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I ticked off loyal Hillary Clinton supporters recently by daring to suggest that a true lady would know when to exit the presidential race gracefully. This is not an apology.

My most fervent detractors were other women -- women who described themselves as members of the generation older than I am. Judging by what they wrote, they seem to support Clinton not so much because of what she stands for but because she's the first woman in their lifetimes who has had a real shot at the White House.

What an irony. Thanks to women who broke down political gender barriers, I can take a pass at the Clinton candidacy. Other female candidates will follow in her footsteps. I have little doubt that I will see a woman in the White House. I simply do not want it to be Clinton.

For that I am an ungrateful little snot. Women my age -- 40-ish -- and younger have no idea what older women have endured. Or so my correspondents let me know.

Of course, my generation doesn't have much of an idea. Wasn't that the point of the hard work of women in previous generations, so that things would move forward for their daughters and granddaughters?

I would like to thank the students, parents, teachers and staff of USD 259 and the Wichita community for the support they have given to my family and me for the past 38 years.

I moved to Wichita in 1971 to become a Shocker, and I am proud to say that I received three degrees from Wichita State University. My wife, Ann, and I have successfully raised four wonderful children in this community. Our youngest graduated from Wichita Northwest High School this year. We have lived, played and worked in this community, and, most important, we have encountered some of the most incredible people on Earth whom we call our friends.

I would like to express my gratitude to the taxpayers of the Wichita school district for their support of me during my 22 years in the district, the past 10 as superintendent. I want to thank them for helping us increase student achievement, for passing the 2000 bond issue, for changing the perception of this large urban district, for their financial support of local option budgets, and for helping us make the Wichita school district one of the best urban districts in the United States.

I want to thank an incredible group of teachers, classified personnel, support staff, principals and administrative leaders for their dedication, passion and long-standing commitment to educate all the students of our district. The successes we have experienced with student achievement should be placed squarely on their shoulders.

The Wichita high school graduating classes of 2008 and I have something in common this spring -- that our eras in the district are coming to a close, and we will be heading off for a new adventure. It is exciting, yet very scary. However, I have learned this: The Wichita district has prepared me well for my new adventure as superintendent of the Albuquerque, N.M., school system, and I am confident that the Wichita district also has prepared the graduates well for their new adventures.

Imagine for a minute, just a minute, that someone running for president was able to actually tell the truth, the real truth, to the American people about what would be the best -- I mean really the best -- energy policy for the long-term economic health and security of our country. What would this mythical, totally imaginary, truth-telling candidate say?

For starters, he would explain that there is no short-term fix for gasoline prices. Prices are what they are as a result of rising global oil demand from India, China and a rapidly growing Middle East on top of our own increasing consumption, a shortage of "sweet" crude that is used for the diesel fuel that Europe is highly dependent upon, and our own neglect of effective energy policy for 30 years.

Cynical ideas like the McCain-Clinton summertime gas-tax holiday would only make the problem worse. And reckless initiatives, like the Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep offer to subsidize gasoline for three years for people who buy its gas-guzzlers, are the moral equivalent of tobacco companies offering discounted cigarettes to teenagers.

No, our mythical candidate would say the long-term answer is to go exactly the other way: Guarantee people a high price of gasoline.

This candidate would note that $4-a-gallon gasoline is really starting to impact driving and buying behavior. The first time we got such a strong price signal, after the 1973 oil shock, we responded as a country by demanding and producing more fuel-efficient cars. But as soon as oil prices started falling in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we let Detroit get us readdicted to gas-guzzlers.

This July 1, the government health insurance program for seniors and people with disabilities automatically will begin draconian payment cuts to physicians. Over a year and a half, the cuts translate to a loss of $110 million to Kansas physician practices caring for Medicare patients. But the real losers are Medicare patients, who will be left with reduced access to physician care.

Nearly 400,000 patients rely on Medicare in Kansas, and they will bear the brunt of the Medicare cuts to physicians -- as doctors are forced to make tough decisions because of cuts that push payments far below the increasing cost of providing care. This is not a hypothetical situation: 60 percent of physicians say this year's cut will force them to limit the number of new Medicare patients they can treat. Consider that the average senior sees at least seven physicians a year, and the prospect of not being able to find a new physician has wide-ranging consequences.

