Explosives near Kansas Statehouse lead to ... release of suspect?

He came. He brought bombs. Kansas police let him go.
 
Mark it down as one of the odder-seeming terrorism scares in recent memory, at least thus far. On Wednesday morning, a Kansas state employee called police after noticing a funny-looking pickup truck parked in a restricted lot near the Statehouse.
 
Its hood was missing, and its front grill was crunched; it had a specialty Florida license plate solely for U.S. paratroopers; and it was smattered with bumper stickers that said such things as “Welcome to America. Now speak English.”
 
The truck also contained an empty gun holder — and several small homemade bombs designed to spray shrapnel, a Capitol Police spokesman said.

Police cleared the bombs from the area and, using the plate numbers, got a photo of the driver. They soon tracked him down in a tunnel between the Capitol and legislators’ offices. After interviewing the suspect, who Capitol Police said lives in Kansas and was unarmed, investigators searched his home. There, they said, they found bomb-making materials.
 
Open and shut case of potential terrorism, right? Not quite.
 
A day after the scare, the suspect, whom police will not identify, is free. In fact, according to Capt. Jimmie Atkinson of the Kansas Highway Patrol: “In this one, we did not actually take the suspect to jail and arrest him.”
 
Count that as one of the very few solid facts that’s been released thus far in a case that remains hazy.
 
When asked about the case Thursday morning, officials with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Kansas Highway Patrol and Topeka Police Department even seemed somewhat confused about who was in charge of the investigation.
 
Finally, by Thursday afternoon, Atkinson said: “We are going to be going forward with the charges because the [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] did not want to file charges.”
 
What charges would be filed? Atkinson wouldn’t say. Nor would he say why the suspect was at the Capitol.

Police said Wednesday that the man claimed to have an appointment inside the Capitol when confronted by the authorities, but no appointment was verified.
 
The apparent anti-immigrant stickers on the truck raised eyebrows, as the Kansas legislators were meeting that day to discuss contentious immigration legislation that would crack down on undocumented workers, who play a significant role in Kansas’ agricultural industry. A rally outside the Capitol drew about 300 protestors, according to a count by the Topeka Capitol-Journal.
 
When asked whether he thought the suspect, now free, posed any danger, Atkinson paused and then said he wouldn’t speculate. “Anybody could be dangerous,” he said. “I can say if we thought he’d be a continued threat, more than likely we would have kept him incarcerated, and we would have posted the bond then.”
 
He wouldn’t say any more.
 
Atkinson said the charges would be hashed out with the Shawnee County district attorney next week -- the earliest day an appointment could be arranged.
 
Capitol Police said the suspect did not have any connection to another man who was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of making threatening phone calls to the governor.

ALSO:

World's hottest chile pepper: The Trinidad Moruga Scorpion!

Buy latte, pack gun: Starbucks hit with boycott -- and 'buycott'

Are smokeless cigarettes safer? E-cig explodes in smoker's mouth

-- Matt Pearce in Kansas City, Mo.
Twitter.com/mattdpearce
 
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Photo: Homemade explosives were found in this pickup parked near the Kansas Statehouse on Wednesday. Credit: John Milburn/Associated Press

Islamic terrorism: It's not what many think, new report suggests

Islamic terrorists didn’t kill anybody in the United States last year.
 
There were plots here and there, whose stories were contorted by idiosyncrasy rather than stereotype. ... The feds arrested a man they said wanted to bomb the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon with a remote-controlled model airplane. There was the would-be fashion model who worked at a 5th Avenue Saks and was accused of wanting to wipe out a Manhattan synagogue. And who could forget the (as friends described him) pot-smoking, whiskey-slurping, key-losing used-car salesman accused of conspiring with Iran to hire Mexican drug cartels in an assassination attempt on the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States? 
 
Yet there would be no second 9/11 in the United States in 2011, nor any Islamic terrorist killings of any kind, according to a report released Wednesday by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security.

There were roughly 14,000 murders in the U.S. last year, according to the report, but the 20 American Muslims indicted in suspected terrorist plots — out of the 2 million Muslims in the United States — were not responsible for any of them.
 
“The scale of home-grown Muslim American terrorism in 2011 does not appear to have corroborated the warnings issued by government officials early in the year,” noted the report’s author, Charles Kurzman, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Last February, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano took to the bully pulpit in Washington to announce, “In some ways, the threat facing us is at its most heightened state since" the Sept. 11 attacks,  as The Times reported. 

