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Gov. Kathleen Sebelius on Monday appropriately vetoed a bill that proposed shocking intrusions into a woman's privacy and authority to make her own medical decisions.

Siblings, parents, grandparents and spouses of pregnant women could seek court orders to stop abortions after the 21st week of pregnancy. The bill gives those same individuals broad leeway to sue doctors in the aftermath of abortions. It also would make it easier for county and district attorneys to gain access to medical records.

Supporters of this proposal have couched it as protection against women being coerced into having abortions. But proponents have presented no reliable data that coercion is widespread. The real motive is to ease the way for anti-abortion activists to harass providers and get their hands on sensitive medical records. Members of the House and Senate should uphold the governor's veto.-- Kansas City Star

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Despite what some abortion foes believe, few if any women favor abortion. Neither do the poor or homeless choose their lot in life, but they sometimes find themselves penniless or living on the streets. All are social issues that must be solved by communities, not lawmakers.

For battle-weary Democrats, the big news out of Pennsylvania is pretty simple: Their nightmare continues.

In the seven weeks between the Texas and Ohio primaries in early March and Tuesday's balloting in Pennsylvania, the tone of both Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's campaigns became markedly more negative, and both candidates displayed new vulnerabilities that John McCain can easily exploit.

Despite a relatively narrow loss Tuesday, Obama is likely to be leading in both popular votes and convention delegates when the last primary results are counted on June 3. But it is almost certain that he will be short of the number needed for nomination, leaving the final choice to the almost 800 superdelegates -- elected officials and party leaders.

And that is where trouble looms. Until now, Democrats have been congratulating themselves on a contest that has attracted millions of new voters. Many had become disillusioned with politics. Many were independents or converted Republicans. It seemed to bode well for November.

But now all the worried Democrats can see are more and more first-time voters who will be frustrated and angry if their candidate is counted out in a process they neither sanctioned nor really understand.

On the same day that Pennsylvanians gave Hillary Clinton a victory that still left unclear who will eventually be the Democratic nominee, voters in Mississippi's 1st Congressional District failed to settle who will fill the seat left vacant when Republican incumbent Roger Wicker was appointed to the Senate.

The Republican hopeful in Tuesday's special election, Greg Davis, has been forced into a runoff on May 13 against Democrat Travis Childers. Childers actually led 49 to 46 percent and came within 400 votes of a first-round majority that would have sent him to Congress. Four other candidates diverted just enough votes to force the runoff.

Davis had the endorsements of Gov. Haley Barbour, Sen. Thad Cochran, Wicker and the man Wicker replaced, Trent Lott. He also outspent Childers almost 2-to-1 and pummeled his opponent with a flood of negative ads, emphasizing the standard GOP menu of social issues.

But Childers relied on the same issues that produced a surprise Democratic win in a special election earlier this year in the Illinois district vacated by former House Speaker Dennis Hastert. High gas prices, shaky job prospects and a grinding war in Iraq have fueled a call for change.

The message to Republicans could not be plainer: In a time when the public has soured on President Bush and the GOP, the old appeals are just not enough.

After Barack Obama's defeat in Pennsylvania, David Axelrod, his campaign manager, brushed it off: "Nothing has changed tonight in the basic physics of this race."

He may well be right -- but what a comedown. "Yes, we can" has become "No, she can't."

This wasn't the way things were supposed to play out.

Obama was supposed to be a transformational figure, with an almost magical ability to transcend partisan differences and unify the nation. Once voters got to know him -- and once he had eliminated Hillary Clinton's initial financial and organizational advantage -- he was supposed to sweep easily to the nomination, then march on to a huge victory in November.

Well, now he has an overwhelming money advantage and the support of much of the Democratic establishment -- yet he still can't seem to win over large blocs of Democratic voters, especially among the white working class.

According to the Kansas Health Insurance Study, about 11.5 percent of Sedgwick County residents are uninsured -- that's nearly 55,000 of our neighbors, friends and family members.

And the faces of most uninsured people look just like you and me, working adults. Among all adults working full time, 9 percent are uninsured. Among those working part time, nearly 20 percent are uninsured.

