Kobach: Kansas is in the midst of a constitutional crisis

Voters who are in the military, living overseas or won’t be in Kansas for the scheduled Aug. 7 primary elections are supposed to start receiving early ballots June 23, but they still can’t identify the district in which they live.

If that happens, “we’re beyond crisis,” Newby said. “We’re over a cliff.”

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House Resolution 6032 calls the UN initiative “radical” and requires state lawmakers to expose “its destructiveness to the principles of the founding documents of the United States of America.”

Opponents say the House resolution is a right-wing distraction, but three House Democrats voted for it anyway. Vince Wetta, Wellington; Stan Frownfelter, Kansas City; and Jerry Williams, Chanute; joined the majority in passing the HR 6032 by a vote of 76-41.

Ten House Republicans voted against the resolution: Barbara Bollier, Mission Hills; Bob Brookens, Marion; Mike Burgess, Topeka; Don Hill, Emporia; Don Hineman, Dighton; Steven Johnson, Assaria; Tom Phillips, Manhattan; Charles Roth, Salina; Vern Swanson, Clay Center; and Ron Worley, Lenexa.

Supporters of the UN initiative say Agenda 21 is necessary to avert climate change.

Rep. Dennis Hedke, R-Wichita and the resolution’s sponsor, noted that most U.S. citizens are unaware of the agenda or the implications of what he called a “massive attempt to restructure human activity on the planet.

“There is no other way to put it — this is the most aggressive attack on individual liberty and the foundations of our country we have ever seen,” Hedke said in the days leading up to Friday’s vote.

Lured by the promise of federal money, local governments around the state already are committing resources to planning in support of Agenda 21′s sustainability goals. That trend has produced a backlash.

County Commissioner Richard Ranzau recently led an unsuccessful effort to keep Sedgwick County from participating in a federal regional planning grant linked to Agenda 21. He told KansasWatchdog the House vote was, “Another step in the right direction.”

But he also said it’s unlikely to make a difference in Sedgwick County. “Unfortunately local officials don’t seem to care about the opposition to Agenda 21, whether it’s from the House or the Kansas people.”

Sedgwick County approved the regional planning grant application in September and the grant agreement in April, both by a 3-2 vote with Ranzau and fellow commissioner Karl Peterjohn opposing.

The Wichita City Council voted 6-1 to April 17 to approve the grant agreement. Council member Michael O’Donnell cast the opposing vote.

Ranzau said he hopes the House vote will help keep the topic in the forefront of public discussion. “There’s certainly been a lot more education on this than when the session began,” Ranzau said.

From the Kansas Legislature page on HR6032:

On roll call, the vote was: Yeas 76; Nays 41; Present but not voting: 6; Absent or not voting: 2.

Yeas: Alford, Arpke, Aurand, Billinger, Boman, Bowers, Brown, Bruchman, Brunk, Calloway, Carlson, Cassidy, Collins, Crum, DeGraaf, Denning, Donohoe, Fawcett, Frownfelter, Garber, Goico, Gonzalez, Goodman, Gordon, Grange, Gregory, Grosserode, Hayzlett, Hedke, Hermanson, Hildabrand, Hoffman, C. Holmes, M. Holmes, Howell, Huebert, Kelley, Kelly, Kerschen, Kiegerl, Kinzer, Kleeb, Knox, Landwehr, Mast, McLeland, Meigs, Mesa, Montgomery, O’Brien, O’Hara, O’Neal, Osterman, Otto, Patton, Peck, Powell, Prescott, Proehl, Rhoades, Rubin, Ryckman, Scapa, Schroeder, Schwab, Schwartz, Seiwert, Shultz, Siegfreid, Smith, Suellentrop, Tyson, Vickrey, Wetta, Williams, B. Wolf.

Nays: Ballard, Bollier, Brookens, Burgess, Burroughs, Carlin, Davis, Dillmore, Feuerborn, Finney, Flaharty, D. Gatewood, S. Gatewood, Grant, Henderson, Henry, Hill, Hineman, Johnson, Kuether, Lane, Loganbill, Mah, McCray-Miller, Meier, Pauls, Peterson, Phelps, Phillips, Roth, Ruiz, Slattery, Sloan, Swanson, Tietze, Trimmer, Victors, Ward, Winn, Wolfe Moore, Worley.