The federal government’s security apparatus has ballooned since 9/11 — the Department of Homeland Security, which was created after the attacks, now has more than 230,000 employees — largely to combat a specter of Islamic terrorism whose face in the United States has changed over the last decade. "The terrorist threat facing our country has evolved significantly," Napolitano said in her remarks.
 
Kurzman’s figures show the Al Qaeda model, in which transnational groups of foreign-trained and foreign-funded extremists cross borders to commit high-profile attacks, has largely been outpaced by a sloppier and less successful run of home-bred freelance terrorists inspired by YouTube and Internet message boards, if inspired by foreign influence at all.
 
“Very few of the cases of Islamic terrorism in the United States have had any connection with Al Qaeda or its affiliates,” Kurzman said of the last few years of data, speaking in a phone interview with The Times. The data amount to 33 deaths in 12 domestic Islamic terrorism attacks since 9/11, including the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks.

“The fear and concerns that many have had in the days and months after 9/11 about sleeper cells and trained killers waiting to strike has not materialized in the decade since then. … Most of the cases involve fringe individuals or small groups who are not connected with foreign terrorist organizations or with other plots in the United States," Kurzman said.
 
Life has also changed for many international groups traditionally identified by the U.S. government as major proponents of terrorism. Al Qaeda has seen its leadership decimated by the death of Osama bin Laden and its effectiveness crippled as the U.S. continues its aggressive use of clandestine raids and drone strikes. And the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah has flirted with adopting nonviolence tactics, as has the Palestinian group Hamas, inspired by the "Arab Spring’s" example. 

As Kurzman’s report notes, Islamic extremism continues to exist in the United States, though he said in an interview that the numbers were too small to make many generalizations about the cases compiled in his report. “Some of the folks on these lists are frankly bizarre in their beliefs even within revolutionary Islamic circles,” he said.
 
Not included in Kurzman’s report are instances of non-Islamic terrorist plots in America, which, by one interest group’s reckoning, outnumber Islamic plots 2 to 1.
 
A January report by the Muslim Public Affairs Council counted 119 violent plots against people by non-Muslim Americans versus 52 plots by American and foreign Muslims since 9/11. The council also identified eight non-Muslims who had or tried to get biological, chemical or radiological weapons.
 
Ideological violence in the United States has never been the exclusive domain of Islamists. In November, the FBI arrested four Georgia men in their 60s and 70s accused of a bioterrorist plot based on “saving the Constitution." Further, radical environmentalist and animal rights groups have caused uncounted millions of dollars in damage in ecoterrorism over the years.
 
And then there’s Jared Lee Loughner, a non-Muslim charged with perpetrating perhaps 2011’s greatest act of domestic horror during the attempted killing of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. His ideology was originally misconstrued as conservative before analysts realized it was too obscure and incoherent to be called much of anything at all and, as The Times reported yesterday, he is still not yet considered fit for trial. 

Then there are the political -- and occasionally violent -- protests; a case in point is the small-scale anarchist street violence that some say has arisen in Oakland as part of the Occupy protests there. Few would call this terrorism, but just what definition of domestic “terrorism” is Kurzman using, anyway?

“I don’t get into this,” he admitted on the phone.

Kurzman just takes the reports of Islamic terrorism as he finds them and as they’re submitted to him, he said, which he admitted leads to him making a lot of “judgment calls as to whether they involve terrorism.”

It's more inclusive than not, Kurzman said. Trying to define non-Islamic terrorism, he said, is opening “a can of worms.”

ALSO:

Thrill-killing Missouri teen gets life for strangling neighbor, 9

911 call: Worker says Josh Powell 'blew up the house and kids'

N.C. trooper who kicked his dog should get job back, court says

-- Matt Pearce in Kansas City, Mo.
Twitter.com/mattdpearce

Photo: Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has spoken about the terrorist threat currently facing the United States. A new report suggests that threat may not be what many people think. Here, Napolitano testifies before the House Committee on Homeland Security last February. Credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images 

Chocolate beer for Valentine's Day: Kansas City falls in love

 

It was the beer that drove Kansas City crazy.