Our current health care system is designed to help those with health insurance. But too many without insurance fall through the cracks, and when they have a medical need, they use the only option they know of for immediate care -- the hospital emergency rooms. This is a costly option and, in most cases, not the level of care needed.

What folks need is access to an affordable, appropriate health care home. Having a "medical home" not only helps provide the most appropriate level of care needed, often minor or chronic disease management, but helps to assure a continuity of care -- your doctor knows you and your health needs. It is also most cost-effective for our health care system. It reduces the demand on the emergency rooms to take care of the most critical and immediate needs, and it begins to focus on prevention, not just "sick care."

Last summer, the Sedgwick County Commission initiated a community dialogue to research and look for possible ways to decrease the barriers citizens have to health care. Three main barriers emerged: coverage, system coordination and system navigation.

Let's talk about us. Not as in you and me but, rather, as in common cause. I've been thinking about "us" for a few days, ever since I happened upon a message board for sports fans on the NBA playoffs. The conversation was what you'd expect -- fans of underdog teams arguing that, while other people may not believe in "us," all "we" need to do is box out, get back on defense, and "we" can prove "our" doubters wrong.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but none of the people throwing around those variations of the first-person plural pronoun is competing in these playoffs. Not a rebound will they snatch, not a bounce pass will they catch. They are accountants, doctors, cabbies, cops, bellmen, barkeeps and others whose closest brush with athletic glory comes in weekend wars waged at the park followed by liberal applications of Bengay.

I came away struck, as I often am, by this singular ability of sports to make people say "we." It happens much less often in other areas of civic life. No one says "we" when he talks about homelessness or hunger. No "our" enters the discussion of fatherless families or abortion rights, "Us" is a stranger to the debate over failing schools and crime. Those conversations are framed by words like "them" and "they."

I have no bone to pick with sports. Still, I find myself thinking a healthier society would find common cause beyond the ball field and the basketball court, would regard working toward great and ambitious goals as a civic obligation. Am I the only one who remembers a time when rallying the people together was considered the very embodiment of leadership?

That's not to suggest earlier generations were all marble men of selfless good. HBO's "John Adams" miniseries and Eric Burns' 2006 book, "Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism," provide fresh reminders -- as if any are needed -- that pettiness, backbiting and smallness of vision are hardly new to American politics.

In Latin America, it is Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, not President Bush, who are seen as the go-it-alone cowboys, by opposing the United States' free trade agreement with Colombia.

Some Democrats claim that they are against the pact because Colombia has abused human rights. Those concerns are legitimate -- but they shouldn't be used to punish people like Norma Reynosa, a 35-year-old woman who just may snip the flowers that go into the Mother's Day bouquet that you buy.

Human rights aren't abstract to Reynosa. Two of her relatives were killed in the brutal warfare and insecurity that plague her home region in the southern part of Colombia. A third was killed by a land mine, and a fourth was kidnapped at age 12 to work for guerrillas in the National Liberation Army. Reynosa ran a small restaurant but had to flee when the guerrillas demanded that she pay more extortion money than she could afford.

So in June 2005, Reynosa and her husband abandoned their home and fled to the outskirts of Bogota to see if they could get jobs in the booming flower industry. Colombian cities like Medellin were the most dangerous cities in the world in the 1980s and '90s. But now they are thriving, and homicide rates are well below those of some American cities.

One reason is those bouquets you buy, entering duty-free from Colombia. These days Colombia is the world's second-largest exporter of flowers after the Netherlands, and almost 200,000 people work in the flower industry. Up to 28 cargo planes a day carry flowers from Colombia to the United States.

Lilly Ledbetter worked in a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. plant in Gadsden, Ala., for 19 years before she received some valuable information from an anonymous tipster: She learned that she was making $6,500 less than the lowest-paid guy who had her job.

She did what anybody might do. She sued. She was in for a surprise. So were a lot of civil rights experts. If any cases were intended to be covered by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, they thought, it was cases like hers.

