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The following are reader comments from our blog, http://blogs.kansas.com/weblog:

Budweiser sale

America is dying. Just wait until GM closes its doors. Why won't "we the people" wake up? No, we'd rather fight between left and right for no good reason.

With such a weak dollar, InBev had no problem buying up this American icon.

Maybe the sale to InBev of Belgium will improve the taste and quality of Budweiser beer.

I was moved by the Rev. Dave Fulton's commentary "Combat violence by providing hope" (July 13 Opinion). I am a recent transplant to the Wichita area from Rochester, N.Y. My thoughts and opinions, though personal, are rooted in a career of working against violence in communities such as ours.

I humbly present my belief that the answers to reducing and ultimately eliminating violence in our community are within reach.

We must establish new partnerships at all levels of government and community while maintaining those that exist. We must educate our children. Finally, we must instill hope in our children's hearts that they can succeed.

By engaging in these activities, we can change the negative socioeconomic factors that are jettisoning our youths into engaging in crime.

Who should be the positive agents of socialization in the lives of our youths? Family, church, school, friends and relatives. When there is a lack of any or all of these, the results are reflected in negative behaviors.

Since Sept. 11, Westerners have tried two approaches to fight terrorism in Pakistan, President Bush's and Greg Mortenson's. Bush has focused on military force and provided more than $10 billion -- an extraordinary sum in the foreign-aid world -- to the highly unpopular government of President Pervez Musharraf. This approach has failed: The backlash has radicalized Pakistan's tribal areas so that they now nurture terrorists in ways that they never did before Sept. 11.

Mortenson, a frumpy, genial man from Montana, takes a diametrically opposite approach, and he has spent less than one-ten-thousandth as much as the Bush administration. He builds schools in isolated parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan, working closely with Muslim clerics and even praying with them at times.

Mortenson's superb book about his schools, "Three Cups of Tea," came out in 2006 and initially wasn't reviewed by most major newspapers. Yet propelled by word of mouth, the book became a publishing sensation: It has spent the past 74 weeks on the paperback best-seller list, regularly in the No. 1 spot.

Mortenson found his calling in 1993 after he failed in an attempt to climb K2, a Himalayan peak, and stumbled weakly into a poor Muslim village. The peasants nursed him back to health, and he promised to repay them by building the village a school.

Scrounging the money was a nightmare -- his 580 fundraising letters to prominent people generated one check, from Tom Brokaw -- and Mortenson ended up selling his beloved climbing equipment and car. But when the school was built, he kept going. Now his aid group, the Central Asia Institute, has 74 schools in operation. His focus is educating girls.

Satire is tricky. It makes its point by exaggerating wildly with a straight face. In inflating a thing beyond all common sense or propriety, it seeks to render inconsistencies and hypocrisies glaringly apparent. Satire seeks truth in the ridiculous. For illustration, see any given episode of "The Colbert Report."

What makes satire difficult is that sometimes, people don't realize they are being had.

The New Yorker is under fire for a cover illustration depicting Barack Obama in the Oval Office wearing a turban and bumping fists with his wife, Michelle, who wears an Afro, fatigues and has an assault rifle slung over her shoulder. Osama bin Laden watches from a portrait on the wall. An American flag burns in the fireplace.

The Obama and McCain campaigns have pronounced the cover offensive. There have been calls for a boycott.

I like the cover. It strikes me as an incisive comment on the fearmongering that has attended Obama's run for the presidency. Still, I understand why it is incendiary: Some of us will take it seriously.

Two longtime friends of mine died last week. One was the renowned cardiovascular surgeon Michael DeBakey. I first met him as a young reporter in Houston in the late 1960s, and we kept up over the years. He lobbied me to write about health issues and the importance of research. I occasionally asked him for medical advice, which he was always happy to give. A brilliant man with fingers so long he might have been a concert pianist, DeBakey invented many of the instruments now used in operating rooms and pioneered procedures that have extended human life.

"Rebuilder of Hearts," said the New York Times' front-page obituary about this unique and extraordinary man, the son of Lebanese-Christian immigrants, who died two months shy of his 100th birthday.

My second friend, Tony Snow, succumbed to colon cancer at age 53. His mother died of the same disease when Tony was 17. I spent more time with Tony in recent years because of our proximity in Washington, D.C.

In a different way, Tony was also a rebuilder of hearts. No one could be depressed in his presence. Though battling his own cancer, he encouraged many others with the same disease. His smile lit up any room in which he appeared. His optimism was infectious. His situation didn't matter; he always wanted to know how someone else was doing.

At a Washington dinner in January 2007, Tony talked about his struggle with cancer and the perspective it had given him. Before a room full of fellow journalists and entertainment people, he bared his soul: "You have to learn something that is very hard in the modern era," he said, "and that is you have to give yourself to God, to surrender. It's not really saying, 'God, it's in your hands,' but understanding whatever may come afterward is a matter not of trying to get God to do stuff for you, except maybe to knock down some of the barriers that separate you from God, because for all of us our vanities get in the way."

In recent weeks, sensible questions have been raised about the Kansas Energy and Environmental Policy advisory group, chaired by Cessna CEO Jack Pelton. Though I cannot speak for the group, as a citizen appointee I would like to provide a glimpse into KEEP's goals, process and product.

In the executive order that created it, KEEP is charged to develop recommendations to the governor "to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in Kansas, recognizing Kansas' interests in continued growth, economic development and energy security."