Present but not voting: Bethell, Colloton, Moxley, Pottorff, Spalding, K. Wolf.

Absent or not voting: LeDoux, Weber.

Related:

And, sure, said state Rep. Greg Smith, R-Overland Park, some people hear him discuss Agenda 21, and the theme music from “Twilight Zone” starts playing in their head.

But there’s nothing fictional about Agenda 21, a 20-year-old United Nations statement on sustainable development. And that’s why the Kansas House is considering a resolution “opposing and exposing the radical nature” of the UN initiative.

Smith supports the resolution, which says Agenda 21 “is being covertly pushed into local communities” and that its call for “sustainable development views the American way of life of private property ownership, single family homes, private car ownership, individual travel choices and privately owned farms as destructive to the environment.”

Opponents of the resolution say Agenda 21 is old news, nothing to be concerned with and purely voluntary.

But on Tuesday, the House Committee on Federal and State Affairs approved House Resolution 6032.

Rep. Judith Loganbill, D-Wichita and ranking minority member of the committee, offered the only opposition to the resolution from a committee member.

She read excerpts from Agenda 21 that call for improving access to markets, increasing land ownership by women and indigenous people and combating poverty. “What’s wrong with that,” Loganbill asked Smith.

“I have no problem with the free market,” Smith said, “but that’s not what that is. It’s wealth transfer. We act in our own sovereignty and for our own people.”

Smith, a former schoolteacher, gave committee members a lesson on the origins of the sustainability movement and Agenda 21.

In 1969, UN Secretary General U Thant warned that the world had only “10 crucial years” to avert a host of disasters, including plummeting global temperatures and spreading polar ice caps.

During the next 23 years a series of UN statements, many authored by Canadian businessman Maurice Strong, laid the groundwork for a call to eliminate private lands, end national sovereignty and accord humans no greater protection than any other species.

In 1992 Strong chaired the UN Earth Summit, also known as the Rio Conference, which produced Agenda 21’s call for curtailing national sovereignty and redistribution of resources, both natural and intellectual, in the name of sustainability.

Rep. Dennis Hedke, R-Wichita and the resolution’s sponsor, noted that most U.S. citizens are unaware of the agenda or the implications of what he called a, “Massive attempt to restructure human activity on the planet.”

“There is no other way to put it — this is the most aggressive attack on individual liberty and the foundations of our country we have ever seen,” Hedke said.

Agenda 21 and its supporters say such radical change is necessary to avert the calamity of global warming or climate change.

Zack Pistora, legislative director for Kansas Chapter of the Sierra Club, offered testimony on behalf of Rabbi Moti Rieber, director of Kansas Interfaith Power & Light, an environmentalist group.

Pistora was the only person to address the committee in opposition to the resolution. He said the real issue is, “Are we going to pay our way in a better future, one with healthier water and air?”

Pistora said nobody wants to address climate change and instead is trying to paint sustainable development as communism and socialism.

Rieber, in his printed testimony to the committee, said a small but intense opposition to Agenda 21 and sustainable development from “rightwing activists” is nonsense and unworthy of the Legislature’s time.

In 2009 Hedke, a geophysicist, testified against the Environmental Protection Agency’s declaration that carbon monoxide is a greenhouse gas and responsible for global warming.

Rep. Steve Brunk, R-Wichita and chair of the Federal and State Affairs committee, said he is confident HR6032 will be approved if it comes to a vote by the House before the session ends on Friday.

The resolution also notes that Agenda 21 calls for social justice, which it describes as “the right and opportunity of all people to benefit equally from the resources afforded us by society and the environment, which would be accomplished by redistribution of wealth.”