But after Ledbetter's case made it all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court last year, the high court ruled 5-4 that the law did not apply to her. She was too late. She should have filed her complaint years earlier, when the original discrimination occurred.

The law said she had to file her complaint within 180 days of the alleged unlawful discrimination. The surprise came with the Supreme Court's interpretation of when the clock is supposed to start on that 180 days.

Since the 1960s, nine federal circuit courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had ruled that the 180-day clock started -- or restarted -- every time the employee received an unequal paycheck.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright went to Washington, D.C., Monday not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him. Smiling, cracking corny jokes, mugging it up for the big-time news media -- this reverend is never going away. He's found himself a national platform, and he's loving it.

It's a twofer. Feeling dissed by Obama, Wright gets revenge on his former follower while bathed in a spotlight brighter than any he could ever have imagined.

So there he was lecturing an audience at the National Press Club about everything from the black slave experience to the differences in sentencing for possession of crack and powdered cocaine.

All but swooning over the wonderfulness of himself, the reverend acts like he is the first person to come up with the idea that blacks too often get the short end of the stick in America, that the malignant influences of slavery and the long dark night of racial discrimination are still being felt today, that in many ways this is a profoundly inequitable society.

This is hardly new ground. The question that cries out for an answer from Wright is: Why -- if he is so passionately committed to liberating and empowering blacks -- does he seem so insistent on wrecking the campaign of the only African-American ever to have had a legitimate shot at the presidency?

In my office we're always saying we want to work smarter, not harder. I guess that's how I want to live, too, with challenges squarely faced and overcome.

Let's ditch the shock radio, trash TV and tabloid journalism. Shift our focus away from the celebrities who have done nothing of value to gain that celebrity. Vote out the politicians more concerned with pork than leadership. Readjust our worldview. Provide better stewardship of this finite planet. End war. Through new media, we have newfound power. Let's use it.

Think we can't? Others have. Peace talks are under way to end the war in northern Uganda largely because of three Southern Californian 20-somethings -- Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey and Laren Poole -- who traveled there in 2003. They came home haunted by the country's child soldiers and night commuters.

These young men told their story to family and friends and then -- with an online rough-cut video -- the world. From these simple beginnings, they created a movement known as Invisible Children. What began online moved offline with the story told on "Oprah," CNN and more. In 2006 the group hosted an event that drew 60,000 people. Last year's world tour drew millions. Invisible children have been made visible.

The increasing sweep of communications technology is making us more human and, I like to think, more humane. It's tearing down barriers and, in their place, erecting a new mandate: to be authentic.

Just what about total annihilation of the Jews by Palestinian, Arab and Muslim people does Jimmy Carter not understand?

Carter's latest leap into the foreign policy breach resulted in his declaration that the terrorist organization Hamas had accepted Israel's "right to exist" and would further accept the establishment of a Palestinian state on land occupied by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war -- land whose borders had been changed after Israel was attacked by some of the very people who still want the nation's elimination. The working strategy of Israel's enemies is: If at first you don't succeed in killing enough Jews, then try, try again.

Hamas immediately denied Carter's claim it is willing to recognize Israel and introduced the usual caveats about Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, "right of return" for Palestinian refugees and so forth. We've heard it all before. Israel's and our enemies tell us what we want to hear while continuing their terrorist and murderous acts in order to achieve their objectives.

Carter has a history of believing (and smooching) murderous thugs. He expressed surprise that the late Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev had lied to him about invading Afghanistan in 1979 (Memo to Carter: dictators lie, and so do totalitarian groups like Hamas). Carter also has kissed and/or met with the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Hamas political leader Khalid Mashaal and North Korea's Kim Jong Il (falsely claiming the dictator had agreed to suspend his nuclear weapons program). In each of these meetings, Carter has served the interests not of peace, or of his own country, but of the dictatorial regimes whose prestige has been elevated by the visit of an American ex-president.

The false premise on which all negotiations with Islamic terrorists have been based is that the terrorists lack something that, if they got it, would bring about instant peace, reconciliation and the study of war no more. This is wishful thinking bordering on self-delusion.