Columns

Nonunion workers make up nearly 90% of the U.S. workforce. President Joe Biden is stabbing them in the back. The massive $3.5 trillion budget bill Biden and Democratic lawmakers are trying to ram through Congress discriminates against nonunion workers and even forces some of them to pay higher taxes than union workers...

September marks Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, and it provides us with an opportunity to rally around the common goal of preventing suicide in our communities. The issues that divide us have received national headlines, but the issues that lead to death by suicide are ones that we must all face equally. ...

It's one of the strange ironies of American politics. Few things are as politically polarizing as foreign policy, and yet it's on foreign policy where the differences between the parties are often narrowest. Indeed, viewed from abroad, our allies and adversaries often think that the biggest problem with any new administration is the continuity of U.S. policies, not the change in direction...

Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas is indisputably good at one part of his job -- always referring to the migrant surge at the border as a "challenge" and never a "crisis." He visited Del Rio, Texas on Monday and refused to use the offending word about more than 10,000 Haitian migrants huddled under a bridge, living amongst trash with insufficient food and water in sweltering heat...

The following questions were asked in a letter to the editor by Gary Hill in the Sept. 16 Southeast Missourian. These answers were provided by city staff in conjunction with the mayor and members of your city council. ...

We are in the midst of redesigning the digital platform for the Southeast Missourian, and feedback has been coming in about what people want to see. It's not too late for you to join us with your thoughts. Go to semissourian.com/thefuture to sign up...

The scientific method used to govern much of popular American thinking. In empirical fashion, scientists advised us to examine evidence and data, and then by induction come to rational hypotheses. The enemies of "science" were politics, superstition, bias and deduction...

Democrats are ready to raise taxes. They want more revenue, in part to fund an out-of-this-world amount of new spending. Some simply want to soak the rich, as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., plainly signaled at the Met Gala by wearing a white dress with "TAX THE RICH" scrawled across it in red paint. ...

In 1983, Tom Cruise starred in the film "Risky Business." It's about wealthy parents in Chicago who go on vacation and leave the house under the stewardship of their high school-age son. In short order, the boy throws a wild party, and the rest of the film is about the chaotic fallout...

Maybe President Biden should handle COVID-19 the way he's handled Afghanistan. It's a strange thought, given how badly he botched the U.S. withdrawal. But at least Afghanistan Joe had a clear idea about what we needed to do. COVID Joe has no such exit strategy. He's making it up as he goes...

Benjamin Franklin was right about death and taxes, but new taxes only become inevitable when a Democrat is elected president, and here we are. The House Ways and Means Committee released an outline of tax proposals to offset President Biden's jaw-dropping spending plans, and it's the expected assortment of tax increases on business and the affluent that Democrats like to pretend can fund a social welfare state of the sort that Bernie Sanders has long pined and advocated for...

"How easy it is, in times of ease, for us to become dependent on our routines, on the established order of our day-to-day existence, to carry us along." These words greeted subscribers to the monthly spiritual magazine Magnificat 20 years ago, on the morning after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. ...

California once was run by conservatives and mostly centrist Democrats. True paleo-liberal governors such as Pat Brown greatly expanded the welfare state. But they also believed in pushing integration and building freeways, dams, aqueducts and power plants, while preventing forest fires, directing the mentally ill into state hospitals, and ensuring the state enhanced the housing, timber, oil and gas, nuclear and agricultural industries...

Not too long ago, supporters imagined Joe Biden might be the next LBJ, and perhaps they were right — just not how they thought. Biden bears no resemblance to the Lyndon B. Johnson who entered office after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 with a 75% approval rating and over the next couple of years passed a raft of historic legislation. No, if there’s any comparison it is to the LBJ who by 1967 had seen his approval rating dip underwater in a deeply riven country...

The Democratic Party is rolling out its left-wing big guns to go to California to support Gov. Gavin Newsom in the recall election scheduled for Tuesday. In California, the bluest of blue states, where, in 2020, challenger Joe Biden defeated incumbent President Donald Trump by a margin of almost 2-1, the polls are within the margin of error showing Newsom holding on in the recall...

Exactly 10 years ago, economist Michael Clemens published a paper in the prestigious Journal of Economic Perspectives called "Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?" He urged fellow economists to consider a paradigm shift in their research about immigration. Though economists had mostly neglected the global economic losses caused by migration barriers, the existing estimates "should make economists' jaws hit their desks."...

