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You've seen this gag in a hundred old cartoons: Cat turns to flee angry dog, steps on a rake instead, knocks himself silly. It's not sophisticated humor, but it is a visceral illustration of an abiding truth: Panic can make you hurt yourself.

Some of us, I think, need reminding. Consider the case of Rachael Ray and the scarf that made people scream.

Ray, of course, is the preternaturally perky host of cooking shows on the Food Network -- and a spokeswoman for Dunkin' Donuts.

In that capacity, she wore the aforementioned scarf around her neck in an online ad -- and people started screaming. It seems that in the eyes of conservative columnist Michelle Malkin and a handful of blogosphere blowhards, the scarf resembled a kaffiyeh, the Arab headdress most infamously worn by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Me, I thought the paisley scarf resembled a paisley scarf, but then I haven't been taking my paranoid lunatic pills lately, so what do I know? Those with more discerning vision cried foul, and late last month, the doughnut maker crumbled, pulling the ad lest anyone assume the company was selling mass terror along with its iced coffees and crullers.

Every day when I sit down at my desk, I look straight at the Tankman.

The Tankman is the unbelievably brave Chinese man who stood before a line of tanks near Tiananmen Square in Beijing, as the Chinese government moved to crush pro-democracy demonstrators in June 1989.

This month marks the 19th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacres. The site of the 1989 bloodshed is a central venue for the Beijing Olympics. The torch ceremonies were held there, and the Olympic marathon will start there.

China's government has made this dark page of its history into a taboo subject, forbidding the media to discuss it. Journalists who've done so have been jailed.

An estimated 180 Chinese arrested during the Tiananmen events still remain in prison, according to Human Rights Watch.

Wichita became the latest of many communities in Kansas to acknowledge and act on the threat of smoking in public places. In doing so, the state's biggest city took a step in the right direction. The problem is that it didn't go far enough in establishing new rules to protect the community against the irrefutable health hazards of secondhand smoke.

Garden City's comprehensive public smoking ban, enacted in January 2007, prohibits smoking in virtually every workplace, and is a model for other communities interested in protecting all citizens and visitors from secondhand smoke. Positives of the move are evident in cleaner air in places people gather. Plus, Garden City didn't experience business closings that many opponents of the smoking ban predicted.

Unfortunately, Wichita came up short in endorsing a compromise measure that fails to acknowledge that all citizens deserve equal protection from a known health hazard.

In doing so, a city that should be progressive instead set a poor example for a Legislature that will again take up a statewide smoking ban -- and, when it does, has an obligation to pursue a more restrictive ban that's not only health conscious, but also is fiscally responsible in curbing health problems that end up costing all Kansans.-- Garden City Telegram

Cedar Crest event -- Auctioning a hosted dinner sounds like a good contribution to a charity, but when it is the governor's mansion and a political group, it is a dangerous practice. More bad judgment was shown when the governor went ahead with a reception when it was (auctioned to Wichita abortion doctor George) Tiller. Not only is Tiller a lightning rod for controversy, he was under investigation at the time by former Attorney General Paul Morrison and subsequently was charged with multiple misdemeanor charges related to his abortion practice.-- Hutchinson News

There seems no stopping Barack Obama, not solely because of his obvious appeal, but because who really wants to be the one who stands athwart history yelling "Stop!" when this particular history is so compelling?

And so charged.

It is compelling, no matter one's politics. Watching Obama give his celebration speech Tuesday night, I became aware that I was smiling. I slapped myself, of course, but the fool thing wouldn't go away.

It is hard not to smile when Obama is smiling. It was simply satisfying to witness the birth of this new political offspring after centuries of labor. We were all midwives in that moment. Bravo.

It's too bad John McCain didn't say something along those lines instead of starting the general election off with a badly delivered attack on Obama. McCain's performance Tuesday provided a glimpse of the downer aspect of competing with this particular foe.

Recently we had a garage sale, and at the end of the day two people came by and starting riffling through a set of sleight-of-hand tricks that my 13-year-old was trying to sell together in a tin. They took first one item and then another down the driveway for close examination.

