Last week, Rep. Ron Estes, R-Kansas, visited the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador on a Congressional junket. On the government’s dime, Estes and six other Republican members of Congress participated in the trip. Despite…

Those wondering how to get smartphones out of schools now have an example in Virginia. This month the state’s Democratic-led General Assembly passed legislation mandating cellphone-free education in K-12 public schools. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin…

“Active shooter on campus.” Those chilling words again. This time, the attack happened on the Florida State University campus in Tallahassee, just miles from the state Capitol where lawmakers are in meetings for their annual…

It was with real dismay that I read about the gutting of AmeriCorps on Thursday. The civil service program was created in 1993 as a domestic version of the Peace Corps. AmeriCorps volunteers serve for…

For a few years, a major hotel chain ran a series of commercials that I thought were both highly amusing and quite brilliant. A group of tourists were in the control room of a nuclear…

Underpaid for years, Kansas legislators finally received a substantial pay increase this year.  Instead of a paltry per diem (per day) allowance, they now receive $43,000 per year and remain eligible for KPERS benefits. Normally,…

The dollar is meant to be a source of safety. Lately, however, it has been a cause of fear.  Since its peak in mid-January the greenback has fallen by over 9% against a basket of…

Congratulations to Harvard University for fighting back against the Trump administration’s unseemly efforts to use federal dollars to try to exert unwarranted control over higher education.  The oldest and richest college in America wasn’t the…

The landslide victory of the Kansas City Public Schools’ bond issue has prompted lots of local head-scratching.  How did the campaign pull off such a lopsided victory?  There are a few explanations: a smart campaign,…

Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran has been tapped in the new Congress to join a bipartisan “working group” on the 340B Drug Pricing Program — a title that sounds vague enough to mean anything but important…