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Local Planning Initiative Has Federal Strings, UN Roots (kansaswatchdog.org)

KS GOP “Resolution Exposing United Nations Agenda 21″ (kansaswatchdog.org)

Missouri lawmakers may relax their state’s monitoring of radioactive-waste haulers, a move that worries some Kansans.

“The implications for both states are significant,” said Lisa Janario, a senior policy analyst with the Council of State Governments, a nonpartisan think tank. “(Interstate) 70 goes completely across both states, and Kansas City is a major rail hub for the whole region.”

Kansas regulates radioactive-waste shipments far more loosely than nearby Missouri, Iowa and other Midwestern states through which such waste travels from the power-hungry East to the more sparsely populated West, which has more underground storage.

“Kansas has always been more tentative in following the lead of other states in regulating this traffic,” said Janario. “They seem to be waiting until they see a greater necessity to become more involved.”

Missouri, in contrast, charges shippers as much as $1,800 per container, plus mileage, to move the highest-level waste across the state, and shippers must reimburse the Missouri Highway Patrol for escorts required en route.

Now Missouri lawmakers are considering relaxing some of those regulations. The Gamma Industry Processing Alliance, an Ontario-based radioactive material producers and shippers group, is asking legislators to allow Missouri to waive some inspection requirements and fees that shippers say duplicate federal requirements at the U.S.- Canadian border.

The Canadian group ships medical-industrial isotopes primarily used to sterilize hospital equipment, not waste, said Stephen Norton, a lobbyist trying to shepherd the request through the Missouri General Assembly. 

But the regulations are the same, “and we don’t believe it’s necessary for Missouri to conduct and charge for the same inspection, if the feds just spent 10 hours taking the truck apart,” Norton said.

Critics of the Missouri proposal worry that creating such a chink in the nuclear regulatory armor would funnel more radioactive traffic through Missouri and Kansas.

But Kansas state Rep. Carl Holmes, R-Liberal, said he doesn’t believe Kansas would automatically pick up much extra nuclear traffic.

Federal regulations and the locations of the storage sites to which the shipments would be headed make big traffic increases unlikely, said Holmes, chairman of the Kansas Legislature’s Joint Committee on Energy and the House Energy and Utilities Committee and who also represents Kansas on a Council of State Governments’ hazardous waste hauling policy panel.

National security requirements and anti-terrorism concerns make it impossible to know many specifics about the shipments, Holmes said.

“But there is a lot more traffic on Interstate 80 through Nebraska than on I-70,” Holmes said.

I-80 is a more direct route to storage facilities in Utah or Washington state from nuclear waste producers who are mostly from the Chicago area to the east, Holmes said. It also offers good connections to Interstate 25, which drops south to other storage sites in New Mexico.

“Plus I-70 has the Eisenhower Tunnel,” Holmes said. “I don’t think they could haul radioactive waste through there.”

The four-lane, nearly two-mile-long Eisenhower Tunnel cuts through the Continental Divide about 60 miles west of Denver and is the highest altitude vehicular tunnel in the United States. Federal and Colorado highway authorities ban shipment of many kinds of hazardous waste through the tunnel because of potential fire danger.

Truckers in Kansas have hauled eight loads of what is known as low-level nuclear waste across some parts of the state since Jan. 1, said Sharon Watson, a spokeswoman for Kansas’ Division of Emergency Management.

Low-level waste includes protective clothing, water filters, machine parts, office equipment or other material that’s been exposed to radiation from a nuclear reactor and must be sent to federal sites in Utah, Washington state or South Carolina for disposal.

In most years, about 12 such shipments move through Kansas, usually along I-70 or major highways across the far southeastern part of the state connecting Missouri and Oklahoma, Watson said. No high-level waste — the used-up but still very radioactive nuclear-reactor fuel — has moved through Kansas since 2009, she said.

Officials are sure that Kansas’ biggest nuclear waste generator, the Wolf Creek nuclear power generator near Burlington, isn’t adding to the traffic, Watson said.

“They’re storing on site and will be for many, many years to come,” Watson said.

But there is a caveat.

“Those are just the shipments we’ve been told about,” Watson said.