Without a word or a look, the woman put some of the items back, but kept a disappearing coin trick in her hand. We were looking to see if she was going to walk off with it, or what.

The man finally came back and put all his items back, but dug around and around, pulling together a deck of trick playing cards. He dug them out one by one, walked down the driveway and sorted them by suit, and then counted them and counted them again.

He finally came to our checkout table and said sheepishly that they were Vietnamese. Though this was not a huge revelation to us, it seemed his way of explaining their strange behavior, and I thought surely this was some cultural thing I just didn't get. I tried hard not to let irritation and suspicion pepper my thoughts, as I smiled and nodded in his direction.

They looked around at some more sale tables and finally came back and, with very hard concentration, asked how much the cards were. I tried hard to explain in simple terms that they were all part of a set, and that we didn't want to break up the set, but he could buy the whole set for $3.

Kansas was poised to move to the front of the health reform pack this year -- or so we thought. After all, the Legislature voted unanimously last year to create a premium assistance program.

Premium assistance, which isn't all that revolutionary, would have helped about 24,000 uninsured Kansans. But the program, which costs taxpayers about $1 million to design, will now be relegated to the legislative scrap heap, another indication of benign neglect toward the poorest of the poor Kansans.

Let's face it: Our current health care system is an expensive, bureaucratic mess. But Kansas cannot sustain this structurally flawed system for many more years. Getting a handle on health care costs, quality of services and access to care are key to preserving a competitive edge for Kansas employers and employees.

It is obvious that health reform needs funding. Otherwise, it is meaningless. However, there were initiatives presented this year that would not have cost Kansans a dime to implement, yet they weren't approved either. The statewide smoking restriction in public places would have had a tremendous impact on Kansans' health outcomes. Yet it also was left for another time.

What was accomplished in the final days of this session was not health reform, in spite of the bloated claims accompanying the equally false and pretentious title of the final legislation passed.

How quickly time passes, how urgently things stay the same.

Not so long ago, Bill Clinton was the man of the moment, the one who was going to put Democrats back in power and baby boomers in charge. His defeat of George H.W. Bush with 43 percent of the vote wasn't just a changing of the guard. It was a baton passing from one generation to the next.

The rest you know: the triangulating, the interning, the squandering. Then came Hillary Clinton's turn. And then, apparently, it went.

The primaries finally are over, and Clinton has missed her date with destiny.

And she missed it in no small part because of that man from Hope, Ark. Contrary to the braying of the wounded sisterhood, Clinton's defeat hasn't been the result of misogyny. She was defeated by her husband and by her own party.

Because the speculation last week about what Hillary Clinton would do consumed so much oxygen, a genuinely important development drew much less sustained attention than it deserves. I am referring to the challenge from John McCain to Barack Obama for a series of 10 joint town meetings starting this month and continuing perhaps until Election Day.

Bypassing the TV networks, the presidential debate commission and all the other muckety-mucks who have seized control of the campaign dialogue, McCain simply dropped the newly nominated Obama a note saying, in effect, let's get it on.

The Obama camp said it found the notion "appealing," and with that, what may be the largest step toward improving the content of the presidential election became a genuine possibility.

The first such debates were held in 1960, under a law that allowed the networks to sponsor them without providing equal time for minor candidates. The country was captivated by the Kennedy-Nixon encounters. But Lyndon Johnson was nowhere near that generous to Barry Goldwater; Richard Nixon stiffed his opponents in 1968 and 1972, and the debates might well have disappeared had Jerry Ford, who emerged from his convention in 1976 trailing Jimmy Carter, not challenged Carter to debate.

Most years, the autumn debates were the main events of the campaign, drawing the largest audiences and having the maximum impact. But over time, these debates have become more and more ritualistic and less and less useful to voters.

Search the Internet for "Bush Lied" products, and you will find sites that offer more than a thousand designs. The basic "Bush Lied, People Died" bumper sticker is only the beginning.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, set out to provide the official foundation for what has become not only a thriving business but, more important, an article of faith among millions of Americans. And in releasing a committee report Thursday, he claimed to have accomplished his mission, though he did not use the L-word.