The 18th-century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham came up with the idea of the panopticon, a prison designed to allow all the prisoners to be observed by one guard. What even Bentham couldn't conceive of, despite his creative musings about schemes of perpetual surveillance, was a society like contemporary Australia...

Like everyone under the age of 50, I was born after Roe v. Wade. It's worth reflecting: If our parents knew what we'd experience in life and the mistakes we would make, would they have decided not to have had us? Terrorist attacks. A global pandemic. ...

I got back to the U.S. from my honeymoon on Sept. 10, 2001. My wife went straight home to Washington, D.C, to start her new job at the Justice Department. I went to Washington state, where we'd gotten married, to retrieve our dog Cosmo, whom we'd left with family. I was in a hotel room in Pendleton, Oregon, when I saw the first reports of a plane hitting the World Trade Center. I used something called AOL Instant Messenger to tell my co-workers to turn on the TV...

According to a new report from The Washington Post, America's corporations have committed "at least" $49.5 billion to the cause of "racial justice" since the George Floyd murder last year riveted our national attention on race. This amounts to a little over $1,100 for every Black man, woman and child in America...

Ideologues at both political extremes, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt, on the left and Fox News host Tucker Carlson on the right, have recently pointed to pet foreign countries as exemplars of what America should strive to be. Yet Sanders and Carlson are each misled by a superficial understanding of what these countries are really about...

In a major victory for constitutional norms, the Supreme Court overturned a lawless and essentially authoritarian policy of the Trump administration, and progressives are furious. You read that right. Let's catch up. On March 27, 2020, Congress passed the CARES Act, and Donald Trump signed it into law. ...

Talk about a catastrophic success. The Biden administration wants credit for the Afghanistan evacuation as measured by the sheer number of people it flew out amid a security and humanitarian crisis of its own making. This is the arsonist bragging about how many fires he has put out...

On the eve of the 111th birthday of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, five nuns from Missionaries of Charity arrived in Rome from Kabul with 14 disabled Afghan youths, most of them children. The sisters, members of the religious community that Mother Teresa founded in 1950 and lived with until her death in 1997, have run an orphanage for children since 2006 in Afghanistan. With Italy's help, they fled that country as the Taliban have taken over...

After the attacks on our nation on Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush took to the airways to address the American people. Speaking to a nation in shock, he cast what had occurred in the framework of good and evil. "Today, our nation saw evil," the president said...

Incompetence, political weakness and fearmongering about foreigners in search of a new home has created a cruel immigration policy. But this structural cruelty pales in comparison to the comments made by some legislators who tout their opposition to welcoming Afghan refugees to our shores after many of these refugees put their lives on the line for two decades by helping American soldiers in that war-torn country...

Poor Ron Klain. It's not a good sign when a White House chief of staff to a Democratic president wants to retweet favorable news coverage and all he can find is the least credible and most slavishly loyal commentators on the internet. The Afghanistan fiasco has created that most disorienting and discomfiting experience for a progressive administration -- a serious bout of critical media coverage immune to White House spin and determined to tell the unvarnished story of an ongoing debacle...

President Biden's inept execution of his -- and his predecessor's -- policy of withdrawal from Afghanistan was a political gift to the GOP. It has made foreign policy, at least temporarily, a unifying issue on the right. For conservatives, whether you supported or opposed withdrawal, Biden's shambolic implementation has something for everybody to attack...

The initial results of the U.S. Census have been released. Jackson's population grew 12.5% to 15,451 since 2010. Cape Girardeau County and Cape Girardeau grew as well. I am very pleased with the population growth Jackson has experienced. These results show Jackson is a vibrant community where people desire to live, work and play...

The upcoming Supreme Court case about abortion is about more than a Mississippi law and Roe v. Wade. It's an opportunity for a nation to look in the mirror. We end the lives of unborn babies in United States. We sever the most precious relationship there is -- between a mother and a child -- and we call it health care. Long gone are the Bill Clinton days of "safe, legal, and rare."...

Joe Biden did to himself what his opponents couldn’t — shredded his own credibility in a high-profile, hugely consequential matter that won’t be forgotten. No memos from the desk of Donald J. Trump, no RNC talking points, no right-wing Twitter memes or excoriating floor speeches by Republican senators possibly could have had the effect on Biden of Biden himself selling and defending his Afghanistan policy in terms instantly discredited by unforgettable and horrifying images on the ground last week. ...

