Developing the oil fields of western North Dakota and eastern Montana need not be a repeat of the gold rush in the Black Hills during the 1870s, with white speculators trampling on the lives of the Sioux to get at…
A comment from a young woman heading off to college in the fall wanted to know about how to start a student Republican group at either Black Hills State University or at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. …
The recent vote and discussion in North Dakota about abolishing property taxes is an encouraging sign that grassroots democracy isn’t dead yet in America. It’s too easy to redefine “citizenship” to include only passive consideration of top-down options from the…
Polls can be fickle, with voters swayed by tangential sentiments, hardly chewed information, and whatever political wind happens to be blowing in their direction at the time. Tomorrow things might change again. But support for pro-life has seen a steady…
Memorial Day is a time for families and churches and synagogues across America to remember friends and relatives who have fallen on distant battlefields. Most of us can still think of uncles and grandfathers who fought in World War I,…
Ronald Reagan’s son Michael recently wrote about “Destroying the California Dream” to lament that state’s political decline into a one-party system, including the social wreckage and voter apathy that comes with it. Not exactly what a wholesome democracy is all…
The terms “left” and “right” aren’t used as much as they once were during the Cold War period, unless they are spit out by detractors. Today we seem to prefer “liberal” and “conservative.” Even being “ideological” has a negative connotation…
We can’t blame the spoon for making Oprah fat. Nor should we castigate electrical engineers and computer scientists for flooding our lives with intoxicating electronic gadgetry. Truth is, however, American society is drowning in popular culture, news “infotainment” included. Actually,…
We can’t get all of our political ideas by listening to news commentators briefly sparring with each other. Sometimes we have to turn to deeply grounded authorities who have spent a lifetime studying a subject. It’s well-known…
English has become sanitized in recent decades. People say what sounds good, not what they really think, as if a recording device has been hidden for later use in the courtroom. Police officers on the beat are instructed…