opinion

I served my country during three wars. I was in the United States Navy during the last part of World War II. After I got out of the Navy I joined the United States Air Force, where I served 20 years. I retired from the military Jan. 1, 1970. I went to eat at Applebee's on the 17th...

First of all, thank you for the comprehensive investigation of the trafficking issue facing North Dakota. The issue deserves attention. I found it interesting that a few short weeks after this informative piece an editorial from the same news forum wrote in support of the Sandpiper...

I recently addressed a rather odd topic for an audience of political progressives: “Who was your sports hero growing up?” Of course, sports today is very political — from billionaire team owners demanding that taxpayers build sports palaces for them, to the recent show of political...

Redistribution has been in vogue for the last 60 years. It began in the 1960s with LBJ's Great Society. There have been four major attempts to implement it. Income redistribution: Intent -- the intent was to help mothers with dependent children. Effect -- the effect was to destroy...

President Obama, eager for the spotlight and now warily eyeing his legacy, may have to concede that the American middle class he’s consistently promised to save is beyond redemption. Years of the administration’s destructive economic policies have destroyed middle class America,...

SAN FRANCISCO — With a legislature controlled by Democrats and a sometimes unpredictable chief executive whose critics still favor the “Governor Moonbeam” nickname he had decades ago, California is often the outlier in U.S. governance. But the rest of the nation should pay close...

For decades conservatives have advocated scaling back the role of the federal government in transportation, yet the federal gas tax that was supposed to end in 1969 is still hanging around 46 years later. Fortunately, there is a feature of the current law that gives states the the...

For a guy who watches maybe 250 ballgames a year, I’ve always taken an interest in what was once called the women’s page. After studying the sports section every morning, it’s the next thing I turn to. Newspapers no longer have women’s pages. For complicated reasons I’m...

On Jan. 22, 1973, Minnesota's law protecting unborn children and mothers was overturned by the Supreme Court. Since then we have terminated more than 600,000 unborn children's lives, and assisted in trauma for some of the mothers and fathers. Do we realize that abortion is now...

According to an essay published by New America Foundation (and reprinted on “Time” magazine’s website), protest songs are enjoying a resurgence, after falling below society’s radar for a few years. I’m a natural to write about protest songs. My wife’s folksinger great-aunt...

Decades after being dismissed by George S. Kaufman as a genre that “closes on Saturday night,” satire, like the measles and mumps, is making a comeback. And in many quarters, remains the most feared of the three conditions. Some experts hold to a strict definition: “Satire...

Since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the dollar has lost over 97 percent of its purchasing power, the US economy has been subjected to a series of painful Federal Reserve-created recessions and depressions, and government has grown to dangerous levels thanks to the Fed's...

Boy, does the world need a better sense of humor right about now. Humor, says Merriam-Webster, is "the ability to be funny or to be amused by things that are funny." Humans are at their best when they are amused. Few things can better reduce stress or shed light on truth than...

Armed with hefty grants from the Pentagon, squads of food technologists are on a mission to supplant nature with a great leap forward into the Brave New World of synthetic foodstuffs. Not satisfied merely to tinker with the genetic makeup of nature’s products, these mad scientists...

It is settled: The Paris terror attacks had almost nothing to do with Islam. Consider that on the one hand, you have the chilling new tape of the Charlie Hebdo attackers declaring, "We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad," and on the other, you have the tortured assurances of White...