by Leo Morris A reader commenting on my column about nimrods from Podunk emailed that he appreciates a little context with his news, “a concept that seems to be an endangered species.” Numbers are just numbers, he wrote. “Data should always be presented in context. Context can make the difference between truth/fact and honesty.” Anecdotes offered as proof of an argument could also use a little context to bridge the fact-to-honesty gap. I was thinking…

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” — George Orwell, “1984” I HAD THE IMPRESSION during my time on Capitol Hill, a supposed center of representative government, that…

POST-RIOT LIFE in our town is divided into the factions that a historian predicted more than 70 years ago, and we will be lucky to survive when they finally clash. Granted, nobody reads Arnold Toynbee any more. He is a bit thick, as British scholars tend to be, but his 10-volume magisterial study of the rise and fall of more than 60 civilizations put him on the cover of Time Magazine. In short, he knows stuff. Here are some of Toynbee’s…

by Mark Franke John Adams is the Rodney Dangerfield of the Founding Fathers; he gets no respect. That is an exaggeration but not by much. He was, at the same time, one the most intellectual of the Founding Fathers and no doubt the most ill-tempered. It seems he just couldn’t help being irascible, given to moodiness and bouts of brooding. Because of his superior intelligence, he could think easily at the conceptual level so why…

by Leo Morris Sooner or later, every political columnist quotes George Santayana, and this is my week. If you have a problem with that, then go back to Podunk with the other nimrods. That was probably a bad way to begin. Some readers might take offense. Let me start over. “Podunk” was a common insult when I was growing up, and it generally meant a dull, insignificant place, a cultural backwater where nothing ever happened.…

by Paul Harvey and Lisa Conyers Our book, “Welfare for the Rich,” is designed to inform Americans — especially taxpayers who are footing most of the bill — about the massive movement of money from millions of middle- and lower-income Americans to much wealthier people and corporations that do not need and should not be entitled to these favors. What’s most remarkable about these policies is their variety and ubiquity. While today’s politicians — especially…

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” — Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld answering a question at a 2002 press briefing AT A CERTAIN AGE you should be getting used to the generation gap, overlapping…

“It was the legislature that passed the Emergency Management and Disaster law, which gives the governor broad power to take action to protect public health during emergencies. And if a global pandemic that has infected millions of people globally and killed 150,000 in this country in four months’ time is not an emergency, what is?” — Nancy Marcus, a Fort Wayne attorney quoted in the July 29 Fort Wayne Journal Gazette as an expert on the…

by Mark Franke We have all heard enough of the progressive-liberal mantra that the rich don’t pay their fair share. Proposals for millionaire taxes, which somehow always seem to hit hardest on the middle class, are a dime a dozen . . . provided they are on someone else’s dime. Okay, but look at several recent highly publicized demands which put the lie to their claims of ideological purity.   First, there are the blue-state governors…

by Leo Morris Early in my stint on the News-Sentinel’s editorial board, county officials came to lobby for the newspaper’s support of a proposed new tax. They knew we had a conservative editorial page, so they gave us their best sound arguments based on fiscal prudence. The impact on individuals would be minimal – a “dining out” tax of a mere 1 percent on food and beverages. The use of the revenue would be strictly…