President Biden arrived in office with the Southern border secure and Afghanistan in a state of fragile equilibrium. Eight months later, the border continues to be deluged with migrants overwhelming our capacity to properly house and process them, and we are evacuating our personnel from Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul overrun by desperate Afghans fleeing the Taliban...

The American-nurtured Afghan military of the last 20 years that had suffered thousands of prior casualties evaporated in a few hours in the encirclement of Kabul. Enlistees apparently calculated that their own meager chances with the premodern Taliban were still better than fighting as a dependency of the postmodern United States -- despite its powerful diversity training programs...

President Joe Biden was right in his speech to the nation about our withdrawal from Afghanistan, that a long legacy of American involvement there preceded him. But across the board, in domestic as well as foreign policy, any new president inherits realities that precede him. The issue confronting every president is what principles and policies will he put in place to deal with these existing realities that will define his administration...

Another government failure, another outrage. This time the scandal is brought on by the less-than-orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and the realization that 20 years of military presence in the country achieved nothing but death and chaos. Observing another instance of large-scale mismanagement, I can't help being surprised that anyone is still surprised...

Rick Burgess is known for being half of "The Rick and Bubba Show," a popular morning program covering everything from current events to faith to sports. On Saturday, Burgess will be in Cape Girardeau as part of the Lynwood Baptist Church Catalyst Weekend...

When Joe Biden came into office, we were told that the "adults are back in charge" because he immediately set to work undoing as much of Donald Trump's legacy as he could. "The new president in his first week issued more than three dozen executive actions on a wide range of issues," reported U.S. News & World Report. "And virtually all of them reverse or stop actions taken by Donald Trump."...

As you've likely heard by now, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is resigning in the wake of allegations of utter disrespect, to put it mildly, of women on his staff. He should have resigned much earlier for his cover-up of how the state handled nursing homes during COVID-19. But on both fronts, our problems go beyond Cuomo...

The enabling tool of what we call "cancel culture" or "wokeness" is language. People are put in categories to which names are assigned, and this supposedly captures who they are and what should be done with them politically. Unfortunately, the whole business of racial identification and categorization is not about advancing the quality of the human condition and human dignity but about progressive politics...

Americans are growing angrier by the day, but in a way different from prior sagebrush revolts such as the 1960s Silent Majority or the tea party movement over a decade ago. The rage this time is not just fueled by conservatives. For the first time in their lives, Americans of all classes and races are starting to fear a self-created apocalypse that threatens their family's safety and the American way of life...

Warnings that state and local governments faced a fiscal calamity were predictably plentiful when it became clear in early 2020 that COVID-19 would cause major social and economic disruptions. Predictable because it has become gospel that the solution to an economic downturn is to have the federal government suck money out of the private sector, redistribute it to state and local governments minus a cut for all three levels of bureaucracy and then spend the remainder -- often wastefully -- according to political desires and special-interest dreams.. ...

In December we lost a good friend and cherished colleague: James Baughn, webmaster for the Southeast Missourian and Rust Communications. James was a remarkable individual — history writer and hiking blogger, satirist and bridge chronicler — who for 20 years designed and evolved the digital architecture for more than 30 Rust newspaper websites in eight states. ...

President Joe Biden has already violated his oath of office. The good news for him: He's in fine company. In 2002, George W. Bush signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill into law. At the ceremony, he expressed his "concerns" that the law he signed "restrains the speech of a wide variety of groups on issues of public import in the months closest to an election." He added, deflecting from his own responsibilities, "I expect that the courts will resolve these legitimate legal questions as appropriate under the law.". ...

A trillion dollars used to be a lot of money, even in Washington. Now, a trillion-dollar spending bill is a trifle barely worth arguing over and the stuff of bipartisan consensus. Oscar Wilde famously said that nothing succeeds like excess, but even he might blanch at the shameless profligacy that is America's new normal...

By the time you read this column, Alta Fixler may no longer be with us in this world. Alta is a 2-year-old who is severely disabled. Born premature, she showed no signs of life until doctors resuscitated her and put her on a ventilator. After spending her entire existence on life support, Royal Manchester Children's Hospital has now decided that her time is up, at the objection of her parents. And the parents are running out of options...

