Manager Carole Roosterboken
Advertising Manager Janice Clements
Assistant Advertising Manager Jude Jarusha
Assistant Marketing Manager Julie Clements
Assistant Classified Manager Kurt G. Schiff
Carter's definition makes sense. He wants to do the same President Ford did for the Kissinger administration. Nixon—put the matter to rest for the sake of the country. Dole says he and Ford are against blanket pardons, yet Nixon was granted a "blanket" pardon for killing his own son. They are still popping up like dandelions after a spring shower.
In last week's battle of terms over the amnesty pardon issue, Carter showed himself a man who believes in equal treatment for all Americans, whether he brafted evacuated by the President of the United States. The document showed only how Ford ad-
Dole showed only how hypocritical the Ford administration is.
Issue of apathy ignored
Politicians spend millions of dollars to figure out why people vote the way they do. Polls on issues, emotions and images are conducted to make it easier for a candidate to run a successful campaign. But too often the candidates, the major parties, fail to neglect a much more important question—why many people don't vote.
Certainly some potential voters are hopeless. They are the sort who won't vote because they are too lazy to spare 15 minutes to register. On election day, if they are registered, they will be raining, or too hot, or whatever. There's little to do about such people.
BUT THERE are others, and one suspects they are a large group, who would vote if they thought it worthwhile. Unfortunately, the major parties and candidates seem more interested in gaining a majority of voters than getting more people involved in the political process.
Although this is seldom true, little is done to dispel the myth. Certainly Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey weren't at all allure in 1968, and President Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter seem to present a pronounced conservative-liberal split.
the current lack of interest in politics by many rather intelligent Americans is lamentable, but even worse is the dismal effort made by the Democrats and Republicans to improve the situation.
ONE REASON for not voting is that "the candidates are the same."
But when it comes time to make differences clear to the public, the
Greg Hack Contributing Writer
Another reason the alienated voter seldom goes to the polls is the idea that candidates who are truly different simply can't win. The experience of Barry Goldwater in 1964, George Wallace in 1988 and George McGovern in 1972, supports this idea.
THE MAJOR parties did little to help Goldwater and McGovern, their own candidates. It is unfortunate that Goldwater and McGovern were too incompetent to at least make them a majority in the theirs probably make other candidate wry of being as honest as those two were.
But such experiences shouldn't make candidates afraid to say what they really think.
Skillful campaigners such as Carter and Reagan made fairly strong statements on some issues, but they were not as powerful and even such slays as Carter's "ethnic purity" put by Reagan's choice of Sen. Richard Schweitzer as a run-up to his reelection (even though Reagan lost the Republican nomination).
PERHAPS THE most legitimate reasons people give for not voting, especially in presidential, are that politicians aren't to be trusted.
These are tougher obstacles to overcome—essentially because both charges are true—and they must be overcome if the United States is to remain (or become) a healthy country.
Government is indeed out of control. Even one as ignorant as I am of weapons systems and defense requirements senses strongly that someone is getting fat needlessly from the $40-billion defense budget.
AND WHO can doubt, when millions who live in poverty get no government help at all, that the government allows all the Department. Health, Education and Welfare isn't being spent on those truly in need?
The credibility gap widens when Republicans tell us they are against big government, but support aid for big corporations in trouble, and when the Democrats, whose Congress created the mess, tell us they will reform the government "from top to bottom."
Indeed, it is almost enough to make one stay home on election day. It is less likely to accomplish nothing positive, and it could signal our demeis.
THIS YEAR, at least, we have to settle for the lesser of two vials (or cups) of wine or water in a box, third-party candidates). But a big voter turnout will still show the major parties that the people say they want good government.
The country desperately needs a large total vote, or else those in power will continue to smugly say that all of the countries are satisfied. And the country also needs candidates courageous enough to say what they really think, in YELP, and most important of all, the people who think that tough questions are answered.
Recent events have proved that the press can make a difference when it tries. Now it must try its best to force the candidates to force the candidates and the parties to face the music and dispense with the same old soft shoe.
WKDC/
Corry and Westphal
IT IS IN THIS BUILDING THAT NORTH KOREA TODAY MADE A FORMAL PROTEST TO THE UN OVER ACTIONS TAKEN BY THE U.S. IN FELLING A DREE NEAR THE KOREAN DEM.7.
THE TREE MARKED THE SITE WHERE AN UNPROVOKED NORTH KOREAN STOCK KILLED TWO US OFFICERS SENT TO TRIM THE TREE.
