Advanced Search

Protesters like to claim they are “speaking truth to power.” That’s both noble and heroic. It is also rare, because speaking the truth requires knowing the truth. And knowledge is gained not by joining the crowd chanting slogans but by taking time to talk and to listen, questioning, debating, reading, and reflecting. It is a slow, arduous and ultimately rewarding process. It is called education.

To judge by media coverage — especially prominent due to the strong visuals of tent encampments and tensions between protesters and officials — one might infer that Gaza is foremost among political concerns this spring.

Former Beloit Daily News Editor Bill Barth sees echoes of the Vietnam War protest movement in today’s campus protests over the Isreal-Gaza war.

The “outside agitator” meme is invoked to absolve — or, at least, mitigate — your tribe of accountability. That’s a cop out.

Blogger Gregory Humphrey chides Columbia University for blocking press access to protests. He also criticizes protesters’ demands journalists get protesters’ permission to photograph them.

After insisting that she would only meet with protesters after they had voluntarily decamped, she met with them yesterday anyway. Why on earth is she rewarding this kind of behavior?

Robert Reich, President Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor during the ’90s, notes that since the Reagan, Bush and Trump tax cuts, wealthy Americans have financed the federal government mainly by lending it money and collecting interest payments on those loans — “profiting when the rest of us pay them back.”

We are a nation at a crossroads in need of prayer.

Injecting new ideas and forcing the major parties to incorporate a wider array of interests remain the most tangible results of minor-party and independent campaigns.

Tax dollars should fund election administration, and election workers should be paid for their vital efforts. It is now up to the Legislature to make sure the funding exists to make that happen in both ordinary and extraordinary election years, whether that’s due to a novel coronavirus or a not-so-novel economic downturn.