Opinion

L&T Publisher Earl Watt

I’m a fan of Oatmeal cream pies, you know, those Little Debbie discs of deliciousness holding in a sweet cream like two soft cookies around icing.

Maybe I walk those off after eating them, maybe I don’t.

What enjoyment do they bring to me? It’s not something anyone could understand.

It’s similar to the Cadbury Easter Egg or almost anything I’ve eaten while inside a Disney park.

THE POSTSCRIPT, Carrie Classon

I will be home in time for Christmas.

It’s always a little hard to leave Mexico, and leaving right before the holidays is perhaps the hardest. The giant Christmas tree just went up in front of the church last night. Thousands of handmade tin stars hang over the streets, embedded with colored glass beads and lit from within. The poinsettias (or “nochebuenas”) decorate the windowsills. There is a concert every night of the week. It is hard to leave, in the middle of all this celebration, to return to our own Christmas up north, where the weather is so very different.

GUEST COLUMN, Dave Trabert, Kansas Policy Institute

Congratulations to the four newly elected members of the Kansas State Board of Education: Betty Arnold, Beryl New, Connie O’Brien, and Debby Potter. You were elected with a D or an R next to your name, but we hope you will retire those labels and adopt the only one that matters: student-focused.

Student-focused state school board members are constitutionally and statutorily charged with setting high standards and improving student outcomes. The standards (what students are expected to know and be able to do to qualify as proficient) are pretty good. Unfortunately, achievement levels are nowhere near what students need and deserve.

GUEST COLUMN, Sally C. Pipes, Thomas W. Smith Fellow

America's health bill will surpass $7.7 trillion by 2032. That's equivalent to one in every five dollars flowing through the economy.

To address this crisis, we must make health care work like other sectors of our economy, rather than the bloated, over-regulated mess it is today. And that will require giving patients more control over their healthcare dollars.