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Nobody wins with gerrymandering

The redistricting arms race now roiling American politics was not merely predictable, but inevitable. It began the moment President Donald Trump picked up the phone last year to demand that Missouri, Texas and other red states gerrymander their congressional districts mid-decade to give Republicans an advantage in the upcoming midterms. Some Democratic-held states have responded in kind. The result is that in much of America this November, voters won’t be allowed to choose their politicians; the politicians are instead choosing their voters. It’s an untenable situation that will ...

The Steyer smear on greenhouse gases

Billionaire Tom Steyer used his money to attack a lone climate researcher. Roger Pielke Jr.’s research on climate and disaster policy wins awards and is cited by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “My views are entirely mainstream,” says Pielke. “My work is cited by all three working groups of the IPCC. There’s nothing contrarian.” Both Steyer and Pielke agree that “greenhouse gases warm the climate,” but Pielke’s sin was saying, “it’s not the apocalypse.” Because of that, “the Center for American Progress decided to make ...

Democratic control means redefining America

Per USA Today columnist Chris Brennan, the Rededicate 250 event, held on the National Mall to rededicate our country as One Nation Under God, violated both our national spirit and our Constitution. Per Brennan, the Christian character of the event, and the Protestant content, flies in the face of the national value of religious diversity. The bottom line on the religious diversity claims points to religion not being a national value at all. I am perplexed how this squares with the rights noted in our Declaration of Independence asserted under the authority of the “Laws of ...

Data centers take center stage in Ohio

Ohio’s House of Representatives seems to have a sense of urgency in digging into the question of data centers in the state. Having already passed House Bill 646, which would create a data center study commission, lawmakers also are launching a bipartisan joint data center committee. HB 646 now sits in the state Senate committee. But while those details are worked out, the new committee will invite data center workers, residents and even companies such as Google and Meta to testify, according to a report by the Ohio Capital Journal. Leading the committee will be co-chairs Rep. Adam ...

Read ‘Pig Book’ and weep

It’s the time when Citizens Against Government Waste releases its annual “Congressional Pig Book Summary,” exposing some of the most outrageous, ridiculous and in many cases unconstitutional spending one can imagine. I guarantee you won’t be able to imagine most of it. Why should you when it’s not their money they are spending and borrowing, which has driven the debt to unprecedented and dangerous levels. According to CAGW, the number of earmarks, which is spending that avoids going through the normal appropriations process, “totaled 140,826, costing $484 billion.” ...

Decluttering till death do we part

Margareta Magnusson was an artist in Stockholm who wrote a bestselling book, “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning.” Decluttering, the removal of unnecessary items from our living spaces, had already become an international obsession. That was doubly so for Americans, whose large houses became easy repositories for the cheap goods arriving by container ship from low-wage countries. We declutterers had already gotten going 15 years ago, when Marie Kondo, Japan’s high priestess of neatness, came out with her big book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” I tried to ...