Serving proudly since 1873 as the beautiful Nebraska Panhandle's first newspaper
Serving proudly since 1873 as the beautiful Nebraska Panhandle's first newspaper
Sorted by date Results 877 - 901 of 1718
Last week we had yet another indication the Biden administration is woefully ignorant about life in rural America. Pete Buttigieg, the new U.S. Transportation Secretary, expressed support for a new tax to make vehicle owners pay for each mile they drive. In an interview on CNBC Buttigieg said, “If we believe in that so-called user pays principle, the idea that part of how we pay for roads is you pay based on how much you drive, the gas tax used to be the obvious way to do it, it’s not any...
The shooting at a Colorado grocery store is tragic. That we should all agree on. It is tragic to start with because any violent loss of life has more than one victim, for a time at least. It is socially tragic because assaults in public places continue to strip away the sense of safety in society. We can dissect the situation by gender, political ideology, race, anger issues, religion, or even gun availability. Any one of these issues leaves many questions unanswered. Maybe incidents like this...
In an earlier article I used George Orwell’s novel “1984” as the basis of my thought process. Two years before George Orwell wrote “1984” (in 1945) he wrote a novella entitled “Animal Farm.” “Animal Farm” was an allegory of the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time, a power- hungry Tsar ruled over the Bolshevik people of Russia, making their lives miserable. The Bolsheviks revolted against his tyranny. Some have claimed that the moral of this novella was: “power corrupts, absolute power corr...
The Nebraska Legislature is halfway through its 2021 session. Senators are working on passing a budget that controls spending and delivers on Nebraskans’ top priority — property tax relief. The Unicameral is also working to achieve other important objectives like providing veterans tax relief, replacing the crumbling Nebraska State Penitentiary, and expanding our state’s broadband infrastructure. At this halfway point in the legislative session, Senators are sorting the worthwhile bills from the...
The most important principle of communism is the abolition of private property. When Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto back in 1847 they declared the first principle of communism to be the “abolition of land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.” Today we are seeing this principle being implemented in a very large way. On January 27, 2021 President Joe Biden issued Executive Order 14008, which is known as the Tackling the Climate Change Crisis at Hom...
For those who do not recognize the reference in the title, it is taken from a song by Napoleon XIV, the pseudonym of Jerry Samuels, who had a one-hit wonder in 1966 with his novelty song, “They’re Coming to Take Me Away Ha-Haaa!” His nom de plume, for his series of mental illness songs was a play on the names of Napoleon I and King Louis XIV. Samuels used these songs to make some humorous, yet astute observations about life in the 1960s and beyond. The second stanza of the song should be a fam...
I know I am not the first person to say that the pandemic has changed many things about our daily lives. In some cases, such as mask-wearing and social distancing, these changes are temporary and would never have happened if COVID-19 had not come to the United States last year. But in other cases, the past year has simply accelerated permanent changes that were already taking place. One of the most striking examples of this second type of change can be seen in medicine. Even before the pandemic...
Two weeks ago, there appeared in “The New York Times Book Review” a review of Derk DelGaudio’s just-published memoir, Amoralman: A True Story, and Other Lies, even though he says, “It is not a memoir.” Rather, he says, “I had a story to tell about my days as a bust-out dealer, hired to cheat card players at a series of high-stakes poker games at a house in Beverly Hills. I told the story through a memoir.” In the the first half of the book, Derek tells of his early years growing up in Colorad...
I was recently asked to fill out a law enforcement survey on hate crimes from a television broadcaster. I filled out their survey a short time after having gone through Nebraska’s mandated anti-bias and racism training that all law enforcement officers are required to take every year. During these trainings, I was basically told that as a white law enforcement officer, I am automatically racist and in all cases biased. I hate to break it to everyone, but we are all biased and I have even been t...
In 1947, a man named Eric Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, started a novel entitled “1984.” He described the novel in his own words as “a most dreadful mess.” This novel was published in 1949, the year I was born. Happy birthday to me! This novel was also made into a movie that I watched on television this past year. Eric Blair had a vision of things to come and at the same time a reminder of things that already had come. He saw not only the possibility but the reality of the...
Several years ago I read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the first in The Chronicles of Narnia series. Actually, that is probably when I reread the classic tale. Later I watched the movie. It is the kind of story that is overwhelmed with imagination and fantasy, and a handful of life lessons. I was struck by the imagination of the story line and of the children. A whole world of fantasy and adventure lie within the grey world of the rainy London estate where they were residing. All they...
ACE, the Public Alliance for Community Energy, will again be a competing natural gas supplier in the upcoming Nebraska Choice Gas selection period, which has been extended this year and runs from March 18 through April 22. Formed by Nebraska communities to ensure Nebraskans have a choice in their natural gas supplier, ACE remains true to its mission as the only community-owned and not-for-profit supplier in the program. Local control is the cornerstone of ACE. Each of the 75 ACE member communities, including Sidney, has a representative on...
