Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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We’ve all probably heard the saying that something – clothes, figure/physique, chocolate – is to die for, meaning it was highly desirable. The Christmas season has been upon us in a commercial sense since before Halloween, with some Black Friday sales already started, though Thanksgiving isn’t until next week. While I haven’t heard “to die for” used in any sales pitches yet, the products being hawked on TV are billed with the concept that they’re the latest and greatest, and you simply cannot live without them. We like giving to die for gift...
When Amazon billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos decided not to allow his newspaper to endorse Kamala Harris for president, a quarter million readers canceled their subscriptions. Now this esteemed newspaper is suffering from a credibility crisis that may never recover under Bezos’ compromised ownership. Something similar happened to Fox News back in 2020, when the network essentially called the election for Joe Biden while their most loyal viewers were drinking in Donald Trump’s Kool-Aid and denying the reality of his loss. A sud...
It’s been two weeks since Election Day, and we’ve heard what pundits think cost Vice President Kamala Harris the election. Their hit list of topics included the uneven economy, high inflation, the Israeli-Hamas conflict, rising crime, extreme and excessive wokeness, and out-of-control borders. Yet, there is another reason that hasn’t been discussed nearly as much in most quarters – the intersection of race and gender. Harris would have been the first woman of any race and the first South Asian person to have been elected president of the mos...
The Democrats did not do a good job of dealing with their terrible loss. In fact, they and the liberal media collectively melted down in front of the whole world when Donald Trump and America’s voters dealt Kamala Harris a decisive, humiliating and historic election defeat. For a bunch of supposedly sophisticated liberal politicians, journalists and celebrities who profess to love democracy, it was an embarrassing but completely predictable display of bad sportsmanship, denial, reverse racism and partisan bias. Joy Reid of MSNBC blamed white w...
Standing on the banks of the Jordan River, about to cross into Canaan and three years of warfare, the fledgling nation of Isreal listened to the final address of Moses. In Deuteronomy 10, one of the old man’s points was that God could have chosen anybody. The whole world was his, after all. He literally had every option open to him. God chose Abraham, though. God set him apart and lavished his love on the man. Then God chose Abraham’s descendants and blessed them. God revealed himself to this holy line, while leaving the other nations in rel...
This column is to the progressives out there who, once again, saw their hopes for a better world thwarted by the election of Donald Trump. All is not lost. Trump could still self-destruct, especially if he actually does what he promised to do. His affinity for tariffs is a good example. More than likely, they will raise prices and undercut American jobs, and that surely won’t sit well even with his MAGA base. And his mass deportation promises will undercut our economy by taking away workers doing jobs that “true” Americans don’t want. If you...
For Democrats and their weeping soulmates in liberal media, it’s “Mourning in America.” Not morning – M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G. But for those of us who voted for Donald Trump, today feels like the opening line of my father’s famous TV campaign commercial – “It’s morning again in America.” The message of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 ad – considered one of the greatest political spots ever – was that after four tough years in office his policies had fixed America and restored the country to greatness. I’m obviously feeling terrific about Trump’s defeat of K...
For some people, Nov. 5, 2024, was one of the greatest days in American history. Others may well remember it as a day that will live in political infamy. Regardless, the 2024 presidential election is over, and Donald Trump has been reelected as the 47th president of the United States. And if people are honest with themselves, they would probably admit that Tuesday’s results shocked but did not totally surprise them. Throughout various periods in our nation’s history, charismatic politicians espousing a populist message have sporadically emerged...
“Close don’t count in baseball. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.” That was said by baseball manager Frank Robinson in 1973. Not long after that, while I was in college and throwing water balloons through open windows into girls’ dorms was fun (more fun if there was a screen), we modified the last sentence to, “Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and water balloons.” We’ve heard almost all summer the presidential election would be close and that the loser might have the greater popular vote but lose due to the ou...
When we think about the economic damage of climate change, most of us probably think about the physical destruction wrought by mammoth disasters like hurricanes, wildfires and droughts: Bungalows tumbling into the sea. Houses turned to ash. Acres of dead crops. That sort of thing. But the quieter, longer-term effects of global warming cut even deeper. Consider western North Carolina. It’s just beginning to repair the heavy physical damage to homes, businesses and infrastructure caused by Hurricane Helene nearly a month ago. The state’s tab for...
If you designed a banner declaring, “The world is full of crazies” and ran it up the flagpole, assuredly, I would salute it. On the other hand, as Veterans Day approaches, I realize the world is also full of opportunists – opportunists who devalue the dangers faced by the nation’s military personnel. We’ve all witnessed it with increasing frequency: some office-holder, bureaucrat or celebrity (a) gets pushback for a totally outrageous statement or (b) finally gets busted engaging in some flavor of financial/political/sexual skulldugg...
When I was young, I didn’t know how good I had it. My family wasn’t rich, but we had enough. My parents loved their children unconditionally, taught us the value of service and gave us all a foundation for lives well lived. Moreover, I grew up with a hero in the house — my father. He wasn’t a war hero, a great athlete or television star. Instead, he was a good and decent man who made sure our home was filled with love and laughter, and I never stopped looking up to him as an example of how someone should live their life. When I hit my young a...
The bride-price is a common feature of the Bible’s stories. Jacob famously put in 14 years of hard labor for Rachel. David paid King Saul a bride-price of 100 foreskins of the hated Philistines. For a family to give up a daughter in marriage represented a financial burden, as most of them lived a hand-to-mouth agrarian lifestyle, and all the women helped keep it going. To lose a young woman was to lose an important worker. So, the payment of a bride-price was meant to help compensate for that l...
