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Christmas potpourri

One of my favorite movies is “Mr. Holland’s Opus.” It’s the fictional story of a composer who starts work as a high school music teacher in 1960s to make ends meet. While not his desire for a career, he begins to care for teaching and his students over the decades. The movie ends with Mr. Holland’s forced retirement in the 1990s. He spent his lifetime working in his free time on a musical composition that he thought would never be heard. He wasn’t entirely sure whether he had made an impact as a teacher. But then he is led into an auditorium filled with former students ...

PolitiFact tags Trump For ‘Lie of the Year’ for the 7th time

Don’t call PolitiFact an “independent fact-checker.” When they assemble to select their “Lie of the Year,” they have singled out Donald Trump in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020 and 2021. No Democrat has been tagged with this dishonor since Trump arrived on the scene. It was Trump again this year, as PolitiFact tweeted: “A lie marked a town and its residents in the name of campaign rage. It was absurd. It was consequential. Our Lie of the Year goes to Donald Trump and JD Vance for false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pet dogs and ...

The decline and fall of The Wall Street Journal

Many American institutions have beclowned themselves in the past 10 years -- too many to list. To count the right-leaning institutions that have not succumbed to Trumpian populism takes only one hand. But the decline of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has been particularly galling because, compared to the Heritage Foundation, Hillsdale College or the Claremont Institute, it had farther to fall. In the pre-Trump era, the paper had some integrity. While the board was broadly aligned with the Republican Party, its editorials didn’t hesitate to differ with Republicans on major ...

Biden pardon raises questions

Joe Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter, at first blink, appears to be a supreme act of love from a doting father. But it does raise some questions about the President’s priorities and leadership style. After all, he did promise not to extend clemency to his son and then he broke that promise. It also raises questions about his post-election Presidency. Indeed, Biden not only seems to have compassion for Hunter but also for Ukraine. At every turn, he has tried to force Donald Trump’s hand by trying to lock him into a policy of escalation. Indeed, two weeks after the election Biden ...

Kump Open House on Saturdays before and after Christmas

You are invited to an Open House at Kump Education Center on South Randolph Avenue for a holiday outing today or Dec. 28, 1 - 4 p.m. A visit to the 100 year old home of Governor Kump’s family will awaken your memories of Christmas past. We are across from Kroger on S. Randolph Avenue. Enter the center from Seneca Road above the property. In 2025, Kump Education Center will celebrate its centennial year with a big thank you to local workmen who built the house in 16 months, and local people who labored 16 years to preserve it for the next generation. The phenomenal preservation you ...

How not to think about Syria

The rapid demise of the brutal Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria has taken every geopolitical analyst and self-proclaimed Middle East “expert” by storm. Following 53 years of brutal Assad family rule and 13 years of bloody civil war, the Syrian strongman abruptly fled for asylum in Moscow as rebels finalized their encircling of Damascus. In the blink of an eye, one of the two Ba’athist Arab states — along with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq before the U.S.-led 2003 invasion — was no more. Start with the obvious: Assad was a world-historical tyrant, even by bleak Arab world standards. ...