Commentary
How many more AR-15 massacres?
About 48 hours after a mass shooting in a Louisville bank left five victims dead and eight injured, including a young, newly sworn-in police officer fighting for his life with a gunshot to the head, I was standing in the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport security line, witnessing massive waste in the name of safety. The frail, […]
Searching for hope in a cruel political season
FRANKFORT — I was sitting at my desk a stone’s throw from the Kentucky Capitol googling Galileo. Was the father of modern science really shown the instruments of torture to make him renounce his belief that the Earth circles the sun?? The authorities had divined that it was the other way around, that God had […]
Dick Wilson was an old school reporter and mentor to young journalists
FRANKFORT — In simpler days before news was 24/7 online, good newspaper reporters were prone to an affliction that an old Ohio newsman first identified as “loading dock panic.” It struck in the dead of night, with the poor reporter sitting bolt upright and sweaty in bed, consumed with nagging doubt about a story finished […]
Seeking GOP primary votes, would-be Kentucky governors fall in line for Trump
This article is published with permission of the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism. Kentucky’s political system, largely run by Republicans these days, has thankfully avoided copying other red states’ mischief with their election systems, spawned largely by Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was taken from […]
What Trump’s business fraud charges mean
Former President Donald Trump was arraigned in New York on April 4, 2023. Shortly after, the charges that a Manhattan grand jury indicted him on were made public. As anticipated, there were numerous counts of falsifying business records related to “hush money” payments made in 2016 to three individuals with potentially damaging information about Trump […]
Think renewable energy won’t work? Check out Denmark
East Kentucky Power Cooperative powers the lives of 1.1 million Kentuckians through 16 cooperative members. The energy source is coal and natural gas.? Power travels through 2,800 miles of high-voltage transmission lines from Maysville and Somerset to reach 370 substations and 560,000 members. EKPC highlights its commitment to environmental stewardship with electricity generated at the […]
Kentucky legislature excluded public from all but the most carefully orchestrated ‘debate’
“Adjourned sine die.” The sweetest phrase in the legislative lexicon. Open government advocates on March 30 breathed a sigh of relief as lawmakers departed the Capitol until noon, January 2, 2024 — certainly compared to a broad swath of Kentuckians who felt the sting of legislative injustice in the 2023 Regular session. It was a […]
You call that love?
Since I was giving a favorite book of poetry, Adrienne Rich’s “The Dream of a Common Language,” to a young friend for their birthday, I re-read it to make sure it was appropriate. It was. The 1978 collection of poems opens with this epigraph by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle’s nom de plume): “I go where I […]
Gun violence is a proxy war on the American public
As the riot of gun violence in America produces fresh massacres by the day, firearm fundamentalists refuse to acknowledge the blood on their hands, and their suicidal stance in the face of escalating carnage is that more guns are the answer. But it’s worse than that. Take a close look at the arguments that gun […]
This is how we live.
LAWRENCEBURG — About the same time a person opened fire inside The Covenant School, a Christian elementary and preschool in Nashville, Tennessee, killing three nine-year-old children and three adults, I was sitting at a stoplight behind a blue Chevy truck with a bumper sticker that read, “No airbags. We die like real men.”? That’s a […]
SB 150 will harm military families and their missions
No matter how you feel about trans health care, we can all agree that soldiers defending America’s interests abroad shouldn’t have additional, unnecessary worries about their families at home. That’s exactly what’s happening with the movement of Senate Bill 150. SB 150 is one of the most extreme attacks on transgender health that we’ve seen […]
Republican legislature overdoes it trying to trip up Democrat Beshear
For a few minutes on the ides of March, it seemed the legislature was really legislating. Faced with a transgender-youth bill that ignored medical advice, the state Senate did a rare thing in this era of tight partisan control: It voted on a substantive floor amendment, and wonder of wonders, narrowly passed it. The amendment […]