No one who ships nuclear waste through Kansas is required to tell state authorities of their plans and, indeed, many are encouraged not to, as a precaution against potential terrorist attacks.

So officially, Kansas becomes involved in the shipments only if they violate vehicle weight or width restrictions that apply to any trucks on Kansas roads, said Steve Swartz, a Kansas Department of Transportation spokesman, or if there is a spill, said Barbara Hersh, spokeswoman of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.

No such traffic spills have occurred anywhere in the U.S. during the 40 years in which 3,000 shipments have traveled by road or rail, said the American Nuclear Society, a nonprofit science and education organization in Washington, D.C.

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If you oppose smoking bans for any reason — property rights, individual liberty, you like smokers — you’re now apparently part of Big Tobacco.

That’s how the American Cancer Society sees it, anyhow.

With the Kansas House poised to vote Friday on a bill to allow smoking in bars again, the local ACS chapter issued an action alert, urging Kansans to “Help turn back new assaults from Big Tobacco.”

One of the main problems with this call to arms is that Big Tobacco has nothing to do with House Bill 2690.

State Rep. Randy Garber, R-Sabetha, the bill’s sponsor, told KansasWatchdog that ACS doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

State Rep. Steve Brunk, R-Wichita, chairman of the House Committee on Federal and State Affairs that worked the bill, said those backing the bill are for “freedom and private property rights. You have a legal product and government is disallowing its use on private property. I see this as akin to a taking of private property.”

Chris Masoner, regional government relations director for ACS, said he produced the alert. He argued that anyone who perpetuates smoking is part of Big Tobacco, including Kansas bar owners and legislators seeking to exempt bars from the 2010 smoking ban, citing double-digit declines in businesses.

KansasWatchdog contacted ACS headquarters in Atlanta for comment on Masoner’s redefinition of “Big Tobacco.” Masoner later called to say ACS national headquarters contacted him and replied: “We speak with one voice on this issue.”

If passed, HB 2690 would require smoking-optional businesses to post signs announcing that smoking is allowed and no one under 21 is permitted inside. Those businesses also would have to post the tobacco “quit line” phone number.

The taxpayer-funded quit lines promote nicotine-replacement therapy, such as patches and gums. ACS operates the quit lines and has received tobacco-control grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the philanthropic arm of pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, maker of most NRT sold in the United States.

Sheila Martin, a Hutchinson tavern owner and smoking ban opponent, jokingly asked if bar owners who post the quit-line phone number “would now be part of Big Tobacco and Big Pharma?”

The ACS alert also asks residents to tell legislators to oppose House Resolution 6026, backed by RJ Reynolds. If approved by the House, the resolution would require the Kansas Department of Health and Environment to study whether smokeless tobacco products, such as chewing tobacco or wet snuff, also called snus, should be promoted as less harmful alternatives to smoked tobacco.

Masoner said ACS opposes using state resources and taxpayer dollars to promote one product RJ Reynolds makes over another. “The reason RJR wants to push this resolution,” he said, “is to maintain the addiction to nicotine.”

TOPEKA — Kansas is moving closer to converting its $3 billion Medicaid program to a privately run managed-care plan.

Medicaid is a state and federal program that pays for about 380,000 Kansans who otherwise could not afford medical care. Kansas’ share is about $1.1 billion annually.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback formally submitted a 50-page request  April 26 asking federal officials for the switch. Kansas doctors and providers who take Medicaid patients now bill the state for the work.

Brownback and Kansas Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer, a surgeon and the administration’s point man on medical policy issues, offered the plan to the Social Security Administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS. The plan — to turn Medicaid operations over to three managed-care companies — will slow the expected growth in Medicaid costs by about $838 million over five years, they say.

Their plan is to give the managed care-companies contracts to run the programs, including financial incentives for more closely coordinating medical services that patients receive and for getting those patients healthier faster. Kansas made an initial application for the change in January, and Brownback earlier this month signed government orders setting things in motion.

Kansas in May plans to choose the three companies from five that have applied, and to receive federal approval of those contracts in August, according to a timeline provided Friday.

