Serving proudly since 1873 as the beautiful Nebraska Panhandle's first newspaper
Serving proudly since 1873 as the beautiful Nebraska Panhandle's first newspaper
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Of all the objectionable things Donald Trump has ever done, selling a Bible would seem to rank pretty far down the list. Yet his marketing, along with Lee Greenwood, of a God Bless the U.S.A. Bible for $59.99 has occasioned a couple of news cycles of outrage. The Bible has an American flag cover and accompanying American historical documents, including the Declaration of Independence, as well as the words to Greenwood's iconic patriotic song. Hawking the Bible like it's a digital trading card or...
Writer Coleman Hughes went on "The View" and was greeted almost as though he had shown up wearing a white hood. Hughes, a soft-spoken black intellectual who is a political independent, was talking about his new book, "The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America." Once upon a time, colorblindness was an uncontroversial idea. It was considered a core American ideal and worth aspiring to, even if we were failing to live up to it. In recent decades, though, it has run into a...
Karl Marx would be proud. Bernie Sanders has proposed taking another step toward the philosopher's envisioned utopia by proposing to mandate a four-day workweek. Marx wrote how in communist society, workers would be liberated to "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, raise cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic." Needless to say, that's not how communism turned out. Yet the belief that work is...
The uncommitted voters of Michigan say "Jump," and Chuck Schumer asks "How high"? The Senate majority leader gave an extraordinary speech flaying the democratically elected leader of an ally engaged in fighting a defensive war against a hideous terrorist enemy. The speech calling on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to go, along with increasingly critical statements by the White House, shows that the Democrats have decided that appeasing their left-wing base in an election year is now...
Joe Biden doesn't have a problem with illegal immigrants. He's made that clear in his shame-faced retreat from his impromptu use of the term "illegal" during his State of the Union address. He regrets using the offending word, doesn't want to disrespect illegal immigrants and believes that they are absolutely essential to the success of the United States. "Look, they built the country," Biden told Jonathan Capehart of MSNBC. He added that they are "the reason our economy is growing." Yes, where...
Donald Trump obviously left office on a sour note in January 2021, written off by many opinion-makers and political professionals. Then, President Biden happened. The most remarkable phenomenon of the 2024 election cycle so far is the rise of Trump nostalgia. It's difficult for anyone to have a new opinion about former President Trump, who is so well-known, so in-your-face, and so polarizing. Yet, people have a new, more favorable attitude toward his presidency in retrospect, certainly compared...
Joe Biden went to Valley Forge to give a big speech telling us how much he cares about defending democracy against the threat represented by Donald Trump. How much does President Biden care? Enough to give a speech defending democracy, one of what's sure to be many if Trump is his opponent. Biden's alarm about the precariousness of the American system, though, will never translate into actions he wouldn't otherwise want to take. To wit, if Joe Biden were, as a matter of the principle, devoted...
Anyone following how weak and passive the U.S. has been in the face of provocations from our adversaries in the Middle East might conclude that the secretary of defense has gone missing. And, at least for a few days last week, he literally was. In an age when it's nearly impossible to go off the grid, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin managed it. He failed to notify the White House and other key players that he was hospitalized in the intensive care unit. This, needless to say, is not an...
The public-health officials are getting around to admitting the fallibility of public-health officials. The former head of the National Institutes of Health during the pandemic and current science advisor to President Joe Biden, Francis Collins, has noted that he and his colleagues demonstrated an "unfortunate" narrow-mindedness. This is a welcome, if belated, confession. Not too long ago, anyone who said that epidemiologists might be overly focused on disease prevention to the exclusion of...
You might have heard that Donald Trump is going to be a dictator if he wins the presidency next year. Among other things, he's threatening to target his political opponents. Let's stipulate that Trump is a provocateur who freaks out his opponents even when he's on relatively good behavior. And his conduct after the 2020 election was genuinely alarming and deeply wrong. He shouldn't talk about going after his political enemies, let alone actually do it if he takes power again. But the vapors...
Do you remember the big national debate on whether the United States would adopt a policy to make the foreign share of the population the highest it’s ever been? Neither do I. For the simple reason, of course, that there wasn’t one. That doesn’t mean that the policy wasn’t adopted, through inertia and the Biden administration’s imposition of a de facto open border for a large swath of asylum-seekers. An analysis of Census data by Steve Camarota and his colleagues at the Center for Immigration St...
Henry Kissinger, the great American statesman who has died at age 100, stands accused by his critics of many things, but perhaps the most outlandish is that he bears responsibility for the killing fields of Pol Pot's Cambodia. Implementing a radical communist vision drawn from Mao and especially the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot and his comrades killed roughly a quarter of the country's population through execution and starvation resulting from forced collectivization and population transfers....
The figure of Napoleon has long been an object of fascination, but the new Ridley Scott biopic makes one wonder why. The film, perhaps inadvertently, partakes of the spirit of the times. The so-called Great Man theory of history -- that it is exceptionally talented men who bend events to their will -- is out of favor. Accordingly, the movie renders the stereotypical great man, Napoleon, as doltish and uninteresting. No man is a hero to his valet, goes the old saying. But can't he at least be a h...