In three years, the first wave of baby boomers will reach Medicare age, and the Medicare rolls will keep expanding as one-fifth of the U.S. population will be older than 65 by 2030. Compound this with the fact that we're already beginning to feel the effects of a looming physician shortage, and the future of senior citizens' access to care may be dire.

Current Medicare payments to physicians are about what they were in 2001, while the costs of running a medical practice increase. It's no secret that costs everywhere are skyrocketing -- just try filling up a tank of gas or buying a week's worth of groceries. If the cuts go through as Medicare projects, physicians will be paid 15 percent less than they are paid now over a year and a half. If the cuts aren't stopped, the bottom line is that having a Medicare insurance card will not guarantee access to physician care.

Intervention by Congress is the only way to stop the cuts, as they occur automatically because of a flawed mathematical equation that ties payments to the ups and downs of the economy instead of the health care needs of seniors. This year's cut of 10.6 percent begins this summer -- and time is running short for action.

Fraud: "deceit, trickery... or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage."

The HBO movie "Recount" tells the story from the Democratic Party point of view that the 2000 presidential election was improperly won by George W. Bush because of the trickery of his fellow Republicans and the U.S. Supreme Court. That has been shown to be untrue by no less a source than the New York Times, but facts rarely influence propaganda.

Here's a better example of fraud straight from the donkey's mouth that you can bet will never be told on film. It comes courtesy of 12-term Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa. During a town meeting last August in his district, Kanjorski made a remarkable statement about the 2006 election in which Democrats recaptured the majority. Kanjorski acknowledged that he and his fellow Democrats "sort of stretched the facts" about their intention to end the war in Iraq and bring American troops home.

A video of his remarks, now on YouTube, shows Kanjorski explaining that Democrats pushed the rhetoric about the war "as far as we can to the end of the fleet -- didn't say it, but we implied it -- that if we won the congressional elections we could stop the war." Democrats also promised to bring down gas prices if they won a majority. That worked out well, didn't it?

"Now anybody who's a good student of government," continued Kanjorski in a condescending manner, "would know it wasn't true."

If there's one issue that epitomizes the culture wars that have so deeply divided American politics over the past eight years, it's abortion. That's why those who benefited most from those wars are desperate to revive abortion's single-issue virulence in this presidential cycle.

For the GOP's hard cultural right, abortion was the centerpiece of a grand strategy to link traditionally minded Roman Catholics and socially conservative evangelical Protestants in a great coalition of the religious right that would paint the electoral map ruby red, cementing the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt into a permanent Republican majority.

Now, because of Barack Obama's perceived problems with blue-collar Catholic voters in the late Democratic primaries, some on the right think they see an opportunity to hammer once more on the abortion wedge. Their most public target is Kansas' second-term governor, Kathleen Sebelius, who many believe is the front-runner for the vice presidential slot if Obama secures the nomination.

Recently, Sebelius has run afoul of Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City, Kan. As the Catholic News Service reported earlier this month, the bishop has told the governor that she "should stop receiving Communion until she publicly repudiates her support of abortion and makes a 'worthy sacramental confession.' " The prelate said that in a private conversation he'd had with Sebelius, the governor said she was "obligated to uphold state and federal laws and court decisions related to abortion." Naumann said he demanded that she show "a similar sense of obligation to honor divine law and the laws, teaching and legitimate authority within the church."

Now there's about as nasty and as utterly avoidable a church-state confrontation as you're likely to see.

After a lengthy competition between Northrop Grumman Corp. and Boeing Co., the U.S. Air Force has selected Northrop Grumman to build 179 aerial refueling tankers. This program is long overdue, as the Air Force urgently needs to replace its fleet of Eisenhower-era tankers.

The Air Force described the selection process as one of the most rigorous and transparent in Defense Department history. But Boeing has protested the choice to the Government Accountability Office, which is expected to issue a decision in June on whether the Air Force followed applicable procurement laws and regulations.

Northrop Grumman believes that the GAO will affirm the awarding of the contract to our corporation.

Since the award announcement, much misinformation has been circulated in the halls of Congress and repeated in the media. Some have labeled the KC-45 project a "French" tanker because one of Northrop Grumman's partners on it is the North American subsidiary of European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co., parent of Airbus. Others have charged that awarding the contract to Northrop Grumman will hurt America's defense industrial base and send jobs overseas. A few legislators want the contract decision overturned or funding blocked.

