Opinion
Lawrence Journal-World l LJWorld.com l Thursday, August 27, 2015
EDITORIALS
Good partnership Lawrence Memorial Hospital programs and support are welcome additions to Sports Pavilion Lawrence.
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he sponsorship and lease agreement allowing Lawrence Memorial Hospital to locate facilities at Sports Pavilion Lawrence is a great partnership between two local entities. The five-year agreement approved by Lawrence city commissioners last week calls for LMH to pay $50,000 a year to lease about 4,000 square feet of vacant space at the recreation center. The space is part of the 6,000 square feet that city officials originally had earmarked for an LMH wellness facility. That plan didn’t work out, but LMH now plans to use part of that space for “sports performance training and other health/wellness related” activities. In addition, LMH will pay $50,000 a year to become an “entitlement” sponsor of SPL. That sponsorship agreement includes allowing LMH some signage inside SPL, two banners at each of the city’s other three recreation centers and some promotional consideration in Lawrence Parks and Recreation Department publications and the department’s website. All of those benefits seem reasonable and warranted for the LMH sponsorship investment. What the agreement doesn’t include is any LMH signs on the SPL exterior or in the parking lot. Some city commissioners already have raised concerns about outdoor signs and possible naming rights, which had been envisioned for a single “entitlement” SPL sponsor who would pay $100,000 per year. SPL is a city, taxpayer-funded facility, they say, that shouldn’t bear the name of another sponsor. Other commissioners aptly point out that money obtained through various sponsorships is money that local taxpayers won’t have to contribute toward the ongoing operating costs of the recreation center. Those differing opinions likely will be aired in future sponsorship discussions, but they shouldn’t detract from the partnership with LMH. The local hospital and the city’s Parks and Recreation Department have a common goal of providing services that contribute to the health and wellness of Lawrence residents. LMH’s programs and sponsorship support are welcome additions to the popular Sports Pavilion.
Trump diminishing GOP chances Washington — Every sulfurous belch from the molten interior of the volcanic Trump phenomenon injures the chances of a Republican presidency. After Donald Trump finishes plastering a snarling face on conservatism, any Republican nominee will face a dauntingly steep climb to reach even the paltry numbers that doomed Mitt Romney. It is perhaps quixotic to try to distract Trump’s supporters with facts, which their leader, who is no stickler for dignity, considers beneath him. Still, consider these: The white percentage of the electorate has been shrinking for decades and will be about 2 points smaller in 2016 than in 2012. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first president elected while losing the white vote by double digits. In 2012, Hispanics, the nation’s largest minority, were for the first time a double-digit (10 percent) portion of the electorate. White voters were nearly 90 percent of Romney’s vote. In 1988, George H.W. Bush won 59 percent of the white vote, which translated into 426 electoral votes. Twentyfour years later, Romney won 59 percent of the white vote and just 206 electoral votes. He lost the nonwhite vote by 63 points, receiving just 17 percent of it. If the Republicans’ 2016 nominee does not do better than Romney did among nonwhite voters, he will need 65 percent of the white vote, which was last achieved by Ronald Reagan when carrying 49 states in 1984. Romney did even slight-
George Will
georgewill@washpost.com
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Trump supporters consider the presidency today an entry-level job because he is available to turn government into a triumph of the leader’s will.” ly worse among Asian-Americans — the fastest-growing minority — than among Hispanics. Evidently minorities generally detected Republican ambivalence, even animus about them. This was before Trump began receiving rapturous receptions because he obliterates inhibitions about venting hostility. Trump is indifferent to those conservative tenets (e.g., frugality: He welcomed Obama’s stimulus) to which he is not hostile (e.g., property rights: He adored the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision vastly expanding government’s power of eminent domain). So, Trump’s appeal must derive primarily from his views about immigration. Including legal immigration, concerning which he favors a “pause” of unspecified duration. Some supporters simply find Trump entertainingly naughty. Others, however,
have remarkable cognitive dissonance. They properly execrate Obama’s executive highhandedness that expresses progressivism’s traditional disdain for the separation of powers that often makes government action difficult. But these same Trumpkins simultaneously despise GOP congressional leaders because they do not somehow jettison the separation of powers and work conservatism’s unimpeded will from Capitol Hill. For conservatives, this is the dispiriting irony: The administrative state’s intrusiveness (e.g., its regulatory burdens), irrationalities (e.g., the tax code’s toll on economic growth), incompetence (Amtrak, ethanol, etc.) and illegality (we see you, IRS) may benefit the principal architect of this state, the Democratic Party. This is because the other party’s talented critics of the administrative state are being drowned out by Trump’s recent discovery that Americans understandably disgusted by government can be beguiled by a summons to Caesarism. Trump, who uses the first-person singular pronoun even more than the previous world record holder (Obama), promises that constitutional arrangements need be no impediment to the leader’s savvy, “management” brilliance and iron will. Trump supporters consider the presidency today an entry-level job because he is available to turn government into a triumph of the leader’s will. This is hardly the first
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— George Will is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.