The storefront signs, plastered all over town on handwritten scraps of notebook paper or on sidewalk chalkboards, came in two stages this week. First was: WE DO NOT HAVE ANY BOULEVARD CHOCOLATE ALE YET. In most cases, they were followed hours later by: WE ARE OUT OF BOULEVARD CHOCOLATE ALE.

The Boulevard Brewing Co., whose famous smokestack-topped brewery is in Kansas City, Mo., teamed up with local chocolatier Christopher Elbow to create the Chocolate Ale specially for Valentine’s Day. Although it’s not unusual for beer companies to be closely tied to the cities in which they’re based, the ensuing mania seems to be a phenomenon bred purely out of the nature of today’s smaller-scale era of beer-making.

Kansas City TV stations ran footage of lines outside liquor stores Tuesday as Kansas Citians waited for the arrival of beer trucks; Jason Bent, a producer for local ABC affiliate KMBC 9, reported that one store sold out its entire stock in 3 minutes despite a limit of four bottles per person. The Kansas City Business Journal reported rumors that some residents were starting to drive out of state to find bottles.  

The company produced just 20,000 gallons of the ale, offering it in 750-milliliter bottles that sold for  $8 to $12 each. But last year, when the company’s much smaller initial offering took off, some people reported buying bottles for $100 on EBay, so this year there was reason to get in line.

Josh Noel of the Chicago Tribune declared it “beer of the month”: “Chocolate Ale might be a gimmick, but it's a deft gimmick worth drinking a couple of times a year.”

Other reviews were more muted, and the arrival of another shortage this year inspired conspiracy theories that Boulevard made too little on purpose to drive up demand. “This is categorically false,” the company announced on its blog.

Meanwhile, Kansas City Star columnist Yael T. Abouhalkah grouched at what he saw as hype, declaring, “Folks, it’s only beer.”  

Regardless of whether the beer’s any good, the frenzy is a coup for the Boulevard Brewing Co., a local darling whose rise on the national scene has been contrasted by the slow diminution of cross-state giant Anheuser-Busch.

Anheuser-Busch’s close fusion with the civic identity of St. Louis has been complicated in recent years by the company’s acquisition by, and subsequent layoffs from, Belgian-based InBev. The implications of local pride and the politics of globalization weren’t lost on Boulevard in Kansas City, which now markets itself as "Missouri's largest independent brewery" and last year sponsored the commissioning of the Virginia-class submarine Missouri.  

It’s microbreweries like Boulevard that have challenged Anheuser-Busch’s domination on the beer market in recent years. So when a local beer makes the locals act a little crazy, it’s also a sign that the little brothers of small-time beermaking keep growing bigger and bigger.

On its company blog, Boulevard freely lauded the genius of its creation as one reason to explain the Chocolate Ale’s popularity, but also admitted there had been some hype, and hazarded another guess with a bit of a shrug. “A more likely answer, and one we may have underestimated: Kansas Citians really love products made in Kansas City.”

ALSO:

Super Bowl 2012: Tour the stadium this way -- it's cheaper

Vermont police find, belatedly, that inmates put pig on car decal

A parade for Super Bowl winners? What about a parade for Iraq vets?

-- Matt Pearce in Kansas City, Mo.

Video: Last year's frenzy (as described in the video) may have stoked this year's frenzy for Boulevard Brewing's Chocolate Ale. Bottles reportedly went for $100 on EBay last year. Credit: YouTube

'YoMama' reference to Michelle Obama leads to, yes, an apology

Note to those politicians inclined to take supposedly private potshots at First Lady Michelle Obama: Go ahead and get the apology ready. Kansas House Speaker Mike O'Neal learned this the hard way -- and he's not the first.

O’Neal had to make a less-than-graceful public apology Thursday for forwarding a private email that found its way into the hands of the Lawrence Journal-World.
 
“I’m sure you’ll join me in wishing Mrs. YoMama a wonderful, long Hawaii Christmas vacation — at our expense, of course,” the chain email read, including an unflattering photo comparing Michelle Obama’s hairstyle to that of the Grinch. 

“Sorry, just had to forward this latest holiday message,” O’Neal added in the email. “I’ve had worse hair days, but this is pretty funny.”
 
When the inevitable backlash came, O’Neal’s office stumbled, first defending the email — “It’s hard to see how Mike O’Neal poking fun at himself and forwarding a lighthearted political cartoon about the first lady’s extravagant spending of taxpayer funds during a time when many Americans are financially struggling is newsworthy,” his office said in a statement — before the Kansas speaker later apologized.

