Andanh.com

When Barack Obama decided last week to throw off the constraints on campaign spending that go with the acceptance of public financing, he was rightly criticized for rigging the system in his own favor.

That was a predictable response. For the better part of four decades, the press and public interest groups have focused on campaign spending as the most serious distorting force in our elections.

Meantime, they have paid much less attention to what may well be a larger problem -- the way that district lines are drawn to create safe havens for one party or the other, in effect denying voters any choice of representation.

With new computer technology, politicians' ability to design districts that meet the legal requirement for equal population, while guaranteeing their fellow partisans easy passage into office, has never been greater.

In 2002 and 2006, the most recent off-year elections, about 9 of 10 congressional districts were won by more than 10 percentage points -- a clear sign that the game had been rigged in advance, when the lines were drawn in the state legislatures.

Among the least-noted aspects of the seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is the psychological toll they are taking on those who have volunteered to fight them. Increasingly, they are being medicated on the battlefield, and many thousands are returning with brain damage and psychological wounds that cause tremendous suffering and have the potential to alter their lives forever.

A recent article that I thought would have gotten much more attention was the cover piece in Time magazine, "The Military's Secret Weapon," which disclosed that "for the first time in history, a sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Soldiers and Marines are being sent into the war zones again and again because the pool of young people willing to join up and fight is so small. In addition to the obvious physical danger, repeated tours in combat are blueprints for psychological disaster.

A study by RAND Corp. found that the psychological toll of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan may in fact be "disproportionately high compared to the physical injuries of combat."

Post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injuries, major depression and suicide are exacting a fearful price from combat soldiers and Marines. These matters are not even being talked about enough, much less dealt with adequately.

The French are different from you and me. Yes, they have President Nicolas Sarkozy.

And they have his wife, Carla.

And they have "the Carla effect," as it's known in Paris.

If an American first lady, or would-be first lady, described herself as a "tamer of men" and had a "man-eating" past filled with naked pictures, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, sultry prone CD covers, breaking up marriages, bragging that she believes in polygamy rather than monogamy, and having a son with a married philosopher whose father she'd had an affair with, it would take more than an appearance on "The View" to sweeten her image.

It's hard to imagine the decibel level on Fox News if Michelle Obama put out a CD this summer, as Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is, with songs featuring lyrics such as "I am a child/despite my 40 years/despite my 30 lovers/a child." Then there is the song "Ma came": "You are my junk/more deadly than Afghan heroin/more dangerous than Colombian white..../My guy, I roll him up and smoke him."

The Iraq war's defenders like to bash the press for pushing the bad news and ignoring the good. Maybe they'll be happy to hear that the bad news doesn't rate anymore.

When a bomb killed at least 51 Iraqis at a Baghdad market last week, ending an extended run of relative calm, only one of the three network newscasts (NBC's) even bothered to mention it.

If you follow the nation's opinion pages and the presidential campaign, Iraq seems as contentious an issue as Vietnam was in 1968. But in the country itself, Cindy versus Michelle, not Shiites versus Sunnis, is the hotter battle.

In America, the war has been a settled issue since early 2007. No matter what has happened in Iraq since then, no matter what anyone on any side of the Iraq debate has had to say about it, polls consistently have found that a majority of Americans judge the war a mistake and want out. For that majority, the war is over except for finalizing the withdrawal details.

But John McCain and the war's last cheerleaders don't recognize this immutable reality. It's their constant and often shrill refrain that if only those peacenik McGovern Democrats and the "liberal media" acknowledged that violence is down in Iraq -- as indeed it is, substantially -- voters will want to press on to "victory" and not "surrender." And therefore go for McCain.

There is a reason progress in Iraq is not receiving more attention. It isn't that Americans are "bored" or "tired" or have "moved on" or "don't care" or "have already made up their minds that the war was a colossal mistake." All of these are variations on themes articulated by certain liberals, Bush haters, Barack Obama supporters (but I repeat myself) inside and outside the big media.

The main reason progress in Iraq is not receiving more attention is that the progress is considerable and the big media are not paying attention because they don't like the new story line.

A headline in Saturday's New York Times told you all you needed to know about the reluctance of the mainstream media to report on progress in Iraq. It read, "Big Gains for Iraq Security, but Questions Linger."

"What's going right?" began the lead sentence, which quickly added, "And can it last?" This is typical Times nay-saying, which undercuts anything that might reflect positively on the Bush administration or John McCain's election prospects.

The story continued with these reluctantly offered positive gems: "Violence in all of Iraq is the lowest since March 2004. The two largest cities, Baghdad and Basra, are calmer than they have been for years. The third largest, Mosul, is in the midst of a major security operation. On Thursday, Iraqi forces swept unopposed through the southern city of Amara, which has been controlled by Shiite militias." And then in a rebuke to all of those Democrats on Capitol Hill who have been saying, well, yes, the military has done a great job and violence is down, but there is no political settlement and so the Bush administration has failed, the story said, "There is a sense that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government has more political traction than any of its predecessors."

The pages of this newspaper often display the sentiments of Kansans frustrated by the cost of energy, including the high cost of gasoline. I support many proposals to address escalating prices, but these solutions are going nowhere until there is a collective will to do something about the energy crisis.

That will does not currently exist, because Republicans and Democrats are trying to posture themselves to deflect blame and capture political gains. I disagree with my colleagues and believe Congress should be solution-minded, not partisan.

The energy challenge requires a diverse solution of developing all available energy resources. While the demand for energy has continued to increase over the years, there has been no significant change in our domestic supply. We must lift federal bans on oil and natural gas exploration in Alaska and off our coasts to increase our domestic supply.

Expanded production of domestic oil and natural gas resources alone cannot solve this problem. The solution must include initiatives to support renewable energy such as solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric and nuclear power, as well as biofuels made in states such as Kansas. Energy development must also be accompanied by energy conservation. We must encourage more efficient vehicles and construction of energy-conserving buildings.

If we are to solve this nation's energy problem, Democrats and Republicans must work together to promote conservation, aggressively pursue forms of renewable energy, and develop domestic exploration and production of oil and natural gas.