Opinion

This is a sad tale but with a happy ending. It is also a fairy tale subsumed in the gothic horror novel that is our immigration mess.

Chicago Tribune

It was one of countless interviews given by a gaggle of presidential candidates that could have gone largely unnoticed. How does describing a specific sect of GOP voters as “listless vessels” compare to one of the greatest hits of the 2016 campaign, “a basket of deplorables?”

The smell of smoke has gotten appreciatively lighter since we landed 10 days ago, but smoke and wildfires still are on my mind as we fly home. I haven’t studied the experts enough to say whether the rash of forest fires in our modern world is a natural occurrence or is human-caused, but it seems a reasonable guess that we are at least partly to blame.

I gave testimony this week in front of the state’s new Health Care Cost Oversight Task Force. The committee had asked me to speak about Indiana’s astonishingly high healthcare costs, particularly in reference to hospitals, and I was happy to do so. I followed folks from the state’s Department of Insurance and an IUPUI professor who’d recently been paid by IU Health to provide a study on healthcare costs in Indiana.

Demagogues and their followers often allow a crowd’s roar to confuse them.

As a longtime reporter, I can only imagine the scene of police busting into a newspaper office — and a private home — confiscating computers and cell phones. It is a threat to the First Amendment that can’t be overstated.

I don’t remember the last time I cleaned out the fridge in our basement. It’s kind of my fridge. Mary Ellen keeps her distance. She has her own upstairs.

This wasn’t exactly roughing it.

To the Editor: