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Columns

  • Easter is about an empty tomb, not empty plastic eggs

    When it comes to Easter eggs, my preference is artificial and hollow.

  • Kentucky retailers want to erase taxation disadvantage

    Kentucky retailers aren’t looking for a handout from Washington. They just want a sale made from a smartphone in Henderson or a laptop in Pikeville to be treated the same way as a purchase made at a store in Danville or Frankfort.

    Before that can happen, Congress must pass the Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013. The federal legislation would give states the authority to require that out-of-state merchants collect and remit state sales taxes.

  • What role does God play in the God particle's discover?

    The smoke barely had settled from the conclave of cardinal’s announcement that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was elected pope, when scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland, made their own announcement: The so-called “God particle” does indeed exist.

    “Look quick,” my wife told me, directing me to the evening news. “They’ve discovered the ‘God particle.’”

    I was curious: Was it A God Particle? Or The God Particle? Or God in a Particle? Or just God’s Particle?

  • Difficult for public to find time for the public's business

    Public meetings always  are more interesting when the public participates. Unfortunately, that typically only occurs when something objectionable or controversial took place at a previous meeting.

    Most government meetings conducting the people’s business attract few spectators. Of course, that’s why we elect others to make decisions on our behalf.

  • Blessed be the caretakers

    “Woe unto you, lawyers,” Jesus Christ himself once said.

    Fast forward 20 centuries and Christ could have had the personal-injury, ambulance-chasing kind of lawyer in mind.

    You’ve seen these law-benders’ brand of advertising: targeting doctors doing their best to alleviate patients’ pain through joint replacements or soliciting victims of diseases you’ve never heard of.

  • Sunshine week: Media and public both have roles in oversight

    The caller on the other end of the phone line was near exasperation. He had been given the run-around by government officials, the very people he put in office to represent him, and his quest for answers was met time and again with roadblocks.

    I don’t recall the specifics of the man’s concern, or the public officials he was trying to spur to action in a cause he passionately believed in from the conversation years ago. But one thing he said has stuck with me, and it is something I go back to time and again whenever someone calls with similar concerns.

  • What an age: News updates are as close as the nearest telephone

     

    ife changes seemingly occur at light speed in this technologically accelerated world.

    Many of the extraordinary wonders of my childhood science-fiction favorites have jumped off the bookshelves and exist today in my own house. Sometimes the changes are hard to fathom.

  • Time for transparency in Frankfort

    Every year members of the Kentucky General Assembly descend on Frankfort to carry out the duties our residents expect us to do. That expectation includes making sure the legislative process is open and transparent to all Kentuckians.

    But time and time again, and to the frustration of many of us in the Kentucky House of Representatives, the legislative process seems in some cases to be stuck in the back rooms of the Capitol. Never has that been clearer than our efforts to address one of the major issues of the 2013 Session: reforming our public pension system.

  • KMA president takes issue with state Medicaid

    Pop singer Prince had a hit song more than 20 years ago that said we should all “party like it’s 1999.” Unfortunately, the managed care organizations running the Kentucky Medicaid system are following the song’s advice and operating in the managed care world of 1999.

  • Plunging into the surprising sinkholes of life

    Even though your house may appear to rest on solid ground, there is still the possibility you may find yourself suddenly awakened in the middle of the night by the rumble of your bedroom floor opening into a massive hole, sliding you and the contents of the room into its pit, interrupting your sweet dreams with dirt and debris.