Andanh.com

Someone is going to think this column is racist. That person -- he or she will be white -- will be unable to point to so much as a semicolon that suggests I believe in the native superiority of my, or any other, race. Rather, the accusation will be based in the fact that the column discusses race, period.

It's a phenomenon I've seen many times, most recently when a friend of mine told me that a friend of hers regards me as racist because I write about race. To which I gave my standard answer: If that's how it works, I'll start writing about money. Then I'll be a billionaire.

I offer the foregoing as a gesture of solidarity with an elementary schoolteacher in California who wrote to ask my opinion of two incidents that happened in her class.

In the first, a white boy -- we'll call him Bobby -- disagreed with a black boy. The black boy, who had been explaining something about his family to the teacher, told Bobby he would not understand because he was white. Bobby said this was racist.

In the second incident, Bobby complained that a classmate had called him a white boy. The classmate was a white girl. Bobby said she was racist.

The only thing more tedious than doing housework is reading about housework.

Yet with the gritty determination of a committed obsessive-compulsive, I plowed through a recent 8,000-word New York Times Magazine expose on the current state of gender equity in the American home: "When Mom and Dad Share it All."

Apparently, men and women are still not equal partners. In fact, they're so unequal that they're more or less stuck in the same trends of 90 years ago, despite our best efforts to get men to be better women and women to be better men.

Alas, still foiled.

The most recent figures from the University of Wisconsin's National Survey of Families and Households indicate that the average wife does 31 hours of housework a week compared with the average husband's 14. When wives stay home, they do 38 hours of housework a week compared with men's 12.

Two years ago, President Bush declared that America was "addicted to oil," and, by gosh, he was going to do something about it. Well, now he has. Now we have the new Bush energy plan: "Get more addicted to oil."

Actually, it's more sophisticated than that: Get Saudi Arabia, our chief oil pusher, to up our dosage for a little while and bring down the oil price just enough so the renewable energy alternatives can't totally take off. Then try to strong-arm Congress into lifting the ban on drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

It's as if our addict-in-chief is saying to us: "C'mon, guys, you know you want a little more of the good stuff. One more hit, baby. Just one more toke on the ole oil pipe. I promise, next year, we'll all go straight."

It is hard for me to find the words to express what a massive, fraudulent, pathetic excuse for an energy policy this is. But it gets better. The president actually had the gall to set a deadline for this drug deal:

"I know the Democratic leaders have opposed some of these policies in the past," Bush said. "Now that their opposition has helped drive gas prices to record levels, I ask them to reconsider their positions. If congressional leaders leave for the Fourth of July recess without taking action, they will need to explain why $4-a-gallon gasoline is not enough incentive for them to act."

The Kansas Supreme Court's 6-1 decision extending juveniles the right to trial by jury didn't come with any cash attached. But it's certain to increase the price of criminal justice in the state, especially in urban courts such as Sedgwick County's with a lot of juvenile offenders.

Legislators and locals had better be thinking how to pay for this sweeping new mandate, which applies to all pending and future juvenile prosecutions. As Judge James Burgess, chief juvenile judge of the Sedgwick County District Court, told The Eagle editorial board, "The whole state's going to pay" in jury fees, lawyers' fees and more.

Until last week, juvenile offenders in Kansas could ask for a jury trial, but a judge had the power to grant or reject the request. In reversing the lower courts' decisions in a Finney County case, the court said that "changes to the Kansas Juvenile Justice Code since 1984 have eroded the benevolent, child-cognizant, rehabilitative" character that distinguished the juvenile system from the adult criminal system. For that reason, it held that "juveniles henceforth have a constitutional right to a jury trial under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments."

Not all those who newly have the right will exercise it. As it was, only 4 percent of the 14,000 juvenile offender cases in Kansas during fiscal year 2007 went to trial at all (most cases were resolved by plea or diversion agreements).

And juries are considered unpredictable. Will adult jurors be unsympathetic to kids who've behaved badly? Or will jurors, unlike seasoned juvenile judges, be pushovers for newly well-groomed youths telling sob stories?