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Tuesday, January 30, 1990 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Agency elevation
'Environment president' endorses plan to elevate EPA to cabinet level
president George Bush last week endorsed Congressional legislat
Congressional legislation that would eleve the Environmental Protection
vate the Environmental Protection Agency to Cabinet-level status, thus creating a secretary of environment.
This support comes eight months after the self-proclaimed environment president introduced his Clean Air Act, which is still under debate in both the House and Senate.
It also represents a change in the president's attitude toward expansion of the Cabinet. During his first year in office, Bush adamantly opposed such a move.
Although he is changing his stance on Cabinet expansion, the president's actions indicate that he actually may be living up to his campaign promises. By establishing the environment as a high-profile issue, he seems to be demanding that the White House give the environment priority attention.
While the environment merits such attention in order to break through bureaucratic red tape that often has inhibited the EPA and other environmental organizations, it also needs the backing of a president who is concerned with the improvement of our nation's environment.
the improvement of our labor's strength. The president's environmental stance is, at.
best, questionable. Although he has taken some initiative through the creation of the Clean Air Act, he remains hesitant about enacting environment-improving legislation.
The president said he was prepared to veto any legislation exceeding his $19 billion cleanair proposal of last June, The Associated Press reported last week.
"... I will only sign legislation that balances environmental and economic progress," he wrote in a letter to the Senate.
If the president isn't prepared to endorse Congress' air-cleaning legislation, how is the environmental secretary going to receive the needed financing to establish a nation-cleaning agenda?
The EPA needs not only Cabinet-level status but also money and ideas from a president who is more concerned about solving environmental woes than he is about establishing good public relations.
President Bush's support of establishing the EPA as the newest Cabinet agency, therefore, appears to be an attempt to make the public believe that he truly is the environment president.
Members of the editorial board are Richard Brack, Daniel Niemi, Christopher R. Ralston, John P. Milburn, Liz Hueben, Cory S. Anderson, Merceda Ares, Angela Baughman, Andres Cavelier, Chris Evans, Tiffany Harness, Stephen Kline, Camille Krebiel, Melanie Matthes, Jenner Miller and Scott Patty
Only time will tell.
Melanie Matthes for the editorial board
No Parking
Watkins needs emergency parking
W atkins Memorial Health Center is not accessible enough to students who pay for its services.
More emergency parking is needed outside the center. Only 38 metered parking spaces are available in Lot 90, a yellow-sticker parking area.
That means if you can't find a place to park in the metered spaces, and you don't have a yellow sticker, there is a good chance that you will be ticketed by the University of Kansas Parking Department.
Last summer, after students requested additional yellow-sticker parking through a petition
campaign, more than 375 meters were removed from Lot 90 to create more yellow zone parking.
This leaves a small number of spaces for patients needing close parking because they are ill or for people needing to pick up a prescription at the pharmacy.
More patient parking must be made available near Watkins or the Parking Department should excuse tickets for those students feeling under the weather.
Azerbaijan tour is a vestige of Soviet pretense
Jennifer Metz for the editorial board
he last time I saw Armenia and Azerbaijan, the stage settings were still in place.
In Yerevan, the Armenian capital, our very guided tour visited a kindergarten that could have been designed by Prince Potemkin. It had an impressive music program, complete with an electronic keyboard to teach toddlers musical notation. In the gym, a lighted scoreboard only a little less impressive than the one at the Astrodome helped kids learn their numbers. In a fully equipped art studio, each child could paint away at his own scaled-down easel. The best of their work was displayed on the wall of one room. (No abstracts. This was still the homeland of Socialist Realism.)
we were solemly allowed there were 341 other kindergarteners just like this one in Yerevan. We couldn't disprove that, but found it impossible to believe. This was
Paul Greenberg Syndicated columnist
tourist at its most impressive and implausible. (Someone once defined Tourist as a highly efficient organization designed to keep visitors from seeing the Soviet Union.)