“Cartoons are intended to be humorous,” O’Neal said in another statement, also published in the Kansas City Star. “This one made me laugh — I’ve had bad hair days too. I forwarded it too quickly missing the text included in the body of the email. To those I have offended, I am sorry. That was not at all my intent.”

O'Neal said he hadn't seen the text calling Obama “Mrs. YoMama” before forwarding it to a few other Kansas lawmakers.

The email has been far from the only recent conservative snipe at the first lady's physical appearance.

Wisconsin lawmaker Jim Sensenbrenner inspired facepalms after saying at a pre-Christmas church function that Obama had a “big butt." He too apologized. Of course, that wasn’t a particularly original jab; host Rush Limbaugh had also recently gotten physical with the first lady, in a manner of speaking, criticizing her figure in light of her healthy eating initiatives:

"The problem is, and dare I say this, it doesn't look like Michelle Obama follows her own nutritionary, dietary advice... I'm trying to say that our first lady does not project the image of women that you might see on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit Issue or of a woman Alex Rodriguez might date every six months or what have you."

Not being a politician, Limbaugh didn't apologize.

On Thursday, The Times’ Christopher Knight, over at the Culture Monster blog, decried a “baldly racist” depiction of Obama in a revised 1775 portrait of Marie Antoinette that appeared on the conservative blog Gateway Pundit. The caricature features the first lady’s biceps and a hand drawn conspicuously in front of the globe.

“The caricature of Obama as a profligate queen relies on the racist stereotype of an ‘uppity Negro,’ which emerged among slave masters in an earlier American era,” Knight wrote. “Obama, born into a working-class Chicago family whose roots are traced to the pre-Civil War South, graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, prior to holding several high-level positions in the academic and private sectors.”

The first lady's office has not commented on any of these jabs, so when word got out about O’Neal’s email Thursday, it was Kansas Democrats who took to her defense.

Joan Wagnon, the leader of the Kansas Democratic Party, told the Star that she found the email “highly offensive, disrespectful and unacceptable.”
 
“Regardless of how he feels about President (Barack) Obama’s politics, Speaker O’Neal’s decision to promote language demeaning Mrs. Obama is simply wrong,” Wagnon said.

ALSO:

Washington broadens definition of rape to include men

Target shooter charged with hitting Texas middle-schooler

Girl Scout cookies are back with new flavor: Savannah Smiles

-- Matt Pearce in Kansas City, Mo.
Twitter.com/mattdpearce

Photo: In this Oct. 25 photo, First Lady Michelle Obama visits a Chicago Walgreens store that sells produce. The visit was part of the first lady's "Let's Move!" initiative, which is designed to promote healthy eating and lifestyles. Credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Beloved weatherman's suicide leaves Kansas City stunned, grieving

 

Kansas City's weather forecasters occupy a conflicting position in the public psyche: They're at once adored cult figures and targets of wrath, cheered for their personalities and accosted for misfires on predicting the oft-dramatic storm systems that traverse America’s mid-section.

Often longtime residents, the forecasters are such local fixtures that their lives are subject to rampant casual scrutiny and gossip in a town where sometimes it can be a little hard to hide.

So when local FOX 4 weatherman Don Harman committed suicide last week at the age of 41, it was almost as if someone had ripped out a chunk of Kansas City skyline, exposing the close bond residents have with the familiar strangers who bring the weather into their homes.

"I miss watching him in the morning! I used to lay in bed every morning until I saw the weather report from him," one woman confessed on Facebook, where tributes poured out after the suicide.

Harman, who is survived by a wife and daughter, was part of the highest-rated morning show in Kansas City for more than a decade. "Don Harman is gone so ain't no weather forecast going to be accurate," another tweeted.

Harman’s popularity in life -- he was known for his great humor -- has made his death hard to downplay in a place where suicides typically pass quietly, a collision of social taboos over suicide, wishes to respect family and quieter worries that too much attention could lead to copycats. Indeed, much of the aftermath played out live.

“Harman’s close friend and morning show co-host Mark Alford looked shell-shocked as he read the announcement at 4:45 a.m. asking for patience from viewers who were bombarding the station’s switchboard and posting messages to social media,” noted Kansas City Star TV critic Aaron Barnhart.

