R.J. Matson/Post-Dispatch
Americans are being ill-served by the nature of the debate over President Barack Obama’s pending decision about the future of America’s efforts in Afghanistan.
No matter what you may have heard on talk radio or cable news, or read on…
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has asked state legislators to submit proposals for a major capital program to fund projects on university campuses and at other state facilities. It’s a sound idea.
The money, perhaps as much as $1 billion, would be…
AP Photo by Seth Perlman, February 2003.
I MET ROD BLAGOJEVICH just once. It was March 9, 2007. Twenty-one months later, I don’t know what to think about what I saw and experienced that day.
The Democratic governor of Illinois and several senior…
By R.J. Matson, Post-Dispatch
IT’S TIME WE STOPPED lying to our kids.
We tell them that they are our future. We encourage them to follow their dreams and work hard to achieve anything they want. We hammer into their heads that the key…
Post-Dispatch photo by J.B. Forbes
canard
ca·nard (kə -NÄRD)
n. 1. An unfounded or false, deliberately misleading story.
Here in the editorial/commentary/letters area of the newspaper, our principal mission is to analyze issues and advocate positions that are consistent with the values and principles of…
Anti-poverty programs stir up controversy now and then. Why, then, does no one get stirred up over the pro-poverty policies of states including Missouri and Illinois? These states tax the poor, making their poverty worse.
Of course, poor people have always…
There was a time when Missouri consumers didn’t regularly get hosed by their state Legislature, when “consumer advocate” wasn’t a term of scorn (like “community organizer”), when ordinary people banded together and effectively pressed…
The number of uninsured Missouri children increased by 44 percent since Gov. Matt Blunt took office in 2005, a fact we noted on this page Sept. 14. In a letter to the editor that we published Wednesday, Mr. Blunt complained…
Project Vote Smart is a non-partisan group dedicated to providing voters with basic information on issues and candidate’s positions for all elective offices from the president down to the state legislature.
They also send out a “Political Courage Test” to all candidates, which…
In America, we look at places such as Iraq and Yugoslavia in horror and wonder. How can neighbors, who live in the same communities for years, suddenly rise up and kill each other?
So, it’s disturbing to realize that Americans may not…
Findsolar.com has a neat solar calculator that shows how well a solar-powered residential electrical system would work in your area.
According to the calculator, St. Louis has a “good” rating for residential solar energy — 4.859 kWh/sq-m/day, to be exact.
The Brookings Institution’s Gregg Easterbrook, writing in the Wall Street Journal, has a thought-provoking piece today:
Democratic attacks on Mr. McCain and Republican attacks on Mr. Obama both seek to punish impermissibly positive thoughts. At a time when there exists a sense…
Our friends at the Springfield News-Leader report that outgoing House Speaker Rod Jetton is shopping for a frame to display our May 18 editorial, “The sad legacy of the Jetton era.”
“I thought it was great,” the paper’s Jefferson City reporter,…
Medicaid is like a parachute for thousands of Missouri and Illinois families: Most of the time, they don’t need it. But when the economy slows down, nothing else will take its place.
It plays the same role for economically hard hit…
Speaking of bad bills, if ever there were a candidate for a quiet killing, it’s Senate Bill 1172. It legalizes the manufacture of silencers for firearms.
Yup, silencers — those suppressors that screw into the barrel of a weapon to muffle…
We Americans love freedom. And education. When it comes to education, we especially love “academic freedom.” Who could be opposed to that?
That helps explain why “academic freedom” has become the latest fig leaf for anti-evolutionists. The latest example is a…
Sixty-eight million years ago, Tyrannosaurus rex ruled the roost. It was the largest and most fearsome predator ever to thunder across the ancient Earth. Even today in the safety of a museum, coming face-to-kneecap with T. rex inspires awe —…
Here’s an advance look at one of the editorials that will appear in Wednesday’s Post-Dispatch and online at STLtoday.com/news/editorials.
DUELING BENEFITS
The word “schizophrenia” literally means “split mind.” That is, at best, an incomplete description of the disease. But it’s a strangely…