Twenty-five states have conducted similar processes, and Kansas joins a group of 11 states doing so now. The good news: Regardless of where you stand on climate change, most of what can be done to manage that risk provides real benefits in terms of energy independence and security.

KEEP's process itself is open and transparent. All Kansans are invited to attend meetings, join work group conference calls, and examine all documents. Complete information is available at the Web site www.ksclimatechange.us, where public comment is encouraged.

Work groups include appointed members, plus additional experts and citizens. Each group starts with a large catalog of options that other states have considered and employed. We then add to that list, amend it and ultimately recommend solutions that make sense for Kansas.

What did the Rev. Jesse Jackson mean when he accused Barack Obama of "talking down to black people"?

That was the second question on my mind in a telephone interview with Jackson. My first was something like this: "Did you really say you wanted to castrate Obama?"

Jackson said he didn't know he was wearing a "hot mic," a turned-on microphone, on the set of a Fox News program when he made what one newspaper headline called his "cutting remark." But his whispers about America's first likely black Democratic presidential nominee revealed Jackson at his worst. He sounded frustrated, marginalized and left by the side of the road in the rising glow of a younger star.

Jackson did not dispute that he made the vulgar remark in angry whispers to another show guest about Obama's recent call to expand President Bush's faith-based initiatives. Twice he complained that Obama has been "talking down to black people."

That was a reference, Jackson said, to speeches like Obama's address on Father's Day at the predominantly black Apostolic Church of God in Chicago. It was a speech in which Obama revealed his inner Bill Cosby. He called for more parental responsibility, whether it was assisted by government help or not.

Some months ago, Mother Jones magazine put together what it called a "torture playlist" of songs that American interrogators have used in their sessions with detainees during the past few years. "Torture's Top 10" was what one newspaper called it.

I have no idea whether the list is accurate. It includes mostly the kinds of songs you might expect -- by Metallica, Drowning Pool, Deicide, Eminem.

But I must admit I was surprised to see that one of the songs supposedly used to break the will of terrorist suspects and cause them to confess to crimes against humanity was the well-known "I Love You" from the "Barney" TV series. That's a song that I produced and arranged in the 1990s (to the tune of "This Old Man"). And this is certainly not a use I ever would have dreamed of for it.

After hearing that news earlier this year, I put the issue aside. But the story came up again recently when the British newspaper the Guardian, in a follow-up article, quoted some musicians and songwriters saying they were upset about the morality of using their art for torture.

Well, I'm sorry, but I'm not terribly upset about the use of "I Love You." I'm amused and slightly perplexed, but I frankly don't believe that any artist or composer can really have much of a say about what happens to his songs after they leave his hands.

Juan y Baracko have been busy lately wooing los que hablan espanol. That is, people who speak Spanish. With an estimated 9.2 million Hispanic votes in play this November, the stakes are high. And the pandering is in high gear.

John McCain and Barack Obama have put out Spanish-language ads, and both made appearances last week at the national convention of the League of United Latin American Citizens. Obama, however, seems to know something about the Hispanic soul that McCain doesn't.

Thus, while McCain talked about clean energy initiatives as alternatives to foreign oil, Obama recalled a young girl named Cristina who asked for Obama's autograph, then translated his comments for her non-English-speaking parents. It was in that moment that Obama, dream weaver and healer, realized that Americans have nothing to fear but fear itself --"that for all the noise and anger that so often clouds the discussion about immigration in this country, America has nothing to fear from our newcomers. They have come here for the same reason that families have always come here... in the hope that here, in America, you can make it if you try."

It may be true, as Obama said, that a problem for one American is a problem for all Americans. But are problems for non-Americans also problems for all Americans?

Are those 12 million people "hiding in this country" because paranoid, xenophobic Americans fear people of different colors who speak other languages, as Obama implied? Or are they hiding because they came here illegally? Does that matter?

Success breeds separation. That's the thing no one tells you, the thing sometimes you don't realize, the thing that might make a child turn from his own potential. Success is like a pyramid, broad at the bottom but narrow at the summit; the higher you go, the fewer people go with you.

It's a frightening thing for anybody, but especially frightening perhaps when you are young, gifted and black and coming of age in a culture where "everything" -- from the shows on television to the friends at your side -- says there is a certain way people like you are supposed to walk and talk and act and be.

The young men and women of Self Enhancement Inc. know all about it. Take Emanuel Ford. He is 18, a student at Grant High School in Portland, Ore. Ford was born in Inglewood, Calif., in the territory of the Bloods street gang. His parents were both drug-addicted.

Then his mother straightened herself up and moved him to Portland, where he is flourishing. He looks back at the old places and, yes, he feels that separation. "My cousins and all my family members down there are still doing the same thing," he said, "still smokin' weed, still bangin'. I feel like if I was still in that kind of position, I'd probably be shot, probably dead or in jail. By the grace of God I... changed my life, got on the right road, and now I'm headed on the right path."

For 11 years, Ford has been a client of SEI (www.selfenhancement.org), a network of support programs (tutoring, college prep, sports, counseling, music and more) serving 2,300 students a year between second grade and age 25. It is featured in this installment of What Works -- my series of columns on programs that are making a difference for black kids -- because it, well, works. Two-thirds of its students improve their grades and behavior; 98 percent of its high school freshmen graduate on time; 85 percent go to college.