I last week pointed out Bible passages endorsing our right to self-defense. Critics will point out guns are not mentioned in the Bible. True. They also are not mentioned in the Second Amendment, which states we have the right to “keep and bear arms.” This should be interpreted by the courts as meaning we can carry whatever weapon we want to protect ourselves and our liberties, but it’s not. Before someone says I don’t believe in any limitations and accuses me of saying I support private ownersh...
Sometimes life in the State Legislatures is like searching for gold only to die without anything to show for your efforts. Last week a bill came up in the Legislature that several State Senator believe is a bad bill. The bill was LB88, a bill designed to protect student journalists. Believing that we could muster enough votes to kill the bill, we set out to filibuster the bill. Filibustering a bill on General File requires the opponents of the bill to talk for eight hours, and that is exactly...
For those of you who did not read my first installment on this topic, T.A.N.S.T.A.A.F.L. translates as: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Science fiction author Robert Heinlein used this device quite effectively in a novel titled “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.” I do not know the author’s political party affiliation, but I believe that he would find today’s American government, from top to bottom, to be radically out of whack. Why? As I wrote previously, for more than 50 years there has...
Americans' right to keep and bear arms is under assault. New anti-gun bills were introduced last week that would mandate background checks whenever a gun is sold or given to someone, outlaw so-called "assault weapons" and limit magazine capacity to 10 rounds. As debate over gun control intensifies, I hear many Second Amendment advocates declaring gun ownership to be a God-given right. Is it? I've been a licensed minister since 2009, but have been preaching in churches off and on as a temporary...
Dr. Seuss, at least some of his published work, has been added to the academic hit list. It seems 21st century critics have discovered he was not always a nice guy by today's standards, some of his stories don't fit evolving social morality. His stories weren't balanced in racial representation, among other charges. The critic did admit some of the books were written in the 1920s. The publisher of the books cited racial implications and inuendos that are not comfortable with today's culture. I...
By now many of you have heard about the new sex education standards being proposed to the Nebraska Department of Education. These new standards would teach children as young as five years-old about gender identity and same gender families. These new standards are not the result of any piece of legislation in the Unicameral. Instead, the 60 page draft of proposed changes to the State’s health education curriculum came from a team of so called “education experts,” otherwise known as LGBTQ activist...
I first met Andy Hoffman at a chili cook off in Butte, Nebraska, in October of 2004. I was running for my first term in the Nebraska Legislature. I was walking from group to group, talking with the cooks and tasting their chili, when I came upon a young man in jean overalls. I introduced myself, and we ended up talking for over 30 minutes. Actually, it would be more accurate to say he “grilled” me for over 30 minutes with a smile on his face. He was kind, and he later became a supporter and a d...
Drug Administration (FDA) gets on inspection of our drugs, according to the director of health care at the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The GAO recently conducted an extensive study on the safety of our drug supply and discovered that FDA is failing to inspect drug manufacturing facilities overseas. Some facilities have not been inspected for five years or more. Some have never been inspected. “This is fascinatingly scary,” one Nebraskan told me after my questions as Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agr...
Jews around the world will elaborate Passover (Pesach in Hebrew) 2021 starting on the evening of Saturday, March 27th, and ending at sunset on Sunday, April 4th, in the Civil Calendar. In the Hebrew Calendar, Passover every year begins on 15 Nisan and ends on 22 Nisan. Passover celebrates the Jews Exodus from Egypt, when the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob liberated themselves from slavery and became a new and unique nation under God. Jews had lived peaceably and friendly in Egypt for...
In the first scene of William Shakespeare’s play “Julius Caesar,” a military official named Flavius reveals his disgust with a dashing military and political official named Julius Caesar, by asking, “Who else would soar above the view of men, And keep us all in servile fearfulness?” In the second scene, on a crowded street filled with people cheering for Julius Caesar as he passes by, he hears a single voice above the din, and asks, “Who is it in the press that calls on me? I hear a tongue shri...
I can visualize readers shaking their heads and asking, “What in the world is T.A.N.S.T.A.A.F.L.? It would be great if I could take credit for this attention-compelling device, but it comes from a science fiction story written by Robert Heinlein titled “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.” It pops ups frequently throughout the story and serves to emphasize a very vital message the author presents in this work of fiction. So you won’t have to buy the book to decode the message, here it is in plain l...
A 17th century philosopher named René Descartes struggled to make sense of the mind-body problem. He understood that thoughts originate in the brain, but he observed that mental activity is ephemeral, without physical substance. How can this be? he wondered. Ever since, philosophers have called Descartes’s philosophy “dualism.” They concur that what occurs within the mind exists in a separate reality from what occurs in the physical world. The 16th century writer Michel de Montaigne tried...
I’ve written two books. Non-fiction “Trophy Bucks in Any Weather” on how weather affects animals in 2008 through a major publisher of outdoors-themed books, and my self-published novel “Species Unknown” in 2019 using tools provided by Kindle Direct Publishing (KPP) through Amazon. One of the most common questions I’m asked by people wanting to publish a book is, “Should I self-publish or go the traditional route?” Here’s how I answer. Traditional publishing is great if you can break into it. All...
