Columns

Earmarks are back, and they’re costing American taxpayers a bundle.

In a world increasingly on fire, there is never a shortage of information about anything and everything. This generates a significant amount of curiosity and can lead us to compile a substantial number of questions that are pondered, yet frequently unanswered. The following 20 questions are among those I hope to have explained in 2023.

What’s a mountain, what’s a molehill? It’s getting pretty hard to tell in American media.

As 2023 begins, Ohio Republicans are in the strongest Statehouse position they’ve enjoyed since the 1960s.

I generally hate year-in-review columns. They seem forced, like a list of things you must buy at the grocery store. Check this off, and then this, and we did this, and I need that, and we are out of this, and can we have extra of that, etc. Years blend into each other and it’s often hard to pick exceptional events, particularly since the same things seem to happen over and over again: Wars start and continue, and we think they end, and then they’re prolonged.

If you’re going to have breakfast with someone, shouldn’t you have some choice on who it is?

Before the midterms, Elon Musk fired half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, including teams devoted to combating election misinformation — and did it so haphazardly and arbitrarily that most had no idea they were fired until their email accounts were shut off.

If the last few years have taught us anything, when it comes to politics, culture, the economy and international events, we should always expect the unexpected. After all, did anyone expect Elon Musk to buy Twitter or Will Smith to storm the Oscars stage and deliver the “slap heard round the world” in 2022? I think not.

Father Time and Baby New Year are polar opposites on the age spectrum.

As we head into the start of another year with which we are all blessed, there’s always some accounting to be done as to what we’ve gained and what we’ve lost in the year now in the history books.