Opinion

When we last left off with Glen Clopton, he was a policeman in El Dorado. His next, and last, step in law enforcement was as an officer with the Kansas Highway, which he joined on July 5, 1949. One of the last things he experienced while an El Dorado policeman was a rodeo. A bum showed up in town and the cowboys thought it would be fun to enter him in the bareback bronc riding. They loaned him some spurs, which he managed to get on his worn-out oxford shoes. They also managed to get him mounted on the meanest bronc in the bareback string.

Dear Doctors: I’ve been reading that it’s a pretty bad flu season this year, and I’m starting to get worried about getting sick. I haven’t gotten a flu shot yet, but I think it might be too late. Is it still worthwhile to get the vaccine? Is this year’s vaccine effective?

hen we fix racism we’ll save or recoup the $16 trillion estimated to be lost in just this century, not accounting for the $2.4 billion related to health disparities. That money could go to healthcare for all or universal minimum wage or college.

After a fully fueled KC-135 military tanker crashed into what was then a segregated Wichita neighborhood, my sister Chan chose not to believe our 5-year-old cousin, Tracy Randolph, had died in the fiery 1965 disaster.

Some citizens remember the extreme cold of February 2021 and our recent Winter Storm Elliott in December 2022, and dismiss global warming. But those were daily weather events. Climate is the cumulative effect of long term temperature changes. Averaged data on temperature readings have continuously risen over these last decades. “Climate Change Indicators in the United States” clearly show a rise in winter average temperatures and a decrease in heating degree days resulting in “the amount of natural gas used by the average American at home during the winter has decreased since 1974….”

I’ve got the perfect New Year’s resolution for Kansas legislators: no more lobbyist-authored bills. Last year, Kansas lawmaking was marked by two dramatic “fails,” both involving lobbyist-authored acts.

Now we know the true legacy of outgoing Attorney General Derek Schmidt: allowing likely sexual abusers of children to walk free. According to a summary from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, more than 400 children in our state were sexually abused by Catholic clergy since 1950.