Let me set the record straight.

An Associated Press story the other day began like so:

"Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, both seeking to use religion to their advantage in the presidential campaign, have learned painful lessons about the risks of getting too close to religious leaders."

Let's see: Which one of these is not like the other?

One candidate -- not an evangelical himself -- sought the endorsement of evangelical leaders because some little adviser whispered in his ear that he couldn't win without the blessing of the religious right.

The other candidate sat in his pastor's pews for two decades, had the guy perform his marriage ceremony and baptize his kids, and named his book after one of his pastor's sermons.

On Friday morning, Joe Biden gave us an example of a leading national politician exhibiting decency and class. Later in the day, Hillary Clinton gave us an example of something else.

Biden, a Delaware senator and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program. He spoke insightfully about the complexity of dealing with Iran, moving the discussion beyond the tedious and simplistic argument over whether to meet with certain foreign leaders.

He defended Barack Obama against the searing attacks by the Bush administration, John McCain and Joe Lieberman, and said:

"I refuse to sit back like we did in 2000 and 2004. This administration is the worst administration in American foreign policy in modern history -- maybe ever. The idea that they are competent to continue to conduct our foreign policy, to make us more secure and make Israel secure, is preposterous. Every single thing they've touched has been a near-disaster."

Biden was then asked about the dispute that Obama and McCain have been having over the proposal by Virginia Sen. Jim Webb to increase college tuition benefits for men and women who have served in the military since Sept. 11, 2001. Obama supports the bill. McCain does not and has introduced a less-generous measure.

Sure, I'll answer your question. It rose from a column about the Democratic primary in West Virginia ("Sorrow, not anger, for West Virginia," May 26 Opinion). The contest, you will recall, was a decisive victory for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama, amid reports that 2 in 10 voters in that overwhelmingly white state said race was a deciding factor in their decisions. I called that atavistic, to which dozens of readers responded: If 2 in 10 whites voting for Clinton is wrong, isn't the overwhelming support of blacks for Obama equally wrong?

It isn't quite the stumper some folks seem to think.

I suppose the first thing that needs saying is that I have no objection to people of any marginalized ethnicity, race, religion or gender voting in a bloc for some member of their group. That's how they become less marginalized, how they win a seat at the table. The Irish did it in New York. The Cubans did it in Miami. Many women are doing it now.

Thing is, that's not what happened in West Virginia. Not unless you're going to tell me with a straight face that vote reflected marginalized whites (an oxymoron if ever there was one) seeking a seat at the table. No, all the evidence, statistical and anecdotal, tells us those folks did not vote for Clinton because she is white; they voted "against" Obama because he is black. There's a difference.

So there is something rather specious in all this hand-wringing about black support for Obama. Moreover, it is based upon a fallacy -- that black support for Obama was automatic.

As a loyal Democrat and a person of color, I am completely disgusted by what the Clintons have done and are attempting to do to ensure that Hillary Clinton wins this election.

As the race for the presidency began, it was a given that Clinton would be the front-runner. No others in the field of Democratic contenders were even perceived to be a threat to her. Barack Obama arguably "just wasn't black enough" to challenge Bill Clinton's previous anointment as the "nation's first black president." Surely Clinton would travel an uninhibited course to the nomination, would best serve the needs of our society in general and give the necessary lip service to ensure the continued support of "those colored peoples."

As the course of this election has taken a turn for the worse for the Clintons, it has brought out the worst in them. Suddenly, Obama became too black for his own good. Open-minded white folks -- who, to their credit, have looked beyond race as a criteria for holding public office -- are being challenged and criticized for even considering voting for Obama, as if they were in some way abandoning their race.

The once-proud Democratic Party, which was built on the principle of inclusion, is on the verge of imploding as a result of the Clintons' recent actions. The party was predicated on social and racial justice, but its principles are being systematically disassembled by those who feel that they are being challenged for leadership by those from whom only votes were necessary.

As people of color, we have been told over and over that if we want to succeed in life, we must emulate, assimilate and participate as members of our respective communities. Once this was accomplished, we would also be entitled to our part of the American dream. Never once were we told that if we did all that, we would not also be entitled to the same rights as other citizens.