Kansas will probably get federal approval for the change, said Scott Beaulier, a Troy University economist who studies Medicaid programs across the U.S.

How likely the program will work as planned is a different question, said Beaulier, who has studied other reform attempts in Florida, Idaho, Rhode Island, Tennessee and the state of Washington.

“Kansas’ move is a step in the right direction, but by itself, is not sufficient to control Medicaid costs,” Beaulier said. “You need some sort of capping mechanism, too, and that probably requires the political will in the legislature to make those decisions.”

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WICHITA — Sam Brownback retired from the U.S. Senate in 2010 to run for Kansas governor.

And the conservatives cheered.

The Parker native and former state agriculture secretary had taken on — and beaten in a 1996 Senate race — a moderate Republican, former Lt. Gov. Sheila Frahm, who was picked by party leaders to replace former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole. Brownback won the governor’s office with 63 percent of the vote, beating state Sen. Tom Holland, D-Baldwin City.

Brownback in his first few months as governor abolished three state agencies, cut Kansas’ payroll by more than 2,000 jobs and wiped 51 outmoded laws off Kansas books.

He proposed major changes to streamline and reduce taxes, convert the state pensions into a less costly retirement savings plan, and replace the state’s school financing plan, which faces a state Supreme Court challenge in June.

In December, a Washington Post story about Brownback’s first year as governor declared a revolution in the cornfields, changing Kansas into a laboratory for tea party principles.

Close the laboratory doors and fire the scientists, some say. Brownback’s first year is an experiment gone wrong.

Even-more-conservative legislators, tea party activists and other conservative groups say Brownback should do more to advance tax reductions, promote smaller government and push free-market approaches to public policy.

Legislators — call them moderate, conservatives and very conservative — returned Wednesday to Topeka for what is referred to as a veto or wrap-up session, a time to clear unfinished business.

It usually takes about two weeks.

How much lawmakers can accomplish before hitting a 90-day session-ending deadline is unclear, although they can vote to go to overtime, or Brownback can call a special session later.

House Speaker Mike O’Neal, R-Hutchinson, said Wednesday that passing redistricting plans for the House, Senate, Kansas’ U.S. Congressional districts and the Kansas State Board of Education were top priorities.

The Kansas Constitution requires it.

Passing a state budget and a tax reform package that will begin eliminating state income taxes — a goal of Brownback and lawmakers — could be done in special session, he said.

“It all reminds me of that terrible teenage game of chicken,” said Michael Smith, a political science associate professor at Emporia State University in Emporia.

Who will compromise? Who will steer safely onto the shoulder or, depending on individual perspective, steer dangerously into the ditch? Who will stay the course?

“I don’t know who is going to flinch,” Smith said.

In the recent past, moderate Republicans could form coalitions with minority Democrats to block legislation by — or win concessions from — conservative Republicans.

That still works, sort of.

The 2010 elections put a lot more conservative Republicans in the Kansas House and Senate than political observers and pundits predicted. As it stands, House Republicans outnumber Democrats, 92-33. Republicans swept Senate races, too, and outnumber Democrats, 32-8. But only 19 of those Senate Republicans are counted as predictable conservative votes; the remaining 13 may or may not vote with Democrats on social or fiscal issues.

Conservatives generally have prevailed in the House this session, and moderates have held their own in the Senate, Smith said.

Eight of those moderate Senate Republicans could face conservative challengers in August’s primaries. Thing is, lawmakers must finish redrawing legislative districts to ensure incumbents and their likely challengers remain in the same district.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the state’s chief election officer, and Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, its top prosecutor, warned this week that legislators must finish redistricting by the expected end of the session May 11 to prevent the process from heading to the courts.

“At that point, it might be the moderates who won’t compromise,” Smith said. “The courts might draw a more moderate-friendly map than conservative legislators would.”

If a legislative lock exists, then the key lies somewhere in the debate over redistricting, political observers say.

