Gov. Sam Brownback’s ideological wars against poor women and the arts are costing Kansas.
Kansas is in a legal battle with Planned Parenthood of Kansas over the federal funding the Brownback administration has diverted to other recipients.
Planned Parenthood has three clinics in Kansas. Only one of these, the Overland Park clinic, provides abortions. With a slick maneuver, the governor ordered the state to pay out the federal money to hospitals and other clinics first and deliver what was left to Planned Parenthood. There was — surprise, surprise — nothing left.
It is the governor’s position that money is fungible, so any money given to any of the three clinics would, in fact, subsidize the abortion clinic in Overland Park. Stretch that logic a bit and any payment of any federal tax or fee also becomes a subsidy of abortion.
The fact is, of course, that Planned Parenthood clinics provide many free or low-cost services to women who meet income guidelines to help them plan their families, treat illnesses and provide contraceptives if they want them. It should be obvious to any but the obsessed that the services provided by Planned Parenthood reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and therefore reduce the number of abortions.
The lawsuit filed by the  organization this week against Gov. Brownback and the state seeks payment for providing those non-abortion services. If the suit is unsuccessful, Planned Parenthood CEO Peter Brownlie said last week, the organization will lose about $330,000 a year and be forced to raise its charges to the poor women it serves or reduce its services.
A failure by Kansas to distribute the federal family planning money as Congress intended for it to be distributed will:
— Increase the number of abortions performed.
— Make the lives of low-income women still more impoverished.
— Increase state Medicaid and welfare costs.
And the tradeoff to these negatives? Gov. Brownback earns a combat medal in his ideological war.

HIS UNILATERAL decision to veto the appropriation for the Kansas Arts Commission — making Kansas the only state in the nation without an arts commission — saved the state budget about $700,000. Because he killed the commission, the National Endowment of the Arts announced that it was forced to stop providing about $800,000 in annual partnership grants to Kansas organizations such as the Bowlus Fine Arts Center in Iola.
The Mid-America Arts Alliance, which has provided another $400,000 in grants to Kansas arts groups, also is expected to withhold its funds due to Gov. Brownback’s decision.
So Kansas makes another decision that just doesn’t add up — save $700,000, but give up $1,200,000.
As the going-bankrupt merchant explained, “I lose a little on every sale, but make up for it in volume.” 

But the dollars forfeited aren’t the primary loss. The blow to the reputation of Kansas is the main embarrassment. Why on earth would our governor want Kansas to stand out as the only one of the 50 states to turn its back on the arts?
So our new slogan is “Come Live in Arts-Free Kansas.”
Flies like a lead balloon.

— Emerson Lynn, jr.

A team of Australian and British geologists say in an article in Nature Geoscience they have discovered fossilized, single-cell organisms that are 3-4 billion years old — which would make them the oldest known fossils on earth.
The fossils were found in sandstone at the base of a rock formation in Western Australia.
What was Mother Earth like then, back at the beginning?
Geologists who peer back in time say the sandstone where the fossils were found with the aid of a powerful microscope was a beach on one of the few islands that had started to appear above the ocean’s surface.
Conditions were very different then. The moon orbited much closer to earth, raising huge tides. The atmosphere was full of methane, since plants had not yet evolved to provide oxygen, and greenhouse warming from the methane had heated the oceans to the temperature of a hot bath.
It was in these conditions, the geologists believe, that organisms resembling today’s bacteria lived in the crevices between the pebbles on the beech.
If this is an accurate timeline for the beginning of life on earth, then those one-celled critters made their appearance soon after what scientists describe as the Late Heavy Bombardment, which was a rain of destruction in which waves of asteroids slammed into our barely new planet, heating the surface to molten rock and boiling the oceans into steam. The bombardment, which ended around 3.85 billion years ago, give or take an eon, would have sterilized the earth’s surface and killed any incipient life.

CRITICS QUESTION whether this or similar discoveries of features found in slices of rock are truly fossils of once-living organisms or are merely crystals that took the form of cells by happenstance. Scientists David Wacey and Martin Brasier say they have found chemicals in the cells that are found primarily in living things and have used even more sophisticated methods to prove their identification is correct.
We find their theories comforting. If life began 3.5 billion years ago, shortly after the earth began, and an inexorable process of evolution started which took us all the way from one-celled organisms too primitive to be called either plant or animal to the Waceys and Brasiers of today’s world, think what another billion years could do for the species.
On Mondays, I would rather dwell on that big picture than call Washington, D.C. up to mind and cry me a river.

— Emerson Lynn, jr.