"In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent," he said.

There's no question that the administration, and particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, spoke with too much certainty at times and failed to anticipate or prepare the American people for the enormous undertaking in Iraq.

But dive into Rockefeller's report, in search of where exactly President Bush lied about what his intelligence agencies were telling him about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and you may be surprised by what you find.

Friendship, party loyalty -- yeah, whatever. That is Phill Kline's attitude, it seems.

Otherwise, a close political ally like state Sen. Karin Brownlee, R-Olathe, wouldn't have been so shocked when yours truly called Monday night for a comment.

"No!" Brownlee said in disbelief when I told her that Kline had reversed himself and would indeed be running for Johnson County district attorney.

"He didn't!" she said. "I waited to endorse Steve until after Phill announced he was not running."

"Steve" is Steve Howe, the career prosecutor the Republican establishment is lined up behind, conservatives and moderates both. The unity candidate who supposedly was going to replace Kline when the latter finished his two-year stint as a placeholder to finish out Paul Morrison's term as district attorney.

Barack Obama's presidential campaign plans to strike at the heart of the Republican base by attempting to woo evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics to his side.

This effort has been dubbed the "Joshua Gener-ation Project." Joshua, Moses' successor, led the Israelites into the Promised Land. Apparently, if we have enough faith in Obama, he will lead us all into a new America.

Obama is better at biblical language and imagery than any Democrat in modern times. But this is cynical manipulation of the devout, and it is no better when Democrats do it than when Republicans use religious language for partisan advantage.

Obama has declared himself a committed Christian. He can call himself anything he likes, but there are certain markers among the evangelicals he is courting that one must meet in order to qualify for that label.

Some insight into Obama's Christianity comes from an interview he gave in 2004 to Chicago Sun-Times religion editor Cathleen Falsani for her book "The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People."

An Eagle editorial said that if Kansas Social and Rehabilitation Services Secretary Don Jordan "is making false claims and pandering, he should be replaced" ("Bullied? Get to bottom of Jordan's claims," June 10 Opinion).

Actually, if Sedgwick County Deputy District Attorney Ron Paschal was quoting Jordan accurately ("Concerns arise over SRS files' validity," June 8 Eagle), we already know Jordan is making false claims -- we just don't know which claim was false.

Was it the claim he made to Citizens for Change in which Jordan said, on tape, that his workers were bullied, yelled at, cussed at, screamed at and threatened by county prosecutors? Or was it Jordan's claim, according to Paschal, that the talk about bullying, yelling, cussing, screaming and threatening was all just "pandering"?

Unless Jordan now wants to deny what Paschal said, the one thing that's clear in all this is that Jordan is unfit for the job.

But some things are even more alarming than Jordan's comments. One is the rush by judges to bury their heads in the sand. They say they haven't seen any bullying. But if bullying is going on, surely the judges don't expect it to unfold before their eyes in open court. Judges should be demanding a full investigation, not compromising their impartiality by assuming this could never happen.

In the Tournament of Abuses Parade, aka the George W. Bush presidency, it's almost impossible to lock in on one outrage. So many roll by in rapid succession.

Look quickly. The steel traps of Guantanamo Bay are wedged tightly by the Fox News float and the Echo Chamber Drumbeat Corps.

If you had a moment, you could get outraged by the National Debt Moving Monument. It will hit $9.5 trillion by the end of the block. Then you get distracted by the $740 million U.S. embassy in Baghdad.

Amid it all, right now you can't even award the Governor's Cup to one of the biggest outrages in modern times: a Senate Intelligence Committee report on how a beaten-down, boxed-in Iraq was made into something that, in Bush's words, was "a gathering danger."

You can't give that outrage the top prize, because something even more outrageous is being floated right now. Rather than review old pretexts for invading, we're scraping up pretexts for staying a lifetime.