Is a president of the United States flagrantly defying the Constitution an authoritarian act? A threat to democracy? Something that at least should be discouraged or frowned upon? Judging by the reaction of Democrats and center-left commentators to the lawless last-minute decision of President Joe Biden's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to extend an eviction moratorium sure to be struck down in the courts, the answer is emphatically "no."...

There's a handy device for determining status in American society -- whether someone feels obligated to abide by his or her own COVID rules or not. The true masters of the universe, the people who imagine themselves the great and good without which society cannot function, are the ones who preach but don't practice, who mandate but don't comply...

Donald Trump has had a very bad summer. This has given some people hope that the end of the Trumpian captivity of the Republican Party is within sight. I wish I could share their optimism. It's certainly true that his post-presidency isn't going great...

Teddy Roosevelt fervently believed that the president of the United States should be at the center of the political universe, constantly attracting attention to himself. But he'd never met Joe Biden. Biden is the most powerful man in the world and yet makes almost no impression...

The CDC wants us to go back to wearing masks indoors, even if you've been vaccinated. This is where I get off. If you'll forgive a little testifying, I've tried hard to be reasonable throughout the pandemic. I've bent over backward to give public officials the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. This pandemic was a once-in-a-century calamity, and there was neither the living memory nor a readily available political playbook for how to handle it...

Most Americans were as indifferent to the U.S. women's soccer team's recent loss to Sweden in the Olympics as they were excited about the team's World Cup win in 2019. In between was the team's nonstop politicking, from whining about compensation to virtue-signaling their disrespect for the United States. The celebrity face of the team, perennial scold Megan Rapinoe, is going the way of teenage grouch Greta Thunberg, becoming more pinched the more she is tuned out...

Ben & Jerry's, noted for its ice cream made from "contented cows," has produced not such contented consumers in many circles following its announcement to stop selling its ice cream in Israel's West Bank and in East Jerusalem. Although the announcement calls these areas "occupied territories," more accurate would be to describe their status as "disputed" territories regarding Israel's sovereignty...

If you wonder what Republicans are accomplishing in Washington, look no further than the Senate Armed Services Committee, where a majority of them voted to create the predicate for drafting women into the military. Astonishingly, only five of the committee's 13 GOP members voted against an amendment requiring women to begin to register for the Selective Service...

It's not uncommon for me to experience a sinus infection or two each year. Eleven days before Christmas, I felt one coming on, or so I thought — and this time with chest congestion. Though not terribly concerned, I decided to go to a local urgent care facility for a round of antibiotics with the hope that I would feel better before Christmas...

Talking to reporters on July 2, President Biden was pressed about the sudden, embarrassing evacuation of our air base in Afghanistan and widespread predictions the Afghan government would fall quickly to the Taliban. The president testily replied: “I want to talk about happy things, man.”...

It is my privilege to lead the largest health care system between Memphis and St. Louis. Entrusted to me are nearly 3,000 employees and their families' livelihoods. My responsibility as a healthcare CEO extends beyond the walls of our hospital and clinics and into the communities we are called to serve. The current COVID-19 surge sweeping Missouri is cause for great alarm for our local healthcare infrastructure and our region...

Is the Supreme Court going to overrule Roe v. Wade? That's the question raised by a Mississippi abortion case soon to come before court. "The conclusion that abortion is a constitutional right has no basis in text, structure, history, or tradition," the attorney general of Mississippi, Lynn Fitch, writes in her brief...

Rarely has stunning human achievement been greeted with as much churlishness as when Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos managed to fly or launch themselves into space. There may be all sorts of legitimate grounds for criticizing billionaires, but attaining suborbital flight under their own power doesn’t seem one of them...

In the old days, Democrats had predictable agendas, supposedly focused on individual rights, the “little guy” and distrust of the military-industrial complex. The left, often on spec, blasted the wealthy, whether the “lucre” was self-made or inherited. ...

Since the new wave of race consciousness that has been sweeping our country, precipitated by the graphic video of the killing of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin, something very strange has happened. Somehow, what is perceived as a problem has become widely understood to be the solution. And it is endangering our country...

Is there anything the left won't blame on their fantastical scapegoat, climate change? Don't bet on it. Their latest dodge is blaming the border crisis, which they created, on the climate crisis, which they invented. A Politico article is headlined, "It's Not a Border Crisis. It's a Climate Crisis." That's a convenient twofer. Never let an opportunity to blame a crisis on climate change go to waste. Well played...