State legislators — individually, in groups and in local communities — have proposed more than 40 plans for redrawing Kansas’ political boundaries. Problem is, no one yet agrees on how to best connect rural and sparsely populated western Kansas with slivers of cities in the east, so elected officials represent an equal numbers of voters.

“If redistricting falls in place, everything else could, too, because you will have everyone around the same table,” said Joe Aistrup, a political science professor at Kansas State University in Manhattan.

Conservatives and moderates have been digging in since the session began Jan. 11, which has stalled action on most of the Legislature’s major efforts. Time remains to concoct a remedy, “but someone has to blink,” Aistrup said.

But whom?

State Rep. Charlotte O’Hara, R-Overland Park, for example, isn’t shy about discussing with constituents what she perceives as the governor’s conservative shortcomings: His fight, for example, against the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — too weak, she says.

Brownback last summer returned a $31.5 million grant designed to help Kansas prepare for the federal act and vows to continue opposing it until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on its constitutionality  in June.

The rejected money was intended to help develop insurance data banks needed for the act to work. But O’Hara and a small group of legislators fear the governor’s proposed replacement — data banks to help run the state’s welfare programs — could be used for the health-care plan.

O’Hara, who did not immediately return phone calls, has said she is disappointed in Brownback’s promotion of wind energy in Kansas, which she likens to similarly failed Washington, D.C., programs, and the governor’s seeming reluctance to push for a single-rate consumption tax to replace personal income taxes.

State Rep. Anthony Brown, R-Eudora, questions Brownback’s proposals for cutting government spending.

“To be fair, I don’t see the whole landscape as the governor does, but it’s frustrating that he’s not been as aggressive on the budget as we need,” said Brown, who is one of the House Appropriations Committee’s most vocal spending hawks.

As a result, opportunities to rein in government growth may be fading, Brown said.

Kansas revenue forecasters in mid-April raised their official projections of anticipated tax revenue through June 2013 by $252 million, to $6.4 billion for the fiscal year, which ends then. Brownback and state legislators were eyeing — by that time — a potential $500 million budget cushion to help make tax reductions possible, even if federal support for social service and education programs withered because of federal spending cuts.

But as Kansas’ anticipated tax fortunes have grown, so have calls to spend the money for K-12 public education, or give raises to employees passed over during revenue shortfalls in 2008 and 2009.

“It’s a lot easier to cut spending when there is no money than when you have $700 million,” Brown said. “I’m afraid the window on that opportunity is closing soon.”

Tea party activist Larry Halloran, also an electrical instructor at a Wichita technical college, faults Brownback for what in conventional political thinking is often termed a virtue.

“He’s a consensus builder and a compromiser,” Halloran said. “You can’t compromise on principle. We can’t compromise on rule of law and can’t compromise on liberty.”

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Several years ago, I appeared on a television news show discussing a local political issue with one of the reporters from the newspaper where I worked as a columnist. As our discussion turned to debate, the reporter said, “Steve, the difference between you and me is that I deal in facts and you deal in opinion.” I was stunned, given that she was as opinionated as I am, and my columns were as highly reported and fact-filled as her news reports.

I’ll never forget that encounter because it epitomizes an outlook that’s still common in the journalism profession, especially newspapers. Reporters believe they are professionally trained to be unbiased. They analyze an issue, speak to the interested parties, and produce a report that impartially presents the facts. That people on both sides of the political spectrum often criticize the final work only reinforces to journalists that they are doing their job fairly. But is it true that journalists can be free of bias and that those who admit theirs are not really part of the club?

That question was raised following a Society of Professional Journalists panel dealing with nonprofit news organizations at the Wisconsin Newspaper Association conference in Madison last month. Three of us who work for nonprofit news entities discussed our operations and answered questions. Bill Lueders, of the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, and Lisa Graves, of the Center for Media and Democracy, were fellow panelists. University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism ethics professor Stephen Ward moderated.

At the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, parent organization of statehouse news agency Wisconsin Reporter, we’re unabashed in our focus. We ask questions from a free-market, pro-taxpayer perspective. We provide all perspectives and follow traditional journalistic standards, but we focus on waste, fraud and misuse of taxpayer dollars — on questions that aren’t always asked in the newspaper world. Everyone has a voice. We simply admit ours, so readers can make their own judgment.

