It’s a rainy Friday, the day before Halloween and who’s got the stomach for a topic on some weighty issue like health care or the Afghanistan war? Not me.

So weigh in on the time-honored tradition of Halloween, where kids of all ages and costumes will ring your doorbell in search of treats. Is there a tradition behind what you  hand out? Or is it just whatever bags you grabbed as you pushed your shopping cart down the aisles of the local store? At our house, we buy in bulk because we get hundreds of trick-or-treaters.

Do you ask the kids to do…

Some economists are saying — perhaps with a touch of irony — that the recession is over. The U.S. economy grew in the past quarter by 3.5 percent, the first expansion of the gross domestic product in more than a year. In fact, it was stronger than the 3.3 percent growth rate economists had predicted.

“We’re beginning to crawl out a very deep hole,” said economist Ken Mayland, president of ClearView Economics. “It will take time to get back to normal again and there are questions about how consumers will hold up in the months ahead. But I think the recovery…

Even as the federal number-crunchers are telling us that the recession is over, more bad economic news is coming to Missouri.

As my colleague Virginia Young reports today, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon will be making more budget cuts today — probably at least $300 million and maybe more.

A comment from one state lawmaker in the story really struck me. Senate President Pro Tem Charlie Shields, R-St. Joseph, said: “The big places you go to get money are higher education and (elementary and secondary) education, but those are the untouchables.”

That’s because of Nixon’s pledge to keep funding for colleges stable.

I have a…

The Washington Post reports today that the Obama Administration ran war games over the past several weeks in order to evaluate the best move in Afghanistan. According to the story:

The exercise, led by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, examined the likely outcome of inserting 44,000 more troops into the country to conduct a full-scale counterinsurgency effort aimed at building a stable Afghan government that can control most of the country. It also examined adding 10,000 to 15,000 more soldiers and Marines as part of an approach that the military has dubbed “counterterrorism plus.”

Another column on…

I have been amused for some time now at the ability of some of our online community to twist any topic into the political screed of their choice. Recently, “socialist libs” have been excoriated for their opinions about consumer fraud. “Nazi socialist Republicans” have been taken to task for their bad grammar.

In some cases, I have tried to purge the dialog of pointless and off-topic, needless political rants, which, frankly, are tiresome and shed only heat, not light.

Today, for our Friday Talk of the Day, I thought it would be fun to go the other direction. Again, just for fun!…