Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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Anyone hoping Republican voters around the country would use Super Tuesday to slow their party’s careening trajectory toward the Trumpian cliff now must face facts: It’s over. Donald Trump’s near-total sweep of Super Tuesday states, and challenger Nikki Haley’s subsequent campaign suspension last Wednesday, means that, barring some epic surprise, American voters on Nov. 5 will be faced with a presidential rematch that most don’t want. Even among the many Republicans out there who recognize Trump’s obvious unfitness for office, there will...
It was entirely predictable, but still despicable, that right-wing demagogues like Sen. Josh Hawley are trying to spin the Nashville school shooting into an indictment of transgender Americans generally because the assailant happened to identify as trans. That was the obvious thrust of a Fox News discussion between the Missouri Republican and host Laura Ingraham that was initially about the shooting but morphed seamlessly into the utter non sequitur of transgender medicine. “We’ve got to tell the truth about what happened in Nashville,” inton...
The saga of the comic strip “Dilbert” and the racist rants of its creator, Scott Adams, isn’t the out-of-control cancel culture that Twitter boss Elon Musk and others on the right claim. It’s actually an example of the free market in action — the free market of newspapers responding to readers who are appalled at Adams’ outspoken racism. Adams has the right to those views, but no newspaper or reader has an obligation to support them with attention and money. Adams has promoted Trumpian conspiracy theories for a while now, but last month he cr...
Back in 2001, precious few Americans could have explained what Houston-based Enron did as a company and how it got so spectacularly wealthy. When it filed for a record-breaking bankruptcy, Americans got schooled fast about not putting their trust and money behind swaggering, fast-talking con artists. But fools and their money regrouped over the years, and along came FTX, a $32 billion cryptocurrency exchange that repeated many of Enron’s mistakes and yielded the same abysmal results. We suspect that a lot of investors who lost their shirts i...
It’s unfortunate that the families of Sandy Hook probably won’t actually get anything close to the nearly $1 billion that a Connecticut jury assessed last week against right-wing conspiracy monger Alex Jones for his monstrous lies about the massacre that killed their children. But the historic verdict nonetheless sends a strong message to those who inhabit the sewers of profitable misinformation out there: Society has had enough. Within hours of the shooting deaths of 20 small children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in New...
Congressional Democrats are demanding that social media companies do a better job of policing threats against the FBI in the wake of the agency’s search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence for classified documents that he took from the White House. The issue presents a crucial test of those companies’ ability to weed out dangerous speech without trampling on the First Amendment. If the companies don’t respond transparently to these demands and make a stronger effort than they are currently making to detoxify their sites,...
How angry are some Republicans at what they see as betrayal by a centrist Democrat? Angry enough to betray sick military veterans, apparently. That’s the only rational explanation for the sudden about-face by two dozen Senate Republicans, including Missouri’s Roy Blunt and Josh Hawley, who opposed legislation they previously supported to make it easier for cancer-stricken veterans to get help from the government. Facing ferocious public pushback, Blunt, Hawley and the other GOP senators who about-faced quickly about-faced again last week, resum...
U.S. gross domestic product shrank 1.4% in the first quarter at the same time inflation continued to soar. For older Americans, that combination conjures memories of 1970s stagflation, a nightmarish combination of double-digit inflation, double-digit interest rates, soaring gasoline prices and persistently high unemployment. The entire economic mess got dumped on President Jimmy Carter’s lap after the 1976 election, even though it was neither his fault nor the fault of his predecessors, Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon. Sometimes, global economic...
Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee worked overtime to trip up Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson or capture a gotcha moment for the cameras during her marathon confirmation hearing last week. The spectacle was exhausting to watch, but like the nominees who went before her in recent years, Jackson handled the questions with dignity and aplomb — unlike her questioners. Democrats have also had their share of low-blow attempts to defeat conservative Supreme Court nominees. Two notable examples are Brett Kavanaugh and C...
Recommendations from the Biden administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention seem to change weekly regarding coronavirus precautions. Americans are justifiably confused and are at risk of tuning out. For a Democratic administration struggling to create the appearance of command authority during an ongoing national crisis, the mixed messaging feeds the Republican narrative that Democrats are incompetent. Americans should, first of all, remember the pandemic response under the previous administration. President Donald Trump...
Normally, the website The Gateway Pundit can and should be laughed off as right-wing, fake-news nonsense. But as Reuters recently reported, the site’s false allegations of election fraud in jurisdictions around the country have stoked harassment and death threats against two dozen election officials. The reason toxic platforms like this exist is because there is a market for them. Only when the news-consuming public learns to be more discerning in where it looks for information will those platforms loosen their damaging grip on political d...
Two school board members in Virginia this month called for the burning — yes, burning — of books in the school’s library that they deem sexually offensive. This is, of course, the logical direction of the conservative movement to crack down on any school curriculum that doesn’t reflect a right-wing view of the world. And it’s another reason why liberals and progressives should reclaim the mantle of free speech that was once an integral part of liberal thinking but that has now, alarmingly, fallen out of fashion on college campuses and other...
Is America safer after its 20-year war on terrorism in Afghanistan has resulted in the Taliban’s victory? The answer, like the war itself, is muddled. The lack of resolution should cause considerable discomfort to Americans who lived through the trauma of 9/11 and cheered the U.S. military’s quick routing of al-Qaida and its Taliban hosts in 2001. After the World Trade Center’s collapse, Americans had every right to believe President George W. Bush’s declaration from atop the wreckage that the United States would make the terrorists pay. In...
American healthcare is too expensive. Exhibit A is a new study of Americans’ medical debt published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. That debt is twice as large as had previously been estimated — $140 billion in collections as of June 2020, compared to an earlier estimate of $81 billion. And it disproportionately affects the dozen states like Missouri that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Despite a referendum that approved Medicaid expansion, and the fact that the federal government would hav...