The old conventional wisdom was that the U.S. couldn't be too pro-Israel for fear of inflaming "the Arab street." The new conventional wisdom will have to be that we can't be too pro-Israel for fear of inflaming "the Western street." The Arab street, a hoary cliche of commentary on the Middle East for decades, was a reference to public opinion in the Arab countries, with the strong implication that if we offended it, the result would be massive anti-Western demonstrations and perhaps violence. W...
The celebrated author Ta-Nehisi Coates is not reliable regarding things he's spent considerable time thinking about here in the U.S., so it's presumably a mistake to put much stock in his newly formed opinions about matters he barely knows anything about. He proved as much in an interview about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the other day on Democracy Now! At the outset, Coates announced his opposition to "complexity" and "complication," and left little doubt about his sincerity in that...
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has a history, and a present, of promoting wild conspiracy theories. His independent bid for the presidency is quixotic at best. And yet a new Quinnipiac poll has him getting an impressive 22% in a three-way contest with Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and with a narrow lead among independents. This should be less encouraging to RFK than a warning sign to the major parties that they are courting disaster by nominating two candidates so unappealing that a solid bloc of voters,...
Luck is the residue of design, they say. Might it also be the residue of frightening and confusing foreign adversaries? Donald Trump's relatively crisis-free presidency in foreign affairs has created a sense, perhaps an accurate one, that he cowed enemies into not challenging the U.S. As Sen. Tom Cotton has pointed out, Kabul didn't collapse on Trump's watch, Russia didn't invade Ukraine and Hamas didn't launch a historic terror attack on Israel. Now this may have just been good fortune. Four...
No matter how much we’d like to believe in the inevitably of human progress and the spread of enlightened norms, we’ve learned the past couple of years that we still need artillery shells -- lots of artillery shells. The Hamas terror attack, together with the ongoing Ukraine war and the looming Chinese threat to Taiwan, is putting a spotlight on the pitiful state of our capacity to manufacture the weapons necessary to the defense of our allies and ourselves. According to a CNN report, an Isr...
It doesn't take long to read or listen to anti-Israel advocacy before the word "colonial" or "colonialism" is hurled at the Jewish state. After the spasm of Hamas murder, rape, and kidnapping over the weekend, the U.S. Palestinian Community Network exclaimed, "Our people are waging an anti-colonial, anti-occupation, and anti-Zionist liberation struggle!" According to an anti-Israel statement signed by dozens of student groups at Harvard, Israel is undertaking "colonial retaliation." An academic...
The Matt Gaetz moment is upon us, and unless you enjoy politics as absurdist theater, you might want to skip it. The bomb-throwing Republican congressman from Florida, who has hitherto distinguished himself with sundry attention-getting antics, is making his biggest play yet by trying to remove Kevin McCarthy from the speakership by offering a so-called motion to vacate. McCarthy’s alleged offense is relying on Democratic votes to pass a last-minute spending measure over the weekend to avert a...
Poor Kamala Harris. The alleged misogyny that is tearing at her vice presidency apparently extends to highly partisan Democratic leaders such as Jamie Raskin and Nancy Pelosi. Both of them caused ripples when their praise for Harris in recent TV interviews was notably cool, as if they were at a high-end fundraising dinner and hated the escargot but had to try to convince the hostess that they really loved it. The Biden campaign reportedly contacted both Raskin and Pelosi. The Maryland...
John Fetterman's Senate legacy is now set -- he's the guy who made it possible to dress like a slob. What the Missouri Compromise was to Henry Clay, what the Second Reply to Hayne was to Daniel Webster, what the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was to Lyndon Johnson, Carhartt sweatshirts and baggy shorts will be to John Fetterman. The Pennsylvania senator is the poster boy -- if self-indulgent sloppiness is your thing -- for the Senate dropping a dress code that required senators to dress in business...
An op-ed in The New York Times warns, as the headline puts it, that “America is an empire in decline,” and finds a precedent in imperial Rome. The piece, written by the co-author of a new book, “Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West,” shows that the cottage industry in comparisons between the United States and Rome is as robust as ever. It is an irresistible temptation to superimpose the history of Rome and especially its decline and fall -- an enduring subject of fascinati...
Just how dominant is Donald Trump in the Republican Party? He's so far ahead in the polls that he felt comfortable skipping the first GOP presidential debate in Milwaukee, while on the actual debate stage, his epigone, Vivek Ramaswamy, soaked up an outsized portion of the attention. The 38-year-old billionaire biotech entrepreneur shows that the Trump brand is so strong that it can create successful subsidiaries, the Trump storyline so compelling that subplots can be spun off into their own prog...
If it "got late early" in the old majestic Yankee Stadium with its long shadows, as the famous Yogi Berra quote had it, it's gotten late before about the fourth inning in the Republican presidential race. In 2016, Donald Trump loved to pump out the results of unreliable online polls that showed him trouncing his competitors by ridiculous margins. Now, he doesn't need to bother with the shoddy polls; he can do the same thing with blue-chip media polls. The new national CBS poll has him leading se...