But last week, Lueders published a column in several Wisconsin newspapers, including many of the same newspapers that run Wisconsin Reporter content, arguing that not all nonprofit journalistic endeavors are equally legitimate. Franklin and Graves’ center, which focuses on corporate misdeeds, provide a valid function, he argued, “but it’s not what the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism does. We are not just nonpartisan but non-ideological, a distinction worth drawing in this brave new world of nonprofit news.”

This reminds me of the attitude expressed by the reporter I described above. Lueders’ operation does great work and is not partisan, but the stories are based on a clear left-of-center perspective. That perspective is so ingrained in newsrooms that reporters often can’t see it. It’s how almost everyone around them thinks, so their thinking must be unbiased. Lueders also took Franklin Center to task, because we do not reveal the names of our donors unless those donors have publicized it themselves.

There’s nothing nefarious going on and nothing that undermines the veracity of our journalism. Nonprofits typically protect the names of donors. Many donors are afraid of political repercussions. In California, even donors who provided $25 to one controversial initiative found themselves on the receiving end of protests. This scares people. Furthermore, donors often don’t like their donations revealed, because it makes them fundraising targets.

The journalistic integrity issue doesn’t revolve around the revelation of funders. It centers on whether the organization has a strong wall of separation between its funding and its editorial content. I’ve heard many stories from the newspaper world where advertisers made editorial demands. At Franklin, we maintain a strong wall. And we are not partisan, despite some common misconceptions.

“My state of Wisconsin is a testing ground for this partisan assault on journalism,” Ward wrote in an online article that references the Franklin Center’s Madison-based Wisconsin Reporter. “If this activist model works here, these groups are prepared to establish similar services across the country, as they prepare for a presidential election next year.”

Yet Franklin and its journalists don’t support or advocate for a particular party, and we can point to many examples of stories that embarrass Republican politicians. A philosophical point of view does not equal partisan activism. I used to work for a newspaper chain called Freedom Communication. The “Freedom” told readers the fundamental perspective from which the publications approached the world. There’s a reason so many newspapers are called the Republican or the Democrat or the Independent or the Vindicator. Somewhere along the way, journalists embraced a false ethic of impartiality and many still cling to it.

That ethic often strikes readers as hypocritical. When I was in Madison, for example, I picked up a cover story in the Capital Times featuring the residents who started the recall effort against the Republican governor. It was an interesting read, but it was a glowing celebration of the activists. That story had a clear voice, but the mainstream journalism world still likes to pretend that such opinionated stories are objective.

Most reporters strive to be fair, but they all have a worldview, whether they admit it or not. They typically quote both sides accurately, but the bias comes in the story selection and the basic premise of the reporting itself. I knew many reporters where I worked and they almost always strived to be fair, but they often reminded me of that New York reporter who famously declared that Richard Nixon could not possibly have won the election. She didn’t know a single person who voted for him. Groupthink is common in all professions, including newspapers.

H.L. Mencken once quipped that freedom of the press belongs only to those who own one. Now anyone can own their own press, given the availability of inexpensive blogging platforms. The new media has changed the journalism world. Broadcast news has changed dramatically too, with the growth in cable news programming and myriad programs with distinct points of view. Yet many journalists are still trying to determine who is a “real” journalist and who is an impostor and impose a false standard of objectivity. Even worse than biased stories that pretend to be fair are those that strive so mightily to show no biases that they end up being boring or fail to provide the necessary back story and perspective that readers need.

At Franklin, we publish news stories and investigative pieces on our own Web sites and publish in traditional media sources. We love the old media and the new media. But we don’t hide from who we are. The emerging new media world is changing the face of journalism. Reporters should embrace this vibrant new world rather than try to fight the pointless battles from the past.

Steven Greenhut is vice president of journalism at the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, sponsor of KansasWatchdog.org. He is based in Sacramento, Calif.