Opinion

GUEST COLUMN, David Dorsey, Kansas Policy Institute

How does the Kansas State Board of Education and Education Commissioner Randy Watson avoid having their feet held to the fire with constantly unacceptably low student achievement? One way that has been very effective for them is to deflect the blame. And what serves as their protective armor? Is it not enough money? Given the showering of cash provided by the last two lawsuits, Montoy and Gannon, that horse is out of the barn. No, it’s the one they can always count on: poverty.

GUEST COLUMN, Greg Doering, Kansas Farm Bureau

Outside of holidays, the most important date on the calendar when I was growing up was always the second Saturday of November or the traditional opening of pheasant and quail seasons. While I did plenty of quail hunting in east Kansas, we always headed west for the opening day to chase ring-necked pheasants.

While life has interrupted my participation for the last several opening weekends, including this year’s, the memories of past hunts are always on my mind when the time rolls around. Provided we were heading to the far western frontier, pheasant hunting remains the only reason I was ever permitted to leave school early without suffering a dire illness.

L&T Publisher Earl Watt

Posts on X (formerly Twitter) are sharing a bizarre reaction to the Donald Trump victory last week.

From women cutting off all their hair to wearing blue bracelets, from suggestions to divorce any man who votes for Trump to women getting their tubes tied so they can’t get pregnant, the reaction has been somewhat over the top.

Conspiracy theories have cropped up as well. Apparently Elon Musk’s Starlink hacked in to the election system and destroyed 10 million Democratic ballots, and millions of Democrats didn’t have their absentee votes counted and are expecting to be able to reissue another ballot to make up for the first one.

THE POSTSCRIPT, Carrie Classon

“There will be monks here tomorrow morning,” is what I figured Jorge was telling me. In Spanish, “monks” sounds like “monkeys” in English. But I was pretty sure we were not having monkeys over for breakfast.

Jorge is my landlord here in Mexico, and he speaks only Spanish to me. He will speak some English when my husband, Peter, is around. But if it’s just me, he’ll stick to Spanish, and I am fine with that, but it doesn’t mean I get 100 percent of what he says.