Opinion

L&T Publisher Earl Watt

When it comes to the holidays, I’m still a kid at heart. Eating the Thanksgiving Day meal, the excitement of presents under the tree and the celebration of the New Year always spark the joy of my inner child.

There are many other get-togethers around the holiday season that are meaningful including Saturday’s Downtown Christmas Parade. We just celebrated 25 years of sponsoring the downtown event, and the size of the crowd coupled with the increasing quality of the floats are signs that Liberal loves the parade.

If it weren’t for the local businesses, families and organizations who participate, there wouldn’t be a parade.

But each year the floats get better and better, and this year there were several standouts.

For one, the Lanning family continues to set a higher bar year after year, and this year, that was literal. From the Polar Express train a few years ago to the take-off of Santa’s sleigh this year, the Lanning Family Float has become one to see each and every year.

THE POSTSCRIPT, Carrie Classon

I hate getting sick.

Maybe being in Mexico while I’m sick is marginally better than being sick back at home in the U.S. because it is warm here and I can sit out in the sunshine like a big, grumpy gecko and soak up the sun. I can put on my dark gecko sunglasses and take my scaly old self onto the roof where there are chairs that overlook the city. I can drink fresh-squeezed orange juice and, when I finish it, some kind person will ask me if I want another one.

“Yes! I want another one!” I want to say. “I want as many of these as it takes until I don’t feel like a gecko anymore!”

I don’t say that. I usually stop at one orange juice because that’s the equivalent of about four oranges, which ought to be enough to frighten off any virus. Although with me they seem especially stubborn. And I know why.

GUEST COLUMN, Vance Ginn, Kansas Policy Institute

If it feels like Christmas keeps getting more expensive, that’s because it is,  and Kansans are feeling it more sharply than policymakers care to admit. The rising cost of living is no longer a blip on a chart; it’s a full-blown pocketbook problem showing up in everything from family grocery runs to holiday gift lists. Add in climbing household debt tracked by the Federal Reserve, and families know the truth: their paychecks don’t go nearly as far as they used to.

Credit card balances recently hit an all-time high, and people aren’t swiping for luxuries; they’re financing day-to-day life and now the holidays on top of it. This isn’t overspending. It’s the reality of an affordability crisis where wages simply can’t catch up.

GUEST COLUMN, Jeffrey Gerrish

President Trump just succeeded where Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush all failed.

In June, European leaders finally agreed to the president's persistent demand that they significantly increase defense spending. For nearly two decades, they'd been resisting major spending hikes.

But President Trump used ongoing trade talks -- and the threat of economic consequences -- to force European NATO members into ending their freeloading and agreeing to a new defense spending target of 5% of members' GDPs by 2035.

The deal is a validation of President Trump's hard-charging approach to foreign relations. And it's a roadmap for how President Trump could succeed in another area where his predecessors failed: ending the foreign freeloading on America's biotech industry.