In the real Armenia, everybody seemed to have cousins in Detroit or Los Angeles — and asked if we knew them. My wife couldn't emerge from the open market (which our guide had told us was closed) without having carrots, green peppers and one huge sunflower full of ripened seeds thrust upon her.
In Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, a gritter oil town on the Caspian, we were welcomed
with a scene out of the "Arabian Nights." A lavish Middle Eastern spread was served in a caravansary, a series of little rooms arranged about an open courtyard in which four musicians played Oriental melodies on their worn instruments. It would not have surprised me to see the caravan from Samarkand arrive momentarily off the old Silk Road. Welcome pillows were spread before low tables heaped with food. On this night we would recline while eating. Even the solemn young corroborest from Bristol, the solemn young resident from New York, shared a Russian proverb: "If you want to be happy for a day, get drunk. If you want to be happy for a year, get married. If you want to be happy for life, get friends."
A full moon had been arranged. It beamed down from a clear sky onto the courtyard, where we did a wild wola to the Oriental music. Wandering around, full of cognac,
caviar and lamb pilaf, I noticed that the adjoining rooms were also full of celebrants, all foreigners. (That's funny. The natives never frequented the places our guides took us.) Then I opened a door and found myself in an unadorned, mundane, thoroughly Western office out of the 1930s — with files, typewriter, paper clips. A sign above the desk revealed who ran this plastic casabah: INTOURIST. Instant sobriety. Welcome to Sovidineland.
The fantasy of one big, happy Sovfamily is shredded now. The familiar old Russia emerges again as pogroms baka Baku, and Armenians flee for their lives. Moscow issues statements deploring "ethnic conflict" — as though all this were taking place on the moon. The Romanov could still be in the Winter Palace, wringing their hands and explaining to a troubled world that there's nothing — nothing really — that can be done.
These natives are so feckless. Only one thing seems to have changed: This time the Armenians are fighting back. They, too, are raiding Soviet arsenals.
Moscow's standard operating procedure hasn't changed since the czars: Enough innocents must be killed before the regular army is dispatched. The reserves, drawn from native populations, remain unreliable. Decisive action is put off lest it offend local sensibilities. The theory is that, when enough Armenians and Azeris are killed, both will come to their senses and realize how Russians are still able to divide but no longer conquer. Ivan Skivinski Skivar, meet Abdul e-bul卢 Ameer.
$\Rightarrow$ Paul Green berg is the editorial editor of the Pine Bilt (Ark.) Commercial.
System frustrating
Why is it that the enrollment of students continues to increase every semester when the obvious shortage of classrooms has denied students like myself, a junior with nearly 90 credit hours completed, the classes needed to graduate?
After my first enrollment, I had only a five-hour Spanish class at 7:30 in the morning. After waiting in long lines and being shuffled from place to place in an attempt to get a viable schedule, I was told that I would have to wait until my Jan. 26 add/drop date. Now I find
that the English department has "... reduced the maximum number of students allowed in each class" in all 300-level classes. These are the exact classes I need for my major!
I had once hoped to graduate in four years, but this University makes it nearly impossible. I do not think that Judith Ramaley should be proud of keeping the enrollment numbers consistent when their steady increase is causing overcrowding and frustration.
As an institution of higher education, I think the University's commitment should be to the education of its students and not to the dollar. That is the real issue. It is time for the powers that be to start listening to the students and begin to work on ways to remedy this growing problem.
Jay Norton
Olathe Junior
News staff
Richard Brack...Editor
Daniel Niemi...Managing editor
Christopher R. Relaton...News editor
Lisa Moese...Planning editor
John Milburn...Editorial editor
Candy Niemann...Campus editor
Mike Considine...Sports editor
E. Joseph Zurge...Photo editor
E. Joseph Kline...Graphic editor
Kira Bergstadt...Arts/Features editor
Tom Eblen...General manager, news adviser
Business staff
Margaret Townsend...Business manager
Tami Rank...Retail sales manager
Misy Miller...Campus sales manager
Kathy Burdette...National sales manager
Mike Lehman...National sales manager
Mindy Morris...Co-op sales manager
Nata Stamos...Production manager
Linda Linder...Assistant executive
Carrie Staninis...Marketing director
James Glanapp...Creative director
Janat Rorholm...Classified manager
Yannie Staite...Township Manager
Jennie Hines...Sales and marketing adviser
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Circuit breakers won't solve problems
Our state representatives and the governor could learn a lot from Lvle Kern.
