As a new legislator in Augusta, you quickly realize that your life is defined by bells. One bell sounds to summon us to the chamber; another reminds members that it’s time to vote. For some, this sound is jarring and uncomfortable, but having been a teacher in York County for close to three decades, I […]

MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa — What do you do if you want to be president and no one has heard of you? You go to Dewitt, Tipton, Glenwood, Denison, Alba, Knoxville, Perry, Grimes and nine other places this year alone—emphasizing the small Iowa towns that seldom see a presidential candidate. You take out an ad during the Super Bowl […]

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee says there is no doubt President Trump has obstructed justice. “It’s very clear that the president obstructed justice,” Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler told ABC News recently. “It’s very clear — 1,100 times he referred to the Mueller investigation as a witch hunt, … he tried to protect Flynn from being […]

The world hemorrhages. Refugees flow from its wounds. Is there a way to be innocent of this? People are washed ashore. They die of suffocation in humanity-stuffed trucks. They flee war and politics; they flee starvation. And finally, we don’t even have sufficient air for them to breathe. For words to matter about all this, […]

In the Age of Trump, it often seems that powerful, entitled men have taken to imitating the behavior of the great man himself: forcing themselves upon reluctant women (and sometimes girls), relying upon their power and money to protect them from the consequences. So go ahead and grab them, boys, because “when you’re a star, […]

Christian psychologist David Myers, in his writing and speaking about happiness, has suggested that long-term human happiness is not particularly dependent on our wealth or health. If you tell him that a year ago one person won millions of dollars in the lottery and another became paralyzed, you’ve given him no sense of their current […]

President Trump was correct to describe denuclearization last June as a lengthy “process” that one summit meeting could not achieve. However, the second summit, in Hanoi at the end of February 2019, again showed that personal diplomacy divorced from an engagement process that incorporates flexibility and give-and-take raises the risk of failure. The Hanoi summit […]

I just read two very interesting articles on the U.S. economy, written from historical perspectives. They compelled me to share my own historical perspective. And what I want to say is more about our changing culture than our economy.One of the articles, by Julie Crawshaw of MoneyNews.com, notes that the “Misery Index”—the combined unemployment and inflation […]