The announcements continued throughout the day, and Harman’s colleagues later wept as they discussed his death on-air.

But Harman’s public standing has also turned an often hush-hush subject into a moment of public awareness. Harman’s family agreed to share interviews with FOX 4 “in hopes that will help erase the stigma of depression and suicide.”

Meanwhile, a public memorial is set for Dec. 17, which Kansas City Mayor Sly James announced Thursday would be “Don Harman Day.”

“The difficulty in this job is to have that good blend of left-brain, right-brain,” local KMBC-TV meteorologist Bryan Busby told the Kansas City Star. 

“We’re scientists, we’re geeks, we know math. So to have a meteorologist who also has that personality — someone who can make you smile — is a rare quality. And Don had both.”

 ALSO:

 Bills to require drug screening for jobless benefits

Texas Sons of Confederate Veterans sues over license plates

Jurors: Connecticut man deserves to die for home invasion horror

-- Matt Pearce in Kansas City, Mo.

Twitter.com/mattdpearce

Video: FOX 4 News, Kansas City, Mo.

 

Joplin tornadoes may have stirred up buried lead

Most of the talk about Joplin, Mo., has been about what the tornado blew away. But lately, officials there are concerned about what the storm dug up: lead.

According to the Jasper County Health Department, the toxic metal — a major health risk for children and workers across the U.S. — has contaminated several properties inside the tornado’s destruction zone, which spans roughly 30% of Joplin.

In tests of 43 properties, 18 showed high levels of lead, prompting the city’s mayor to ask the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources for help in testing for, and cleaning up, the element.

This isn’t the first time officials have grappled with silent hazards brought on by the violent storm, which struck May 22 and damaged almost 8,000 homes and businesses.

In addition to the 162 people killed and many more injured in the storm, an outbreak of a rare but aggressive fungus called mucormycosis attacked 13 victims afterward and probably contributed to several deaths. The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website says officials are still investigating the outbreak,  possibly the first known “cluster” following a tornado.

Lead’s emergence as a hazard, potentially affecting as many as 1,500 properties in Joplin,is linked to Joplin’s past as a lead-mining town.

“It appears it was used in the early construction of homes,” Joplin Health Department Director Dan Pekarek told the Joplin Globe. “Chat [a lead-mining byproduct] was pretty readily available around here, and they used it. It was used as fill for voids around footings and foundations, and to level out crawl spaces.”

From the 1850s to the 1960s, Jasper County was the most productive lead- and zinc-mining area in the world, and Missouri still leads the U.S. in production, according to the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

Joplin was targeted for EPA lead-cleanup efforts in the 1990s, and Pekarek told the Globe it’s possible the tornado damage exposed lead-contaminated areas that had been buried. Much of the soil in the destruction zone had been bulldozed when a reporter for The Times visited Joplin in August, and home and business owners have filed hundreds of new building permits since the storm.

The Kansas City Star reported this week that cleanup could cost as much as $7.5 million and that the city has stopped issuing building permits for highly contaminated properties.

EPA Regional Administrator Karl Brooks has been working with city officials on funding a potential multi-year cleanup plan patterned on its previous cleanup efforts, according to a news release from the agency. The funding would pay for sampling and excavating the contaminated land.

Under the proposal, the Missouri Department of Natural resources would also help fund the efforts and provide a place for storing the soil.

RELATED:

Satellite images of Joplin, Mo., before and after the tornado

After tornado, Joplin radio stations become lifeline for residents

Mementos scattered by Joplin tornado are gradually returned home

-- Matt Pearce in Kansas City, Mo.
twitter.com/mattdpearce

Photo: This May photo shows extensive tornado destruction in Joplin, Mo., with the damaged St. John's Regional Medical Center hospital building at foreground center. The tornado struck May 22. Credit: Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

Tennessee raccoon barbecue leads to (surprise!) a meth bust

Who among us hasn’t barbecued a raccoon in a Tennessee parking lot and then gotten caught up in a meth bust?
 
On Monday, Memphis, Tenn., police arrested 26-year-old Adam Eubank on suspicion of manufacturing methamphetamine after his brother, Alex Eubank, held a late-night critter cookout outside an apartment complex. That cookout drew the attention of the police.
 
