Posted December 11, 2025in Morain
Iowa State head football coach Matt Campbell’s decision to accept Penn State’s head football coaching position devastates Cyclone fans, gladdens Nittany Lions fans, and brings big-time football’s structure front and center in the collective mind of college football fandom, especially here in Iowa. Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard got
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Posted December 04, 2025in Morain
What will you be doing in the year 2033? If you’ll still be younger than 67 years of age, there are innumerable answers. But if you’re 67 or older by then, chances are the Number One item on your mind will be how in heaven’s name you’re going to make
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Posted November 27, 2025in Morain
Most of the top leaders of both political parties converged on Washington’s National Cathedral a week ago to honor the memory of former Vice President Dick Cheney at his funeral service. As former President George W. Bush’s Veep from 2001 to 2009, Cheney played a key role on foreign and
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Posted November 20, 2025in Morain
Thanksgiving gets short shrift these days. The Christmas commercialism colossus, burgeoning every year, now occupies a super-sized chunk of November that used to be the province of the Thanksgiving holiday. Christmas backloads ever-farther into autumn, diverting attention from what once was an appropriate pause for gratitude between harvest and the
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Posted November 13, 2025in Morain
By the time you read this column, it may be irrelevant. I hope so. But I doubt it. Assuming the federal government is still partially shut down by the column’s publication on Thursday, November 13, we will have endured it for 44 days, a month and a half since it
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Posted November 06, 2025in Morain
Kathy and I live in an old house in Jefferson (apparent construction year 1901). It’s the house my parents bought in 1944, and it was my childhood home. My folks sold it about 28 years later and moved some 20 miles south to their new home on Lake Panorama. The
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Posted October 30, 2025in Morain
When ideology takes top priority, America’s world leadership is in jeopardy. The Trump administration’s threats to academic freedom at leading American universities could slow the pace of the nation’s scientific research and subsequent entrepreneurial development of what that research turns up. Our race to stay ahead of China, for instance,
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Posted October 16, 2025in Morain
As I write this column on Sunday, October 12, the United States government is still shut down. Federal employee are not getting paid. No, wait, that’s not quite true. MOST federal employees are not getting paid. Who’s still receiving a paycheck? That would be President Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance,
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Posted October 09, 2025in Morain
Kathy and I returned last Friday from three days in the Black Hills, communing with two of my graduate school former housemates and their spouses. It’s a reunion that takes place somewhere in the U.S. on an irregular basis, always enjoyable and nostalgic. Both housemates are professors emeriti, one from
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Posted September 25, 2025in Morain
Last March, six months ago, Congress averted an impending federal government shutdown by reaching a bipartisan compromise, which extended the government funding deadline by six months, to the end of September. Time passes, and we’re approaching the new deadline. By now a functional Congress would have performed its due diligence
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