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Wednesday, April 6, 1977
University Daily Kansan
Comment
Opinions on this page do not necessarily reflect the view of the University of Kansas or the School of Law
Pot bill dead for now
It came as no shock Monday night when the Kansas Senate rejected a bill reducing the criminal penalties for possession of one ounce or less of marijuana.
After all, passing such a bill might have hurt the state's conservative image. No diehard Bible Belter of Kansas would want that.
There is a rays of hope, however, in looking at the closeness of the Senate vote. The upper chamber of the Senate voted 17-19 to reject the bill and referred it a second time to the State and Federal Affairs Committee, which voted against Senate for a vote after 1½ hours of debate.
A motion to kill the bill altogether failed on a voice vote and allowed it to be sent back to the State and Federal Affairs Committee. The committee, in fact, technically insures its death for this session.
There was an effort yesterday to bring the bill back to life, but to no avail. Decriminalization will just have to wait till next year.
IF ONE DISSENTING senator had instead voted for the bill, it might still have had a chance. If two senators had changed their minds, the bill would be going before the full Senate for final consideration.
But instead Kansas refuses to add its name to the list of eight states that have reduced criminal penalties for possession. This means the state's current law will continue to allow the punishment of occasional smokers and those who are asserting an armed arrest for possession a smoker faces a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a $2,500 fine.
DEATH COMES TO a bill that never had much of a hanvie life anywav.
Even before the Senate rejected the bill, an amendment cutting into its effectiveness was approved in committee debate. That
amendment, proposed by Sen. Frank Gaines, D-Augusta, provided a maximum penalty (a one-year sentence and a $2,500 fine) upon a user's second conviction instead of upon the third conviction as the bill originally provided.
Sen. Edward Reilly, R-Leavenworth and chairman of the State and Federal Affairs Committee, said he was appalled at the lack of intelligent debate by members of his committee. Reilly understated the situation. Consider the absurdity of other amendments that were proposed and that fortunately failed;
—SEN. JOHN Crofoot, R-Cedar Point, proposed that the amount of marijuana in possession be reduced from one ounce to a level tablespoon. Senators were intelligent enough to reject that idea on a voice vote.
—Sen. Bill Morris, R-Wichita, attempted to have the amount reduced to one-eighth of an ounce. That lost on a 9-16 vote.
—Sen. Robert Talkington, R-Iola, tried to make the penalty for possession a possible 30 days in jail, in addition to a $100 fine, at the discretion of the judge. That, too, voiced justice.
The killing of the marijuana bill adds another mark to a series of unsuccessful attempts of Rep. Mike Glover, D-Lawrence, minimize刺 marijuana possession in Kansas.
This time Glover came much closer to getting a compromise concerning decriminalization. One can only wonder what the Senate vote would have been had Glover not confessed to a Kansas City Star reporter last month. He was accusing his remarks made several legislators reconsider their position on the law.
No doubt Glover will be back next session trying to win support of his bill. Maybe next time he can succeed before tablespoons turn into teapacks in the minds of state senators.
Ideologies don't dictate results
The use of political party labels to generalize about an individual's personal political beliefs has always been suspect.
For example, the huge number of Democrats who have rejected former President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal legislation resent the frequently circulated idea that the New Deal was a result of Democrat ideology.
Republicans have a similar resentment of the notion that the GOP is supportive of or subject to the whims of so-called Big Business. To Republicans, that notion is as dangerous as it is wrong.
Political rhetoric has always born the brunt of public skepticism, but rarely does that skepticism accurately reflect the political philosophy of one party or
ALTHOUGH SUCH SKEPTICISM is sometimes directed to one party or another, to the extent that it applies to one, it applies to another. To the extent that the president controls control Democrats in Congress, for example, they control Republicans.
But political rhetoric usually isn't related to the harsh political realities that face Congressmen in the day-to-day decisions they make. Besides the
ever-present worry about being reelected, Congressmen consider how special interests will react to a position that would likely nightly vote on a certain issue or bill.
Brent Anderson Editorial Writer
as also difficult. For whatever the reason, Congressmen usually are expected to follow the directives of the leaders of their party rather than the interests of the people they supposedly represent.
"IT IS EASY to put party labels on what politicians do," said Gov. Robert Bennett last week at a meeting of Kansas College Republicans. "It is difficult to try to understand the reasons they make certain decisions."
The danger of taking a position that a Congressman knows will stimulate division among his own political party
decisions. As President of the Kansas Senate, he was responsible for giving state senators the opportunity to make decisions. As governor, he is responsible for the implementation of those decisions.
Partisan politics are often the reason public officials take a certain stand or make certain statements to the public. Members of both parties are guilty of actions motivated primarily by their political interest. Some of both parties in the same bag with unimportant squabbles is, in my opinion, a mistake.
THERE ARE distinct differences between the Republican Party and the Democrat Party, and these differences may be influenced by politicians seem to spew forth so often. Why are they always saying one thing in their speeches to the social clubs in their hometowns, then doing another thing to vote on specific legislative proposals?