Local TV channel KSDK interviewed the men’s less-than-terrified neighbors to get to the bottom of the story.
 
“Pretty shocked,” neighbor Shelton Russell said, with something akin to a smile. “I… I mean, it’s a raccoon, I don’t know. Where’d they find it?”
 
“They said they were using it [the fire] to dry their clothes,” added neighbor Chris Phillip, who told KSDK the brothers were known as “the squirrel brothers” for once skinning a squirrel in an apartment common area.
 
Several people were standing around the fire, KSDK reported, and there was a futon nearby; one man had large knives. When the police showed up, they noticed buckets containing some suspicious material, so they investigated Eubanks’ apartment.
 
Adam Eubank, who was inside the apartment, didn’t let the police in and didn’t answer questions, according to an affidavit provided to The Times. They arrested him after discovering he’d bought pseudoephedrine — a cold medicine that’s a key ingredient in meth — 35 times in a year.

Alex Eubank was questioned but not arrested.
 
--Matt Pearce in Kansas City, Mo.
Twitter.com/mattdpearce

ALSO:

Texas man sought in frozen armadillo attack

Ohio zoo fends off widow; exotic animals to be quarantined

Advocates for wild horses, black bears swarm Nevada capital

Topeka maneuvers over domestic-abuse law outrage survivors

Claudine Dombrowski tells of having her wrists broken, being hit on the head with a crowbar, getting chipped teeth and, at one point, needing 24 stitches to close a wound. Even when she left her boyfriend, she says, the abuse didn't stop. Ultimately, she says, she was left on total disability.

“I called the police, I did all the right things, I ended up in court, and on a good day, it got reduced from domestic violence to disorderly conduct,” Dombrowski, a Topeka, Kansas, resident and now an advocate for abuse survivors, told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday. 

So Dombrowski was outraged when misdemeanor domestic abuse — already an insult, she thinks, for not being equal to an assault charge — went unpunished for a month in Topeka after a local funding dispute turned into a circular firing squad that caught battered women in the center.

The county didn’t want to pay for prosecuting misdemeanor domestic battery; the prosecutor didn’t want to take the cases without more resources; and the city didn’t want to pay for handling the cases either.

Meanwhile, as many as 30 abuse suspects went free before the city of Topeka, in a legal maneuver, forced Shawnee County prosecutor Chad Taylor to resume prosecution of the cases — by dramatically pulling its own domestic abuse law from the books. The state has its own law, which the prosecutor would need to enforce.

“The fact that it happened just makes me feel pretty worthless, you know?” Dombrowski said. “We spend millions of dollars on public service announcements saying we [domestic-violence victims] don’t have to live this way ... and you really do.”

Times have been tough for local governments. The economic buck stops with them because they don’t get to run on debt the way the federal government does, and some of the collapses have been spectacular.

Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, threw up the white flag this week and declared bankruptcy after a failed $300 million incinerator project capsized the city’s budget. The city manager for moribund Vallejo, Calif., has one assistant; she has to lock the door when she leaves, because there’s no one else in the office. 

But for women, the symptoms of the municipal budget crisis are especially stunning in the sleepy prairie metropolis of Topeka. There, the symbolic decriminalization of domestic violence has thrown a spotlight on a chronically underreported issue in a state where women’s advocates are used to fighting uphill battles.

“We live in Kansas, where we are used to taking a lot of punches on the chin,” said Kari Ann Rinker, state coordinator for Kansas NOW, which recently saw the state legislature try to defund Planned Parenthood. 

Republican Gov. Sam Brownback’s conservative stances have led a few residents to derisively dub the state “Brownbackistan.”

But beyond the familiar battlefronts over abortion, domestic violence hits especially close to home. In 2008, Jana Mackey, a 25-year-old Kansas NOW lobbyist who volunteered to aid victims of sexual assault and domestic violence, was found slain in an ex-boyfriend’s home.

“When I went in front of the county commission in Shawnee County about this issue [funding prosecutions for domestic abuse in Topeka], I brought everything I had, and I was emotional,” said Rinker. “Sometimes I’m accused of being less than professional. But I’ve tried to do this nicely, to fight this mentality in this state, and we’ve reached this point where we need to stop being nice and start rattling some cages to do so.”

Added Dombrowski: “If these people really cared about women, they would come up with the money. They wouldn’t argue about it.”