A lot of people don't care about the nation's growing debt. Some believe that low interest rates for the foreseeable future essentially means a free lunch for the government. Others believe that no matter what the cost of this debt, it is all worth it because of the purported higher returns on government spending. But there is an argument that may convince them otherwise: If inflation ever gets out of control, it's easier to deal with it in a lower-debt environment...

No one is trying to topple the Alamo quite yet, but a new revisionist book on the foundational event of Texas history partakes of the iconoclastic spirit of our time. The book, titled "Forget the Alamo," is a harsh call for Texans, and Americans, to get over a battle deeply etched in our popular memory...

Let's say you're Joe Biden. For entirely valid and legitimate reasons, you staked much of your presidency on getting the country vaccinated. You had a very good start, but then things started to stall right as a new, more contagious delta variant of the coronavirus was spreading...

"Freedom of speech is the air that any thinker breathes; it's the fuel that ignites the fire of an intellectual's thoughts." Raif Badawi dared to write such things in Saudi Arabia. And he exercised his own freedom of speech, asking questions about faith and challenging extremism in that country -- so he was imprisoned for apostasy for 10 years. ...

Could you or someone you know have created a monster? A monster, mutant, variant of COVID-19? Unvaccinated people lead to person-to-person transmission of the virus. Every time the virus replicates, there is an opportunity for mutation. Right now, the mutation known as the delta variant has become the dominant strain of COVID-19 in the United States...

What a mess. Democrats (and their allies in the media) have convinced themselves the Republican Party is at war with democracy. Republicans (and their allies in the media) have convinced themselves the Democratic Party is at war with democracy. ...

Most people sense America is under assault by America-hating forces and worry our freedoms are actually in jeopardy. Mark Levin’s new book, “American Marxism,” confirms those fears, exposes the chilling aims and methods of these malicious groups, and provides a blueprint to restore America to a path of recovery...

If this is Joe Biden when he's forceful and passionate, the country is better off with the passive and detached version. The president gave a thunderous address in Philadelphia on Tuesday denouncing alleged Republican voter suppression. Playing on the darkest fears of Democrats and layering on the adjectival overkill, Biden blatantly distorted Republican state-level election laws in a frankly demagogic speech...

How often during the last year of wokeness have middle- and lower-class Americans listened to multimillionaires of all races and genders lecture them on their various pathologies and oppressions? University presidents with million-dollar salaries virtue-signal on the cheap their own sort of "unearned white privilege."...

Every policy wonk will tell you that after you live in Washington long enough, you start seeing the same issues reemerge on a regular basis. Common ones are praise for the magical ability of government spending to help pay for itself during recessions and hand-wringing over the myth of middle-class stagnation. And when Uncle Sam's coffers are empty, everyone suddenly remembers the so-called tax gap -- the difference between the tax revenues Congress expects versus those it actually collects...

On a recent flight from Texas to North Carolina, a woman came so unglued that she tried to open the plane's door. The flight crew had to bind and gag her with duct tape. This was an extreme example of a disturbing trend in air travel: People are becoming unruly or even hysterical...

The Poor People's Campaign has announced a "season of nonviolent, moral direct action," targeting the U.S. Senate with disruptive activities every Monday, July 12 through Aug 2. According to the campaign's co-chair, the Rev. William Barber II, "The Senate must end the filibuster, protect and expand voting rights, and pass a minimum wage of $15 an hour."...

It's not easy to run a hideous dictatorship and still have fans and defenders in fashionable quarters, but the Castro regime has managed it for decades. The mass, spontaneous protests that broke out all over the country last weekend are yet another sign that the Cuban government lacks legitimacy. In Cuba, it is the government versus the people, and lo, all these years, Castro's apologists have been with the government...

Put aside what you may have heard -- pro or con -- about terms such as systemic racism or critical race theory (CRT) for a moment. There's a lot of exaggeration out there among both defenders and critics. Instead, let me tell you a story. After the civil rights movement achieved its legislative goals in the 1960s, formal, legal racism was largely abolished. ...

As I write, a Franciscan priest I know is in a courtroom in Ohio. Father Fidelis Moscinski was charged with criminal trespass for walking into an abortion facility in Cuyahoga Falls. It's called a Red Rose Rescue: He goes inside, offers women roses, and when asked to leave, says he's happy to -- once the doctor performing abortions does. In other words, once the abortions stop. So the police wind up getting involved...