Barack Obama's youthfulness, soaring rhetoric and style make comparisons with John F. Kennedy inevitable. Sometimes, however, the Illinois Democrat invites the comparisons.

He has invoked Kennedy in several instances to defend his policy of meeting with the leaders of enemy nations without preconditions. In a recent example at a campaign event in Oregon, he said, "Strong countries and strong presidents talk to their adversaries. That's what Kennedy did with Khrushchev."

If Lloyd Bentsen were alive, he'd be able to say it best: "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."

If Obama goes to the White House in January, he will do so with four years of national service. By the time Kennedy took the presidential oath in 1961, he already had served six years in the House and eight years in the Senate.

For most of 1939, Kennedy traveled in Europe, the Soviet Union and the Middle East, conducting research for his college senior thesis. Its title, conceived without the influence of George W. Bush, was "Appeasement in Munich," later published as the best-selling book "Why England Slept." In it, he argued that the democracies' slow response to Nazi militarization encouraged Hitler's aggression and made conflict inevitable.

Bastian helped define Wichita

H. Marvin Bastian didn't just build a defining regional financial institution out of a local mortgage banking firm, as the longtime chairman of Fidelity Bank and Fidelity Financial Corp. He did so while helping define Wichita and epitomizing civic responsibility -- fighting to revive downtown, championing the arts and quietly serving on what seemed like countless boards. Bastian, who died May 24 at age 87, will be remembered at a memorial service at 2 p.m. today at College Hill United Methodist Church. "I feel a debt to Wichita because I've prospered and been happy here," he told The Eagle in 1985. Now that he's gone, it seems like the debt is all Wichita's -- for his inspiring, lasting contribution to the community.

Barack Obama is getting painfully close to tying himself in knots with all his explanations of the conditions under which he would unconditionally talk with America's foes, such as Iran. One clarification was that there is a difference between "preparations" and "preconditions" for negotiations with bad guys. Such hairsplitting word games do not inspire confidence.

The fact is, Obama was right to say that he would talk with any foe, if it would advance U.S. interests. The Bush team negotiated with Libya to give up its nuclear program, even after Libya had accepted responsibility for blowing up Americans on Pan Am Flight 103. Those negotiations succeeded, though, not because President Bush was better "prepared" but because at the time, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Bush had leverage. Iraq had yet to fall apart.

Obama would do himself a big favor by shifting his focus from the list of enemy leaders he would talk with to the list of things he would do as president to generate more leverage for America, so no matter who we have to talk with, the advantage will be on our side. That's what matters.

Bush was also right: Talking with Iran today would be tantamount to appeasement -- but that's because the Bush team has so squandered U.S. power and credibility in the Middle East, and has failed to put in place any effective energy policy, that negotiating with Iran could only end up with us on the short end. We don't have the leverage -- the allies, the alternative energy, the unity at home, the credible threat of force -- to advance our interests diplomatically today.

When you have leverage, talk. When you don't have leverage, get some. Then talk.

A self-identified African-American caller to a Washington, D.C., radio station characterized the recent anti-Hillary Clinton outburst by white liberal Chicago priest Michael Pfleger as a "minstrel show."

Pfleger denounced Clinton for her effrontery and sense of "entitlement" in trying to take the Democratic presidential nomination from a black man, one Barack Obama. Pfleger, who is pastor of St. Sabina Catholic Church, donated $1,500 to the Obama campaign between 1995 and 2001 and is indebted to Obama because when Obama was in the Illinois Legislature, he, according to the Chicago Tribune, "announced $225,000 in grants to St. Sabina programs." Three months after the grant was announced, Pfleger donated another $200 to Obama.

Obama denounced Pfleger's comments far more quickly than he separated himself from his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but one is known by one's preferred associations. Obama's friends and associates have a long history of far-left political and theological positions with which Obama has appeared perfectly comfortable. It makes one wonder if Obama's denunciations are sincere or if he's had a politically convenient "conversion." On Saturday, in what might be considered spiritual and political damage control, Obama announced he has resigned his membership in Trinity United Church of Christ.

We have seen conservative preachers and other self-anointed spokesmen for God make fools of themselves by overindulging in politics and other trivialities, and now the theological left is getting its chance to rush in where even angels fear to tread for their equal time and deserved mockery.