A U.S. SPOKERMAN SAID THAT THE PROTEST WOULD PROBABLY BE OVERLOOKED SINCE THE TREE HAD NO DISCRIMINABLE IMPORTANCE TO NORTH KOREA.
THE NORTH KOREANS AGREED
SAUING THAT THE TREE WASN'T
THE REAL ISSUE. WHAT DID CON-
CERN THEM HOWEVER WAS THEIR
TEN MEN IN THE TREE—POUR
OF WHOM WERE SERIOUSLY
INJURED.
DRR4/WNSTDHAL
Ford needed to offset Congress
Much of the Republican rhetoric at Kansas City, like much of the Democratic rhetoric in New York, was humiliated by hundreds of dash. Here and there at both conventions, the orators served
up some solid stuff. John Connally in Kansas City had a passage worth our thought.
The Democrats, Connally said, already control roughly two-thirds of the seats in both the House and Senate. It would
"AND THAT'S THE WAY WE HUMANS USED TO LOOK BEFORE THE EXPERIMENTS IN MOLECULAR BIOLOGY AND THE CHEMICALIZATION OF THE ENVIRONMENT."
1976 NYT SPECIAL FEATURES
have been tactless to say so, but he might have added that the Democrats almost certainly will retain these majorities, or larger majorities, when the next Congress convenes. The Democrats now are arguing Connally said, "that they should not be allowed to total dominion over all the power in this system by control of the executive branch of the federal government."
HE SAID: "i believe that is an argument which thoughtful Americans must view with care. The real time is time-it is long past time—that we awaken to the reality that our system is in danger of losing the very balances which we rely on and our personal freedom.
"Not in the lifetime of any present here—not in the lifetime of the republic itself—have we ever heard of a president subjugation of the system under the rule of a single party. Is this the party which the people want to hold power over them without a President in the White House, or is there a need to exercise restraint over that party's willful excesses?"
CONNALLY'S point mperss sober reflection. We have had 39 Congresses in this century. The Republicans have controlled both houses in 14 of these, the Democrats in 25.
But with the sole exception of the 75th Congress in 1937-38, the minority party always has a majority in one chamber or the other. And in 1937-38, though they held only 16 seats in the Senate and 89 in the House, the Republicans governorshops and legislatures.
Recent years have wrought enormous changes. The Republicans today hold only 13 governorships. They cling to barely 31 per cent of the seats in state legislatures.
ONLY IN Kansas does the GOP claim the governor's office
and both houses of the legislature. Depending on which poll you believe, only 18 to 22 per cent of the eligible voters identify themselves with the Republican party.
Other changes have greater bearing on Connally's statement. There was a time when warriors, the warhorses, commanding key
James J. Kilpatrick (c) 1978 Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
committee chairmanships, exercised a restraining influence upon their own Democratic party. Most of that power structure has been swept away. Half a dozen Southerners still hold chairmanships in the House, and many hold similar positions in the House, but their authority has eroded.
GRANTED, party labels are not the be all and end-all. Even with their overwhelming majorities in the current Congress, the Democrats have been able to override only 10 of Ford's 55 vetoes. It is the power of the Senate that now provides the principal brake against absolute one-party rule.
Perhaps the American people, by electing Democrat Jimmy Carter in November,
will want to throw that brake away. It would be an act of reckless folly, and I would say the same thing if the situation ever were reversed. Our political system depends upon checks and balances. Discard these, and the system collapses.
THIS IS the danger, in my own view, that ought to be studied. The Democrats, of course, argue that the division of power between a Republican White House and a Democratic Congress produces only stalemate and stagnation.
The Democrats chafe at the vetoes; they are impatient with obstacles in their way. With most of the country going again." On major domestic issues, involving health, education, welfare, labor and regulatory power, would have it all their own way.
If that is a glorious prospect in liberal quarters, it will leave the rest of us unasey. "Beware of energetic governments," Jefferson warned. "They are always oppressive." When power is divided, a President has a brake in the veto, in the impeachment nominations, in the naming of departmental heads. When power is consolidated under one-party rule, we have a government that is all throttle, with no brake at all.
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Letters to the editor are welcomed but should be typewritten, double-spaced and no longer than 400 words. All letters are edited and may be condensed according to space limitations and the editor's judgment. Letters should not include the CUI must provide their academic standing and homeetown; faculty must provide their position; others must provide their address.
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