The past month has been treacherous for domestic abuse survivors in Topeka, according to Becky Dickinson, program director for the Topeka YWCA Center for Safety and Empowerment, which she said saw an increase in the number of women needing help.

“It became a very scary and dangerous time for victims to get law enforcement involved,” Dickinson told The Times, adding that victims “were calling the police and seeing their abusers being arrested but getting released in 48 hours.”

In an abuse situation, Dickinson said, abusers are often the most dangerous after they’ve been arrested. They come home looking for revenge. Needless to say, Dickinson said, “victims were concerned” about the budget spat.

Dickinson said that in 2010, the Topeka YWCA helped 1,305 county residents with services and counseling for domestic and sexual violence, assisted with 586 protection orders, housed 190 women and children in a shelter, and received nearly 2,000 calls to its crisis hotline.

Those numbers are likely low. Domestic violence often goes unreported. So it’s a dark irony that Topeka’s new time in the international limelight comes during Domestic Violence Awareness Month. “Now Topeka is known as the domestic violence capital of the world,” Kansas NOW’s Rinker said.

Whether the county prosecutor’s announcement that it is resuming prosecutions will fix the problem remains to be seen; the prosecutor’s office is expected to lay off almost a fifth of its staff by the end of the year, which could impact the prosecution of domestic violence cases that the office just resumed prosecuting.

“Even on a good day, it doesn’t work,” Dombrowski said of Topeka’s handling of domestic abuse victims. “And now it’s even worse.”

ALSO:

Carson City IHOP will reopen after fatal shootings

Corn maze nightmare 2011: Who is really at fault for 911 call?

U.S. helps recover -- and return -- French painting stolen from museum during WWI

--Matt Pearce in Kansas City
Twitter.com/mattdpearce

Photo: Claudine Dombrowski, left, a survivor advocate, greets Amber Versola, a lobbyist for Kansas National Organization for Women, on Tuesday at a rally at the Shawnee County Court House in Topeka, Kansas. Credit: AP / The Capital-Journal, Anthony S. Bush 

Domestic violence is no longer illegal under Topeka, Kan., law

It's no longer illegal to abuse a spouse if you're in Topeka, Kan. -- at least under city law.

The Topeka City Council voted Tuesday night to repeal the city’s misdemeanor domestic battery law. The issue, which had become a bargaining chip in an awkward battle over local and county budgets, has so far seen the release of 30 abuse suspects, according to the Kansas City Star.

Felony domestic abuse cases continued to be prosecuted, but the Star reported that one abuse suspect has been arrested and released twice since the budget spat started last month.

“I absolutely do not understand it,” said Rita Smith, executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, in the Star’s report. “It’s really outrageous that they’re playing with family safety to see who blinks first. People could die while they’re waiting to straighten this out.”

Behind the move is a game of political "chicken" that developed recently when the local prosecutor for Shawnee County, Chad Taylor, said he could no longer prosecute misdemeanors because his office's budget had been cut by 10%. Half of Shawnee County’s misdemeanors are domestic battery cases, and domestic abuse prosecutions had increased over the last three years without extra funding from the county, according to the prosecutor's office.

That meant the city of Topeka — which had a misdemeanor domestic battery law but had let county prosecutors handle the cases in recent years — would have to pick up the slack. But it couldn't afford to handle the cases either.

So City Council members rescinded the domestic battery law to force a stare-down with the county prosecutor. The state has its own misdemeanor battery law, and the county prosecutor would still have to enforce state law.

The city's tactic worked. In a news release Wednesday,  Taylor announced — grudgingly — that he would prosecute the domestic abuse cases again.

"Effective immediately my office will commence the review and filing of misdemeanors decriminalized by the City of Topeka," Taylor said in the release. "My office now retains sole authority to prosecute domestic battery misdemeanors and will take on this responsibility so as to better protect and serve our community. We will do so with less staff, less resources, and severe constraints on our ability to effectively seek justice."

But Taylor said there would have to be a reckoning; justice costs money, and someone has to pay.
"Public safety is being ignored by the leaders of this community and we will shortly see the consequences of their actions," he said.

ALSO:

Replace dollar bills with $1 coins?