"I didn't think they understood what a million was," Kern said of his fourth-graders. "I was surprised myself."
Ten weeks ago, Kern, a teacher at Jefferson Elementary School in Jola, started teaching his fourth-graders the magnitude of one million by having them collect pop tops from aluminum cans. One million of them.
Our state leaders have the same problem.
The so-called "circuit breakers" would require the state to pay part of the tax bills of some homeowners or small businesses facing skyrocketing taxest At least three of the plans, whose estimated price tags range from $70 million to more than $100 million, are in the House of Representatives. That's a lot of pop tops.
Rampaging property tax payers have caused formerly frugal legislators and a governor who prides himself on his conservatism to rail foolishly for millions of new dollars in direct tax relief.
Giving immediate relief to taxpayers who have flooded the Capitol with marchers, mail and phone calls seems mighty important to the governor and the 125 representatives, all of whom face re-election in Novem-
her
Derek Schmidt
Staff columnist
Thank God for the Senate
State Sen. Gus Bogina, R-Shawnee and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, argues that a circuit breaker is an entitlement program. That means the state would have to pay everyone who qualified for relief, even if the state's estimates were wrong and the treasury didn't have enough money. In other words, it's a potential budget buster.
Bogina is justifiably concerned. Just last week, the Senate had to cough up $7.3 million to pay for the deficit created when $17.3 million in claims were filed against the $10 million appropriated for the existing circuit breaker. Now the stakes are many times higher, and senators are wisely reluctant to ante up.
because they don't face re-election until 1992, senators are better able to resist the panic sweeping the House and the governor's office. Senators want to help burdened taxpayers. But most senators know that a new
circuit breaker would be a campaign
expense, not a sound policy.
The governor knows that too. He managed to find $70 million for a new circuit breaker in a state budget too tight even to maintain current levels of money for higher education and social programs. Increased education spending for the Margin of Excellence, he said, will be "the dream deferred." But he would be more convincing were he not dumping the savings into a black hole.
Higher education is in direct competition with circuit breakers. The millions of dollars proposed for tax relief instead could restore the governor's proposed $20 million in cuts to the education base budget, finance the $16.3 million for the Margin's third year, and have funds remaining. That would be money better spent.
Lawmakers should reconsider the impact of a circuit breaker on students and the poor. There's no shame in the poor. The presence of new understanding.
Lyle Kern even scaled back his pop top expectations. Now he wants only 100,000. After some ciphering last
But even Democratic leaders in the House, while denouncing Hayden's proposed program cuts, are supporting circuit breakers. They are either denying or ignoring the link between the two.
KU, this Bud's for you.
week, he found that each of his 28 students would have had to bring 275 tops each day of the 130-day school year to reach the 1 million goal. That was too much for the kids.
So is circuit-breaker tax relief.
The Associated Students of Kansas and other education lobbying groups plan to blitz lawmakers in the next few weeks to try to restore some of the money cut from education. But there's another way.
Maybe pop tops should become the symbol to protest cuts in higher education. Students and faculty could snap them off and mail them to the governor or legislators at the state Capitol in Topka; 66121.
One year ago, Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. was steeped in tea bags. By alluding to the Boston Tea Party, they represented a protest against a proposed congressional pay raise. From kitchens across the nation, millions of grass-roots lobbyists sent Liptons to lawmakers. The group showed that lopes and mailed them to their congressmen. No fancy arguments. The message was clear. The pay raise died.
Derek Schmidt is an Independence senior majoring in Journalism.
CAMP UHNEELY
THE SKI TRIP: DAY ONE
ONLY 30 MINUTES OUT
OF LAWRENCE, THE TRIP
IS HEADED FOR DISASTER.
BY SCOTT PATTY