Politicians shouldn't do religion and preachers should stay out of partisan politics. If preachers want to do politics, they should resign their ordination and become politicians. And if politicians want to do religion, they should stop running for positions in the lower kingdom, enroll in seminary and become ministers in the Higher Kingdom.

"This doesn't sound like Scott -- not the Scott McClellan I've known for a long time," Karl Rove said last week, referring to his former colleague's new book from inside the Bush administration. "It sounds like a left-wing blogger."

And that's exactly the point. Nothing in McClellan's book is surprising or new. Its power lies in the fact that its author, a former White House press secretary who had worked loyally for George W. Bush since his days in Texas, does indeed confirm what the president's harshest critics have said about him and his administration.

(That includes the public take on Rove, by the way. McClellan calls the former White House adviser "an operative who places political gain ahead of national interest," which is a damning indictment of anyone who serves in a high position in the White House.)

As McClellan now concedes, the invasion of Iraq was poorly thought out and an act of gut instinct on the part of Bush, who believed that only wartime presidents were ever remembered as great. The invasion was sold to the American people as something it was not, McClellan says, because "Bush and his advisers knew that the American people would almost certainly not support a war launched primarily for the ambitious purpose of transforming the Middle East."

But part of the blame, McClellan says, falls on a national media that served as "complicit enablers" of the Bush strategy.

It took Christopher Columbus about 70 days to get to the New World -- a bit less than half as long as it took us to get through the 2008 primary calendar. But we have finally reached our destination, and people in the Barack Obama and John McCain camps are feeling good about themselves.

Neither campaign is planning a major pivot for the fall. Both are confident they have a strategy for victory.

So my role today is Dr. Doom -- to break through unmerited confidence and raise the anxiety level in both camps.

Though voters now prefer Democratic policy positions on most major issues by between 11 and 25 percentage points, Obama has only a 0.7 percent lead over McCain in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. His favorability rating among independents has dropped from 63 to 49 percent since late February.

Furthermore, Obama has spent the past several months rolling up his sleeves and furiously courting working-class votes. It doesn't seem to be working. Ron Brownstein of the National Journal calculates that Obama did no better among those voters in a late state like Pennsylvania than he did for 26 out of 29 earlier primary states where he lost the working class.

The following are reader comments from our blog, blogs.kansas.com/weblog, about former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole calling former White House spokesman Scott McClellan a "miserable creature" for waiting to express his disagreements with the Bush administration:

Right on the bull's-eye, Sen. Dole.

The only thing negative I can say about McClellan and his book is that he should have been man enough to speak out about the Bush administration crimes while serving for the White House.

Bob, step away from the Viagra.

He can attack McClellan all he wants, and maybe it is deserved, but I see that the Republicans aren't saying anything in the book is a lie.

That the University of Colorado is raising $9 million to endow a professorship of conservative studies is rather delicious in its ironies. It smacks of affirmative action and casts conservatism in the syntax of departments decried by conservatives for decades: women's studies, gay studies, African-American studies and so on.

Furthermore, the idea of affirmative action for conservatives seems gratuitous. These other groups may be oppressed, but conservatives run whole wars, black-site prisons, sprawling multinational corporations. In fact, if these other groups are oppressed, conservatives are the oppressors, which may render faculty meetings a bit tense.

But as an academic who is neither a liberal nor a conservative, I think a "professor of conservative thought and policy" in Colorado, or anywhere else, is not such a bad idea. Within the academy, conservatives really are an oppressed minority. At the University of Colorado, for instance, one professor found that of 800 or so on the faculty, only 32 were registered Republicans. This strikes me as high, and I assume they all teach business or physical education.

I teach political philosophy. And like most professors I know, I bend over backward to sympathetically teach texts I hate; I try to show my students why people have found Plato and Karl Marx -- both of whom I regard as totalitarians -- compelling. But when I get to the end of "The Communist Manifesto," I'm usually asking things like this: "Marx says that all means of communication should be centralized in the hands of the state. Anyone see any problems with that?"

I don't deceive myself into thinking that I teach these texts as well as, or in the same way as, a professor who found them plausible. And that's fine. What I'm trying to point out is that even as I try to be neutral, my personal opinions affect every aspect of what I do, and I think that is generally true.