John Wayne Gacy victims unearthed in bid to I.D. victims

Underwear bomber enter guilty plea to terrorism charges 

--Matt Pearce in Kansas City, Mo.
Twitter.com/mattdpearce

Photo: Protesters gather outside the Shawnee County Court House in Topeka, Kan., on Tuesday before a City Council session. Credit: Anthony S. Bush / Topeka Capital-Journal

Kansas gets wind farm, BP gets tax credit -- just in time

 
Kansas is to wind as Saudi Arabia is to oil. So it makes sense that energy conglomerate BP recently announced plans to build an $800-million, 262-turbine wind farm in the southern part of the state.

The project seems like a big deal -- especially considering the several hundred jobs the wind farm will bring -- but it might be one of the last big stories we'll hear about wind energy for a while. The move comes just in time to take advantage of a stimulus-funded federal tax credit that's set to expire next year.

That expiration may shut down, or seriously curtail, new construction in the wind industry. Further, the expiration comes amid a backlash over the Solyndra unpleasantness (more on that later).

The 66,000-acre wind farm, coined Flat Ridge 2, is expected to generate more than 500 temporary construction jobs and roughly 30 permanent positions as BP subsidiary BP Wind Energy moves to start construction before January and finish the project by 2013. The wind farm will be the largest in Kansas and the largest owned by BP. 

Suffice to say, the work comes during a tough time for the renewable energy industry.

Stimulus-backed solar firm Solyndra, once a darling of the Obama administration, has crashed and burned in spectacular fashion, collapsing into bankruptcy and spurring a criminal investigation that has congressional Republicans questioning whether taxpayers should be on the hook for funding renewable energy development.

BP’s job-creating project — as it has been touted by state officials — will take advantage of an expiring provision that had previously been extended by President Obama’s politically unpopular 2009 stimulus.

The provision offers either a 10-year, 2.2-cent production tax credit for every kilowatt-hour generated, or a onetime 30% investment tax credit paid to companies starting wind projects before 2012 and finishing before 2013 — two deadlines that the BP project exactly meets.

“There’s a sort of cliff that we fall off at the end of 2012,” BP Wind Energy chief executive John Graham told the Wichita Eagle. “With the expiration of the [production tax credit], there is likely no wind development in 2013.”

BP will also pay more than $1 million a year for 20 years to the 200 landowners where the turbines will be built, according to a report from The Wichita Eagle, plus another annual $1 million to local governments.

And the company has signed a long-term deal to sell three-quarters of its energy to Associated Electric Cooperative in southwest Missouri, which has 875,000 customers. Its owner cited the imminent expiration of the production tax credit as part of the reason for buying energy from BP now.

“It really buys down the price of the wind power,” said Republican Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback of the production tax credit in an interview with the Wichita Eagle. “Associated is very wise in buying wind energy now because of the pressure on the federal budget, and the [production tax credit] is under pressure. It’s key for the state of Kansas if we want to continue to develop wind energy.”

The wind industry has been heavily reliant on federal tax credits as it expands. Occasional lapses in the production tax credit program by Congress have led to huge dips in new construction, according to data from the American Wind Energy Assn.

The investment tax credit for new wind projects has been popular too: It has awarded more than $8.4 billion in renewable-energy tax credits since 2009, with roughly $6.7 billion going toward wind projects alone, according to U.S. Treasury award data.

The American Wind Energy Assn. has said that continuing uncertainty about whether the credit will continue beyond 2012 has already led to layoffs in what has been a boom industry: The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service estimated in a Sept. 23 report that nearly 400 U.S. manufacturers produced turbine products in 2010, up from 30 in 2004.

“The expansion of U.S. wind power generation will depend, at least in part, on government policy decisions,” the Congressional Research Service said. “If state and federal governments continue to support wind generation, manufacturing of wind generating equipment in the United States is likely to increase.”

Observers may not be actually saying, "The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind..." But they're probably thinking it.

RELATED:

Oil heads for worst quarter since 2008

Solyndra's collapse is a tale of too much dazzle

Energy Department OKs new loan guarantees for green projects

-- Matt Pearce in Kansas City, Mo.

twitter.com/mattdpearce

Photo: The wind turbines are coming -- to Kansas at least. Beyond that, the future of alternative energy is uncertain now that a tax credit to encourage such projects is expiring. The turbines shown here are in Japan. The Kansas project, funded by BP, will get 262 of its own. Credit: Tomohiro Ohsumi / Bloomberg