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From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for Aug. 27, 1915: years “The time has ago come for a more IN 1915 decided stand on the part of the city in regard to the enforcement of the recently passed milk ordinance and unless the milkmen comply with the ordinance in a hurry prosecutions are going to follow, according to a statement by Milk Inspector Holyfield this morning.… ‘There are several dairymen selling milk in Lawrence who needn’t be surprised if they are summoned to appear in court soon.’” — Compiled by Sarah St. John
Carter’s grace embodies true faith “To want what I have, to take what I’m given with grace … for this, I pray.” — From “For My Wedding,” by Don Henley
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time we have heard America singing lyrics like those of Trump’s curdled populism. Alabama Democrat George Wallace four times ran for president with salvos against Washington’s “briefcase totin’ bureaucrats who can’t even park their bicycles straight.” What is new is Trump promising, in the name of strength, to put America into a defensive crouch against “cunning” Mexicans and others. Republicans are the party of growth or they are superfluous. The other party relishes allocating scarcities — full employment for the administrative state. Trump assumes a zerosum society, where one person’s job is another’s loss. Hence his rage against other nations’ “stealing” jobs — “our” jobs. In 2011, when Trump was a voluble “birther” — you remember: Obama supposedly was not born in America, hence he is an illegitimate president — an interviewer asked if he had people “searching in Hawaii” for facts. “Absolutely,” Trump said. “They can’t believe what they’re finding.” Trump reticence is rare, but he has never shared those findings. He now says, in effect: Oh, never mind. If in November 2016, the fragments of an ever smaller and more homogenous GOP might be picked up with tweezers, Trump, having taken his act elsewhere, will look back over his shoulder at the wreckage he wrought and say: Oh, never mind.
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America is a nation of faith. So it is often said. In faith, a baker refuses to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding. In faith, a minister prays for the president to die. In faith, terrorists plant bombs at the finish line of a marathon. In faith, mosques are vandalized, shot at and burned. In faith, a televangelist asks his followers to buy him a $65 million private jet. And no one is even surprised anymore. In America, what we call faith is often loud, often exclusionary, sometimes violent and too frequently enamored of shiny, expensive things. In faith, ill-tempered people mob the shopping malls every year at Christmas to have fistfights and gunfights over hot toys and high-end electronics. You did not hear much about faith last week when Jimmy Carter held a press conference to reveal that he has four spots of cancer on his brain. The 39th president made only a few references to it in the nearly 40 minutes he spoke, and they were all in response to reporters’
Leonard Pitts Jr. lpitts@miamiherald.com
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Feeling sorry would have felt like an insult, a denial of the virtues he showed and the faith he didn’t need to speak because it was just … there.”
questions. Yet, you would be hard-pressed to find a more compelling statement of belief in things not seen. Unsentimental, poised and lit from within by an amazing grace, Carter discussed the fight now looming ahead of him, the radiation treatments he will undergo, the need to finally cut back on his whirlwind schedule. He smiled often. “I’m perfectly at ease with whatever comes,” he said, in such a way that you believed him without question. And it was impossible to feel sorry for him. Partially, that’s because we all die and if — still only
an if — cancer is what takes James Earl Carter Jr. away, well, there are worse things than to go having reached 90 years of age, having been president of the United States, having been married to the love of your life for almost seven decades, having sired a large and sprawling family and having done significant work toward the eradication of disease and the spreading of democracy in the developing world. But here’s the other reason it was impossible to feel sorry for him. Feeling sorry would have felt like an insult, a denial of the virtues he showed and the faith he didn’t need to speak because it was just … there. For all its loudness, all its exclusion, violence and ubiquity, the faith that is modeled in the public square is often not particularly affecting. It is hard to imagine people looking on it from outside and musing to themselves, “I’d like to have some of that.” What Carter showed the world, though, was different. Who would not want to be able to face the unknown with such perfect equanimity? Carter presented an image of faith we don’t see nearly as often as we should. Which is sad, because it
is also the image truest to what faith is supposed to be — not a magic lamp you rub in hopes of a private jet, not a license for our worst impulses, but, rather, an act of surrender to a force greater than self, a way of being centered enough to tell whatever bleak thing comes your way, “So be it.” Even fearsome death itself: “So be it.” The heat and hubris of human life are such that that state is difficult to conceive, much less to reach. Our lives are defined by wanting and by lack — more money, new car, new love — and by the ceaseless hustle to fill empty spaces within. Media and advertising conspire to make you feel ever incomplete. So it is hard to feel whole within yourself, at peace with what is, whatever that turns out to be. But who, gazing upon the former president, can doubt the result is worth the effort? In faith, terrorists kill the innocent. In faith, televangelists swindle the gullible. In faith, so many of us hate, exclude, hurt, curse and destroy. And in faith, last week, Jimmy Carter told the world he has cancer in his brain. And smiled as he spoke. — Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald.