Blog Archives

Sports gambling is a road to disaster

4/26/2023

Former NFL quarterback Jim Miller may have had the best reaction to news that the NFL last week suspended five players for violating the league’s policy against players gambling on games.
“You can’t lie in bed with the devil, and not think you’re going to get burned,” he said, according to a report by The Ringer.
And yet, the fire of legal gambling keeps raging ever hotter, while America’s professional sports leagues don asbestos jackets and hope for the best.
Anyone want to lay odds on this working out?

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Fight over debt ceiling won't solve the real problems

4/21/2023

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The folks in Washington are missing the point again.
I get it. The debt ceiling is something scary enough to maybe win some points in the war against dangerous overspending — a war Republicans didn’t seem to worry much about when Donald Trump was in the White House.
And I get that some of the things House Speaker Kevin McCarthy outlined this week as conditions for voting to raise the ceiling are good. Increasing work requirements for welfare might help the nation’s persistent workforce shortage problem, for one thing. Statista.com reports that 99.49 million Americans of working age are not active in the labor force. Let’s spur them back in.

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Why Ukraine's former leader says the war is about protecting Utah

4/20/2023

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Viktor Yushchenko knows a thing or two about how nasty things can get when a former Soviet bloc country tries to embrace democracy, freedom and the West.
He was running for president of Ukraine in 2004 when he was poisoned by what doctors determined to be the chemical dioxin. As USA Today reported, doctors said the dioxin level of his blood was “more than 1,000 times” normal. Most likely, someone had poisoned his food.
He survived, and he eventually was elected president of Ukraine in a second election forced by protestors who said the first one was rigged. That became known as the orange revolution. He served until 2010.

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Why doesn't the IRS fill in the blanks for us?

4/14/2023

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In more than four decades of journalism, I’ve encountered countless politicians who pledge to make the tax code simpler. They sound like me, at the Christmas dinner table, vowing to make my waistline slimmer.
Instead, the opposite happens.
As you may discover this weekend, if you haven’t already, filing income tax returns has become more complicated year after year, especially if you choose to itemize. The tax code is somewhere near 7,000 pages long, depending on the font size you prefer.

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Are we too vulnerable to propaganda?

4/12/2023

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World War II gave us a lot of valuable adages about intelligence and discretion.
One is “loose lips sink ships,” which adorned posters with a stark drawing of a ship under attack and disappearing into the sea. The idea was that spies might be anywhere. Speaking out loud about anything, even the location of a loved one fighting in the war, might provide useful information to the enemy.
The other comes from former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and was quoted this week by David Ignatius of the Washington Post: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

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Was Sweden right in how it handled Covid? Will we ever know?

4/6/2023

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Ask Sweden’s former chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell whether fewer Swedes would have died back in 2020 if he hadn’t chosen a less-restrictive path in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic and he hesitates.
“I don’t even think with the data we have today we can answer that,” the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet quoted him as saying a few weeks ago, “because we still know very little about the effects the measure had.”

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Sports gambling is a road to disaster

Fight over debt ceiling won't solve the real problems

Why Ukraine's former leader says the war is about protecting Utah

Why doesn't the IRS fill in the blanks for us?

Are we too vulnerable to propaganda?

Was Sweden right in how it handled Covid? Will we ever know?

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