One of the most blatant examples of this amazing phenomenon, especially applicable to Congressmen, involves the phrase, "Bie Government."
An election doesn't go by unless every candidate for the House of Representatives or the Senate says he is against
big government. If all are against big government, why does the government continue to get so big?
ANOTHER EXAMPLE involves the orphan phrase, "balanced budget." Why do voters continue to allow certain politicians to say they are working towards balancing the federal budget when politicians have no interest in such a concept?
Everyone hates the federal bureaucracy. But no one seems to hate the bureaucracy more than a person who wants to be elected to a seat in the House or to a president of the country, now, every bureaucrat in Washington would have been shipped to a concentration camp in Western Kansas.
TWO IMPORTANT reasons seem to strike me as perennial ones. One, a Congressman's constituents never seem to be interested in trivialities such as his voting record, and, two, the Congressman's party affiliation usually means that he is not an expert on specific political trends such as big government, the national debt and the growth bureaucracy.
To say that a flower is a member of the rose family doesn't mean that it will always smell good.
Taxpayers funding ERA lobby
WASHINGTON — President Carter Monday reconstituted the National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year, and named Bella Abzug as his chairwoman. Speaking simultaneously as one tax officer, she asked what in the world goes on.
The commission is to include 42 public members plus two from the Senate and two from the House. It is Birch Bay of Indiana, whose modest claim is to have written more of the U.S. Constitution than he has. He is the constitutional expert. But if there is any constitutional
On April Fool's Day, a fictitious story in the Kansan attempted to parody the college bureaucracy. In a tongue-in-cheek way, it tried to poke fun at administrators while pointing some of the absurdists of the foe of campus committees.
Committees a swampland
And so the list goes, on up to number 1,175, Josh Califano, secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, was surprised to find that he alone had 300 of the pests to deal with. Califano's
Just a few days later, the Wall Street Journal published a story dealing with a similar subject, *The Mistake*, that wasn't a parody, and it certainly wasn't fictitious. It was the sad but true saga of the 1,175 advisory committees that keep democracy recruacy rolling and growing.
responsible for sopping up the overflow.
THEN THERE'S the National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice. That's an obscure committee formed 74 years ago because Congress decided it would be a good way to produce a nation of sharpshooting soldiers. The mission was to help the troops away long ago, but its budget certainly isn't; the board shoots up $385,000 of taxpayers' money every year.
Republicans, a celebrity or two.
Most of the commission
members will attend only three
conferences and attend none at all. The work will be done by a carefully rigged staff under the supervision of a chairman whose views are as
solid as the vernal equinox.
There are committees in Washington to please just about all those who need the Journal story points out, there is the Conor Advisory Committee to advises them about conorders, anangered species.
Worst of all, Congress has made sure that the number of committees—necessary and otherwise—will continue to
President Carter has his
committees explore everything from gastrointestinal drugs to sunburn treatments.
Each of the committees is eating up tax money. And, in some cases, they are in it private. Congressional investigators have found that many of the Pentagon's committees for instance, meet secretly.
grow nearly every time a move is made in the capital.
Those righteous Congressmen who have criticized everyone are saying the federal lamb will have to take the blame for this one. And they're going to have to be doing something about it.
Jerry Seib
Editorial Writer
A 1972 law stipulates that any time a government agency puts one private citizen on a committee that offers advice, that committee can elect the committee committee. Instant red tape—just add a citizen.
authority for this exercise in public expenditures, it eludes ready identification.
JIMMY CARTER has discovered all of this, and he his staff are still acutely aware of his campaign pledge to whittle down the bureaucracy. That isn't of his own making.
Carter, it turns out, can singlehanded, kill only of the ones he has created. Those 16 are the only ones created by executive order. The rest are mandated, created or not. They must ultimately be held
The gentlewoman from New York, as chairwoman of this outfit, has been handed a $5 million kitty to stroke. It is immaterial that in a budget of $460 billion, an item of $5 million
THE LAW WAS made in an attempt to make committees more open, but committees are more open as a result, but there are so many of them that decisions can be lost behind locked doors.
It will be phenomenon if Bell's dooblegge follows any other course. Nothing will be learned from this expenditure of public funds that couldn't be gleaned from the women's magazines or from the consistories of the League of Women Voters. The same speakers will make their presentations have been making for months. The commission's 38 employees will draw their pay and will process travel vouchers. We will have press releases, agendas.
butcher knife poised to start slicing. What he needs now is the go-ahead from Congress.
programs, statements. The only excitement will come, as it came in Mexico City in the summer of 1975, when some of the participants get to howling and pulling hair.
James J. Kilpatrick (c) 1977 Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
A good place to start would be Califano's department. It is a hallway of lush green grass, guzzler that has grown so large it has trouble functioning. Califano would get to rid of it only someone would let him of.