It is one of the unfortunate ironies coming out of the Biden administration that, with all the obsession about so-called equity, policies they are putting forth will only hurt the very low-income Americans they pretend to want to help. The Biden administration is growing government at a record pace...

Declaring their independence from British rule 245 years ago, the American colonists held "these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." They went on to announce, "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.". ...

As absurd, extreme and reckless as the American left has been on race, and despite growing public disapproval of their antics, they are doubling down rather than pulling back. On the Fourth of July, Utah's Black Lives Matter chapter described the American flag as "a symbol of hatred."...

Sharonell Fulton and Toni Simms-Busch should be household names. Fulton and Simms-Busch were the plaintiffs in a recent foster-care and religious-liberty case at the Supreme Court. It was a unanimous ruling, as you may have heard, and that is somewhat remarkable. Legal eagles who labor to defend religious liberty have qualms about the narrowness of the ruling, but I'm grateful for the message it sends...

It’s on. California will vote on whether to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sept. 14. I am deeply conflicted on the question. I am opposed to recalls on principle. In 2003, I was one of the few conservatives to oppose the recall of then-Gov. Gray Davis. ...

If I were leading President Joe Biden’s central committee and my goals were to destroy America as founded and ensure it lose its distinction as the world’s freest and most powerful nation, I doubt I could concoct a superior strategy than adopting the Biden administration’s message and policy agenda...

So far, the bipartisan infrastructure deal is going through the normal life cycle of such proposals -- alive, dead, revived, uncertain. For Republicans, the best answer should be dead. They have nothing to gain by blessing a portion of President Joe Biden's spending plans, when an ungodly amount of money is going to go out the door regardless of whether they vote for a chunk of it or not...

In 2020, it was widely reported that Joe Biden wanted to be a "transitional" president. At a campaign event in Detroit, appearing with several younger, more progressive Democratic politicians, he seemed to endorse this idea. "Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else," Biden said. "There's an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country."...

Traditionalist and conservative America once was the U.S. military's greatest defender. Bipartisan conservatives in Congress ensured generous Pentagon budgets. When generals, active or retired, became controversial, conservative America usually could be counted on to stick with them...

As another month of the Acts of Kindness program comes to a close, it continues to amaze me how wonderful this place is that we all call home. The Southeast Missourian developed this program in order to shine a light on the good in our community and give individuals a platform to share stories of kindness...

The issue of critical race theory is raising a more fundamental question about our nation: education. Education is about more than teaching children to read and write. It is about transmitting values, transmitting a worldview, that will define how our youth think and how they will live...

If you follow the news, you may be under the impression that nothing ever gets done in Congress and that Democrats and Republicans can't agree on any serious legislation. You aren't alone. Look at the inordinate praise the "bipartisan" infrastructure deal is getting. This widespread wonder highlights the mistaken belief that our awful hyperpartisan era brings about discord and gridlock in Washington. This common refrain is simply wrong...

On Tuesday, June 22, Cape Girardeau had the opportunity to host a Welcome Party for the 2021 Great Race, which chose Cape as its overnight stop for day four of this year's race. This was only the second visit by the Great Race since it started in 1983. ...

The ongoing infrastructure drama in Washington is a perfect illustration of how, when dysfunction becomes normal, normal politics looks dysfunctional. Let’s set the context. For most of U.S. history, major legislation worked its way up the committee system in Congress. ...

It’s been a hard time for the American Revolution. It’s been smeared by The New York Times 1619 project as a fight to preserve slavery. Juneteenth, a worthy event in its own right, is considered by some as a candidate to replace July 4, marking a supposedly more palatable and less flawed Independence Day. Statues of leaders of the Revolution have been vandalized and torn down...

"He has to get a life." I've cleaned up the actual quote for family newspapers. Disdain would be a kind word to describe the feelings people had for a protester who recently livestreamed his time outside a Manhattan Planned Parenthood clinic. A few people crashed his video to let his social media followers know what a loser they think he is...

There are lots of reasons why wokeism spread like wildfire once America lost its collective mind during the pandemic, quarantine, self-induced recession and rioting of 2020. Wokeism was never really about racism, sexism or other isms. For some, it illustrated a psychological pathology of projection: transferring one's own prejudices onto others in order to alleviate or mask them...