The Perk air conditioning went out just as poetry and peace lovers arrived, but that didn't stop the performance. People made their own brand of cool with poetry ranging from rap to rhyme to free verse.

The Peace and Social Justice Center and the Youth Peace Center sponsored the Poetry Slam. All ages came to the event, which launched the latest Youth Peace Group initiative, Poets for Peace, who plan to visit such locations as juvenile detention centers, youth organizations, and long-term care facilities engendering youth empowerment by teaching the benefits of self-expression and public speaking.

I have always been interested in that time period, the time period of the great depression. Growing up in a small town, back in the sticks of Michigan, I was required to ask my Grandmother about it during a school project. I expected some piece of history I had not known about my family and their survival through the depression. Instead my Grandma had a simple answer. She stated, "We did not even know a depression had happened, we were always poor. The depression never left up here."

However when listening to the figures relating to declining home purchases it struck me that this could be considered a very positive indicator.

Dear Friends, as many of you know, one of our Equality Coalition members, Dan Manning, is running for Kansas House of Representatives in Wichita. Originally from southern Georgia, Dan is a West Point graduate who served for 8 years in the US Army before being discharged under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Dan has since made Kansas his home and directed his passion for serving our nation in to a campaign to serve in the state Legislature.

Dan's opponent is long-time incumbent Brenda Landwehr. Landwehr, a notorious far-right conservative, has been a vocal opponent of equal rights for gay, lesbian and transgendered Kansans. Since February, she has used Dan's sexual orientation to stir up her constituent. She has gone so far as to use language that Dan was told was "too offensive" to repeat.

This weekend, the homophobia and name-calling took a dangerous and criminal turn. Dan arrived home from work on Saturday to find a death threat attached to his front door...

When I started this program in June 2006, it was mostly to provide some balance to the other talk shows on KSDB 91.9 and commercial radio in the Manhattan area. Every talk show was presented from a rabid right-wing perspective.

For over a year, the K-State's Progressive Coalition had been trying to get a moderate to left of center show on the air waves, but were blocked by the executive staff of the station. Only after a talk show host had had a guest who on air referred to the film "Brokeback Mountain" as "bareback mounting" and used other expletives to describe gay and lesbian people, that resulted in a formal complaint being filed with the FCC, did space become available for an alternative to the toxic talk of Rush Limbaugh wannabes.

Community Bridge began with one goal: to provide community with quality programming from a progressive point of view. To that end the show has worked hard to inform the public debate and provide listeners with content that is not available on other local stations.

It's about time. When Glickman was defeated in 1994 by State Senator Todd Tiahrt, the blue collar voters, especially the culturally conservative ones, abandoned Glickman in droves. "When he voted for NAFTA and helped export our jobs overseas, I knew I couldn't continue to vote for Glickman," said one grizzled aircraft sheet worker. Eighteen years later, Raj Goyle is reminding those working class voters why they voted for Glickman in 1976, and why many rejected him in 1994.

In his 2004 interview with Bill Moyers, Thomas Frank, author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?" marvels about Wichita, a natural hotbed for working class Democrats, going Republican in 1994. Democrats allowed it to happen, and Democrats such as Raj Goyle are going back to what works.

Let's be honest. Every since man first felt the need to set up gods to explain the physical and metaphysical world religions have not exactly ushered in Nirvana. There is also no question that people have performed selfless acts in the name of God to help others BUT, and there is always a BUT, religion seems to be a giant web that has trapped us in an endless cycle of fighting or hating one another. How can we awaken from this limbo of purgatory?

If we are going to allow religion to be part of society and I don't see how we can possibly stop people from wanting to believe in just about anything- including the Madonna appearing on a grill cheese sandwich, then there has to be a system set up to protect us from people who take their religion way too seriously.

But for many people in the world, the hard iron is all too visible. This discrepancy between what we see and what others see is the subject of Julia Baird's recent essay in Newsweek, "Oil's Shame in Africa." Baird quotes CUNY School of Law professor Rebecca Bratspies: "Problems associated with oil production are usually invisible to those of us who consume vast quantities. We don't see how dirty it is. [The recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico] is a more extreme version of daily events in Nigeria, where the oil companies have had a complete and total disregard for the environmental implications of their actions." According to Baird, what the Nigerians have gone through has not been deemed newsworthy in the West.

This, the last show of the summer for the Lawrence Arts Center Summer Youth Theater (SYT) pulled me back over the forty-two years since I'd seen Hair the first time, a Broadway touring company performance in Chicago in 1968. My granddaughter was in the SYT production. It was to be her last performance for SYT and I didn't want to miss it. Also, I wanted to see how the play held up.

The country was blasted by hot, withering winds several times in the summer of 1860: "We had on Monday last," a Topeka newspaper reported on July 14, 1860, "the severest storm of wind ever known in this country. Its ... severity, lay in its temperature, being heated almost to suffication. Penetrating every crevice, it was impossible to escape, entirely, its baleful effects."

Those working outdoors were driven inside by blinding clouds of dust, farm animals were "completely prostrated by it," and young shoots of fruit trees were "literally burned by this terrible wind."