Breaking News

Opinion

Facing an old year as well as a new year

Columns

“What’s past is prologue” wrote William Shakespeare in “The Tempest,” a thought profound enough to be engraved on the National Archives building in Washington. As America prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, a blip on history’s ledger compared to many other nations, we would do well to re-visit even the recent past as a guide to what can provide us a better future. That’s because even though technology changes, other things do not. At the end of each year, I enjoy exploring the events of a century ago, a period in which my parents and grandparents lived. ...

When it comes to immigration and citizenship, listen to Washington

Columns

As news reports proliferate of multimillion-dollar — and possibly billion-dollar — fraudulent diversions of government funds involving Minnesota’s Somali immigrant community, it may be time at one year’s end and the next one’s beginning to take a longer look at America’s experience with immigration, and to seek the guidance of the first and one of its two greatest presidents. The Founding Fathers were aware that their new nation was gifted with vast acreage, but only 4 million people were counted in the first decennial Census in 1790. The Constitution’s first words, ...

Another year, another $2 trillion in U.S. debt

Columns

Just two weeks after he was sworn into office, former President Ronald Reagan went on national television to address the American people about what he perceived to be a dire problem. It was the national debt. “The federal budget is out of control, and we face runaway deficits of almost $80 billion for this budget year that ends September 30th,” he said. “The deficit is larger than the entire federal budget in 1957, and so is the almost $80 billion we will pay in interest this year on the national debt.” By 1960 our national debt stood at $284 billion,” said Reagan. ...

Obamacare always was, is and will be a problem in the United States

Columns

President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, in 2010 without a single Republican vote in the House or the Senate. When Obama announced it to the nation, Vice President Joe Biden could be heard on a hot mic telling Obama, “This is a big f—-ng deal.” It was no exaggeration, particularly given that most Americans opposed it. The liberal Brookings Institution think tank recently wrote: “The ACA was conceived in unpopularity. In October 2010, the month before the midterm elections, only 42% of Americans had a favorable view of the ACA. Republicans hated it ...

Don’t forget your flu shots

Editorials

A new variant of the flu virus has been affecting people all over the world, and serving as a reminder to get your flu shot. According to an Associated Press report, that variant is known as “subclade K” and led to early outbreaks in the United Kingdom, Japan and Canada. In the United State, while flu season typically begins in December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported high or very high levels of illness in more than half the states. The CDC estimated there have been at least 7.5 million illnesses, 81,000 hospitalizations and 3,100 deaths from flu ...

How AI is undermining our education system

Columns

If you want to develop human intelligence, you can’t let students rely on artificial intelligence. Generative AI will transform the world, even if no one is quite sure what the end product will look like. These are artificial intelligence programs that create new content based on prompts or questions submitted by a user. You can imagine the problems this has created for schools and teachers. Programs like ChatGPT can solve a student’s hardest math problem and spit out papers. Some in the education establishment believe the best path forward is to teach students how to ...