Persons who oppose the Equal Rights Amendment would be well advised to mount a counter-offensive. With vigorous effort on their part, stacked conferences can be organized and scheduled of witnesses can be unrigged. Abzug tends to overwhalm opposition, but the gentlewoman is not invincible. As head of a public body, spending public funds, she is in a position of public trust. The case of Katrina was tolerated. As these conferences proceed, perhaps the local press will seek to keep the lady in line.
The study commission then is appointed, according to demographic rules as immutable as the laws of physics; members with Spanish American surnames, so many from the South, the West, and the East, a smattering of
It will be interesting to see what develops. In the normal pattern of such ventures, study commissions follow a classic outline. First is the lofty statement of purpose—in this case, an executive order by former President Ford. This is important, enabling legislation, approved by a Congress that finds it politically inexpedient to challenge so noble an undertaking.
Abzug promised that "some who are opposed to the ERA" would be represented.
is not even pocket change. The five million has been taken from the people under the compass of taxation. For what purpose?
Congress is giving Carter the power to reorganize the executive branch; it should do the same with the advisory committees that are spreading like crassgrab.
The ostensible purpose, spelled out in the authorizing legislation in 1975, is to assess the impact between men and women in all aspects of life in the United States," and to identify the barriers that prevent women from participating in the aspects of national life. Jimanday. The commission also is charged with setting up a series of workshops followed by a national whois-todo in Houston in November.
AS THE REPUBLICANS were telling us all summer, it was a Democratic Congress member of the bureaucratic slop in Washington. There is now a Democratic President willing to cooperate in cleaning up the water and don't hold much water now.
The anterior purpose, unless I am vastly mistaken, is something else: giving money to the spending our money in a desperate, last-ditch lobbying effort for the pending Equal Rights Amendment. Any such diversion of public funds is unlawful, and probably unlawful as well.
Perhaps my speculations are unjust. Back in December 1975, as a member of the House of Commons, I gave colleagues. The commission's conferences, she said, would afford an opportunity "for even greater insight into everything we viewpoint", to make her concerns known.
Computers a blessing, curse
One unchallenged fact of life nowadays is the dominance of computers in our lives.
When dealing with a growing number of people, in any situation, computers speed up
the natural order, or disorder, of things by their efficiency. At the University of Kansas, the days of an impersonal enrollment process on campus are fortunately drawing near, thus eliminating the high personal, sometimes antagonistic and involuntary procedures in Allen Field House.
COMPUTERS ARE ubiquitous. They are in the supermarkets and stores, where minicomputers have replaced the suddenly old-fashioned cash register. Some of these minicomputers are even equipped with a fingerprint, computers, data banks and financial institutions that can both credit and debit accounts from afar. The unconscious and self-gravity feeling of money being doloed out and received is a thing of the past. The computer's main assessors or feelings, which allow it to perform its duties with unimpeded efficiency.
OF COURSE, the computer can solve a myriad of problems, but is impersonal treatment of people-turned-in-number. And there's no reason to that than computers on computers won't increase.
The bypassing of human contact is both the blessing and the curse of computers. The blessing is that the high
probability of human error is eliminated, especially when dealing with large numbers. When it makes sense that if the computer makes a mistake its inherently unable to correct itself and keeps merrily
HOWEVER, whether man or machine is at fault it's still up to the customer to straighten out his bill. For those caught on the bus, it can be difficult for nervous breakdown, this advice should be followed: 1) Keep
churning out misinformation— until a human being steps in and stops it.
Paul Jefferson
Editorial Writer
ANYONE WHO has dealt in credit of any kind is familiar with the fallacy of blindly trusting a machine.
Recently, a man in Washington who thought he had only 67 cents in his bank account was computer-credited with the sum of $4.5 million. When he went to the bank to check it out, he found that it was a computer, whose records were fed by human operators.
After the matter was cleared up, the bank threatened to close his account, but rebelled and asked for an extra $50 with interest, if there was any.
Computer billing foul-ups are far less common now than when credit completion was well past Stone Age. But there's still plenty of room for error, the most common being simple errors.
your cool. Remember that a computer is just a very fast moron, incapable of the malicious attributes you give it. If your computer won't help you get human attention to the problem, and may in fact prolong matters if no one can read your account number. Don't worry about the IDR card. 2) Be nice to the human beings in the billing
system and give them a fair chance of rectifying their mistakes. 3) Holler for help.
COMPUTERS ARE also notorious for spelling out form letters, especially the personalized ones in varying degrees of informality, hard sell, and downright irritation.
A Chicago woman found it almost impossible to choke out a stream of letters churned out by the computer of her credit card company. The letters threatened her with legal action if she didn’t pay the sum of $0.00 immediately. It is these letters, and impersonality and familiarity, that breed contempt.
There are some battles with a computer that you can expect to win, and some battles, if you don't follow the right channels, that are doomed from the start.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Published at the University of Kansas daily August 17, 2018
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Jim Bates
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Greg Hack
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Stewart Brann
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