Here we are, on the cusp of one of the most consequential elections in American history, with the choices for president as different as night and day. Three big questions remain: Who will win the presidency? Which political party will win control of the U.S. Senate and House? And what will the losers do after the winners emerge? Polls and pundits tell us it’s too close to call in the presidential election. I expect Kamala Harris to win the overall popular vote, just as the Democratic candidate has in every presidential election since 2004, b...
Donald Trump’s public appearances follow a typical direction. He has a speech in mind he intends to deliver with the help of a teleprompter, but instead he resorts to rambling and discussing odd, bizarre thoughts about all sorts of topics. To put it bluntly, the former president has increasingly spouted rhetoric that is nonsensical and incoherent. MSNBC columnist Zeeshan Aleem convincingly stated that, “Trump has been embedded in the public consciousness as a rule-breaker for so long that it can be easy to forget how far he is from ful...
The amateurs running the Kamala Harris campaign have finally hit bottom. They tried dealing the “Trump is Crazy” card, the “Trump is Exhausted” card and the “Trump is a Threat to Democracy” card. But Harris’ poll numbers just kept sinking and Trump’s only kept getting stronger. The upward turn of fortune for Trump that has Democrats in a panic is not because he was shot or because he suddenly transformed himself into Mitt Romney 2.0 or Mister Rogers. It’s because the whole country has been getting a better look at Kamala – and has seen what a...
This is a follow-up to my previous article in the Oct. 9 issue of the Quay County Sun about good things coming to those who wait rather than attaining the desires of our hearts through evil. We’re all sinners under temptation, which can lead to sin’s consequences (Romans 3:23; 6:23). God wants to give us our heart’s desires, but he never tempts us to sin (Psalm 145:16; James 1:13-15). Temptations are generally associated with sin, but our desires need not be temptation-based because we can and should have righteous desires (Romans 12:2; Philipp...
Heroes are easy to find but hard to keep. Especially when we’re young, we need our heroes, or positive role models if you prefer, as examples of what courage, sacrifice and success are all about. We typically start with our parents, superheroes in our young eyes, while our imaginations gravitate toward mythical beings like the Man of Steel, the Dark Knight or, yes, that proverbial cowboy riding through a time when right was right and wrong was wrong and what you did, not what you said, was who you are. Parents and action figures are just the be...
Former President Barack Obama stirred up some attention this month when he suggested lackluster support for Kamala Harris among Black men is mostly about her gender. “Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives or other reasons for that,” Obama said at Harris’ campaign offices in Pittsburgh. “You’re thinking about sitting out, or even supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you?” Obama likened this attitude to betrayal. “Women in...
It’s the usual partisan story. Folks who love Kamala Harris and hate Donald Trump thought she did fine in her interview with evil Bret Baier on Fox. Folks who love Trump and hate Kamala thought she was the same unqualified presidential candidate they’ve been watching for three months. But anyone in the middle, any truly independent or still undecided voter watching Fox, would have been left thinking a bunch of negative things about Harris. She didn’t look or act the least bit presidential. She recited her usual platitudes. She said nothi...
A documentary filmmaker, Mark, went to Hawaii to capture the stories of pearl divers. These guys make unassisted dives to retrieve oysters. By “unassisted,” we mean they have no oxygen tanks. They’re diving in the skin God gave them, holding their breath. This is a feat that takes years of training and is never without danger. Mark interviewed an older pearl diver, Mr. H, in the elderly man’s small home. Mark heard the tragic story of Mr. H’s son, who died one day after diving too deep or s...
Set aside for a moment the devastation that has hit the Southeast after back-to-back hurricanes. Turn instead to what’s happening in our little corner of the planet. Studies suggest the human body can’t survive outdoors in sustained temperatures of 120 degrees Fahrenheit or more. And yet, Phoenix, Ariz., just endured a summer that included 56 days of 110-degree temps. And here it is October and they’re still cooking under 100-degree days. Over here in New Mexico, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported August was the hotte...
Over the past few months, Donald Trump has stoked the flames of white resentment on the campaign trail. Speaking to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt last week, the former president — who once referred to himself as a “gene believer” and has a known obsession with genetics and bloodlines — accused migrants coming to the southern border of being “criminals” and having “bad genes.” It’s the latest in a long line of bigoted and xenophobic statements from Trump, ranging from immigrants migrating from “s—hole nations” to supposedly “poisoning t...
Jeeze. In just one day everyone in the country saw why the people in charge of the Democrat Party want to keep Kamala Harris off TV. And in just one day everyone in the country saw why Donald Trump wants our sitting vice president on TV as much as possible. The Trump campaign wants Harris to make a hundred more unscripted appearances on her media tour – even on safe, friendly and embarrassing liberal political places like “The View,” the Howard Stern radio show and “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” On “The View” Harris didn’t merely deliver...
I heard an excellent sermon about temptation recently, and while the preacher was expounding on the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness, something triggered a reminder that God satisfies the desires of every living creature (Matthew 3:13-4:-11; Mark 1:9-13; Luke 4:1-13; Psalm 145:15-16). Each temptation represented a desire of Jesus’ heart that is also common to all humans (1 John 2:15-17). Satan offered to fulfill those desires for Jesus, but Jesus responded with Scripture, which many consider to be the way out of temptation God provides (1...