When Barack Obama achieved his historic victory last week, the battle was joined between two Americas. Not John Edwards' two Americas, divided between rich and poor. Not the Americas split by race, gender, party or ideology. What looms instead is an epic showdown between two wildly different visions of the country, from the ground up.

On one side stands Obama's resolutely cheerful embrace of the future. On the other is John McCain's promise of a wise warrior's vigilant conservation of the past.

Given the dividing line separating the two Americas of 2008, a ticket uniting McCain and Hillary Clinton might actually be a better fit than the Obama-Clinton "dream ticket," despite their differences on the issues. Never was this more evident than last week when Clinton and McCain both completely misread a one-of-a-kind historical moment as they tried to cling to the prerogatives of the 20th century's old guard.

Remarkably, neither Clinton nor McCain had the grace to offer a salute to Obama's epochal political breakthrough, which reverberated so powerfully across the country and throughout the world. By being so small and ungenerous, they made him look taller. Their inability to pivot even briefly from partisan self-interest could not be a more telling symptom of the dysfunctional Washington culture Obama aspires to mend.

Yet even as the two establishment candidates huffed and puffed to assert their authority, they seemed terrified by Obama's insurgency. Clinton held her nonconcession speech in a New York City bunker, banishing cell-phone reception and television monitors carrying the news of Obama's clinching of the nomination. McCain, laboring under the misapprehension that he was wittily skewering his opponent, compulsively invoked the Obama-patented mantra of "change" 33 times in his speech.

Listening to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton repeat stories they claim to have been told by the poor and the unemployed -- who are unable to pay for food and medicine and feel miserable about it -- is enough to make one think we are living in a Third World dictatorship and not the United States of America. But victimhood and a "can't-do" spirit is what the Democratic Party has mostly been about since the Great Depression.

A more positive narrative comes from a new book, "Lessons From the Poor: Triumph of the Entrepreneurial Spirit," edited by Alvaro Vargas Llosa and published by the Independent Institute. The book is an optimistic triumph and a lesson about the unlimited capacity of the human spirit, properly inspired and unencumbered.

In the introduction, Llosa writes, "Entrepreneurial ability and energy are present almost everywhere. But in those countries that still languish in backwardness, the labyrinth intervention of the state and the absence of adequate institutions have kept that ability and energy from translating into full development." He writes of nations that used to be poor but are no longer, detailing how their people climbed out of poverty. He blames political, legal (and, I would add in some cases, religious) systems for stifling prosperity.

Llosa is about creating wealth, and his inspirational stories about real people and how they did it ought to be read in every school and in every home that has accepted inevitable failure.

In 1988, the Ananos family of Ayacucho, Peru, founded the Kola Real Co. Coca-Cola and Pepsi had pulled out because of the unstable political situation. In just 20 years, the Ananos family has transformed a mom-and-pop operation into the biggest transnational manufacturer of nonalcoholic beverages in Latin America. They now have subsidiaries in Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, four Central American countries and Thailand. By 2005, they had more than 8 million customers and 8,000 workers. Their sales totaled $1 billion.

An axiom of American presidential politics is that an issue passes from the state of being possibly pertinent to being gravely serious when it becomes the subject of parody on "Saturday Night Live."

Fair or not, NBC's "Saturday Night Live" has spoofed public perceptions of Gerald Ford's clumsiness, Jimmy Carter's paltriness, Ronald Reagan's forgetfulness, George H.W. Bush's whininess, Bill Clinton's tawdriness and George W. Bush's vacuousness.

This year's presidential elections have offered a bounty for the comedy-minded. And as in the past, the leading presidential contenders have made cameo appearances to demonstrate that they are adept at parodying themselves.

John McCain made the most recent and most consequential of these appearances last month. In it, he asked the American people: "What should we be looking for in our next president?"

The answer: "Certainly someone who is very, very, very old."

As we celebrate dear old Dad today, let's remember why dependable dads are so important -- for our families and for our future as a nation.

If the experience of the past 50 years tells us anything, it is that the consequences of weakening the institution of marriage are tragic for society at large -- and especially for the children involved.

The American family has gone though a difficult time. The number of never-married young adults has grown dramatically. Half of all new marriages now end in divorce. The number of cohabiting couples has grown tenfold since 1970, now more than 5 million. And though the birth rate for married couples has been cut almost in half since 1960, the number of out-of-wedlock births increased almost tenfold in 50 years and has soared to one-third of all births in the United States.

For the first time in our history, a large number of children have grown up without a father present in the household. That sad fact allows us to contrast outcomes for those children with their peers in intact families with a mom and a dad.

By every conceivable measure, children with fathers present in the household fare significantly better on average than their peers without a dad around. According to the Heritage Foundation, these children tend to fare better in cognitive achievement, exhibit fewer behavioral problems, have better psychological well-being, are less likely to engage in delinquency and substance abuse, are less likely to be incarcerated, and achieve higher levels of educational attainment.

It is not every day that I find myself running down U.S. 40 in the heart of Ohio more than 1,000 miles away from Wichita, but the situation I am in can hardly be described as normal.

I have spent the past two weeks literally running across the country to Washington, D.C., with eight other Kansas teens to raise awareness of the genocide in Darfur and to raise money to ease the conditions of Darfuri refugees. This started out as a crazy idea but has turned into a learning experience unparalleled by anything I've learned in school.

During our brief overnight stay in Columbus, Ohio, we had the opportunity to listen to three Darfuri refugees recount their experiences. Their stories were heart-wrenching and so personal that I did not take out the video camera to record them.

Two were husband and wife. They recounted the story of their escape from Sudan to the country of Ghana after the janjaweed militia slaughtered eight people in their village. Both were holding back tears as they revealed that they still have four children stuck in refugee camps.

The third refugee had only arrived in America within the past two weeks. He fled to Egypt after the killing started and co-founded a group there to lobby the Egyptian government and the United Nations to send the Darfuri refugees to safety.

This column will probably get Barack Obama in trouble, but that's not my problem. I cannot tell a lie: Many Egyptians and other Arab Muslims really like him and hope that he wins the presidency.

I have had a chance to observe several U.S. elections from abroad, but it was unusually revealing to be in Egypt as Barack Obama became the Democrats' nominee for president of the United States.

While Obama, who is a Christian, is constantly assuring Americans that he is not a Muslim, Egyptians are amazed, excited and agog that America might elect a black man whose father's family was of Muslim heritage. They don't really understand Obama's family tree, but what they do know is that if America -- despite being attacked by Muslim militants on Sept. 11 -- were to elect as its president some guy with the middle name "Hussein," it would mark a sea change in America-Muslim world relations.

Every interview in Egypt seemed to end with the person I was interviewing asking me: "Now, can I ask you a question? Obama? Do you think they will let him win?" (It's always "let him win," not just "win.")

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Democrats' nomination of Obama as their candidate for president has done more to improve America's image abroad -- an image dented by the Iraq war, President Bush's invocation of a post-Sept. 11 "crusade," Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and the xenophobic opposition to Dubai Ports World managing U.S. harbors -- than the entire Bush public diplomacy effort for seven years.

Did President Bush and his administration lead us into the Iraq war under false pretenses?

Absolutely, they did. The documented evidence is overwhelming. Nonetheless, some of those who initially backed Bush's decision to invade Iraq continue to claim otherwise, arguing that the president -- and they themselves -- were up-front with the American people in laying out the invasion case.

For example, Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt recently described the "Bush lied, people died" thesis as a fiction ("How exactly did Bush lie?" June 10 Opinion). He cited a new report issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. To Rockefeller, the report documents "the absolute cynical manipulation -- deliberately cynical manipulation, to shape American public opinion," and he said he too had been fooled into supporting the war.

But to Hiatt, the Rockefeller report actually absolves Bush of the charge of deception. As he pointed out, the report confirms that prewar statements concerning Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs were "generally substantiated by intelligence information." Unfortunately, that information just turned out to be "tragically, catastrophically wrong," Hiatt wrote.

In other words, how were the Bush administration and other war advocates -- including Hiatt himself -- supposed to have known that before the war?