According to the calendar, winter has officially been with us for about a month, and with it comes the concomitant tasks of shoveling snow, breaking ice in the water trough and installing the half-of-a-pizza box in front of the radiator on the old 1959 International Harvester pickup in an at…
Sen. Ron Wyden and Sen. Jeff Merkley have introduced the ‘’Malheur Community Empowerment for the Owyhee Act’’ (MCEOA). The senators can be commended for taking on such a controversial issue an…
When my childhood home got a phone call, it was an event.
The New York Times provided lessons in both journalism and television Sunday night, by way of bad examples.
So the plastic bag ban has come to Oregon, and I am so glad I live in Umatilla County. Yes, there are a myriad of reasons to be glad to live here. The one I’m thinking of now is that our area …
The women stopped me as I walked through Sisters Cafe to put up a First Draft Writers’ Series poster on the bulletin board.
A new decade is upon us, we who live, love and die in a small rural town of some consequence. In this proud town, many significant talents abound with roots that have long been here and others…
We were on the way to ballet rehearsal. It’s my favorite 30 minutes of the day. It’s a chance to break away from work, and to touch base with my only child. She’s 14 now. And it won’t be long …
Could a communications campaign aimed at gun-owning households lower the incidence of gun violence in America?
Oregon is not a wait-and-see kind of state. So it’s time to stop waiting for more research about providing a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Instead, it’s time we adopt a UBI and fine tune it as…
Less than two weeks from now, thousands of pro-life teenagers will converge on the nation’s capital to rally in support of the unborn at the 47th annual March for Life.
Today marks a new endeavor for me. I find myself writing a column for the East Oregonian, and the powers that be want me to do it every month. When they first approached me to do this I was ho…
Happy New Year to all y’all. My interest in calendars began in early 1953, when my dad brought home a huge boxful of 1952 calendars given to him by an itinerant calendar salesman. In those day…
It didn’t take long for “World War III” to become a trending topic on Twitter in the hours after news broke that a drone strike by U.S. forces resulted in the death of a top Iranian military c…
The relationship between government entities and a newspaper or other media outlets can be a complicated one, and occasionally one highlighted by a certain degree of tension.
Even coverage of an attempted mass shooting successfully stopped by the NRA’s “good guy with a gun” is not immune from the Opposition Media’s anti-gun agenda.
The 2010s began with Hermiston officially taking the mantle as largest city in Eastern Oregon. It’s a point of pride for this small town that came into its own as an agricultural powerhouse at…
Mason, my oldest son, recently agreed to help me move some pictures and sort through a pile of framed images I had taken off the wall upstairs this past week. I had spent the day sorting, clea…
Oh swell. The Republican Senate’s so-called “moderates,” who combine big talk with little action and fuse noble rhetoric with hapless inertia, appear to be readying themselves for another year…
The United States of America Commemoration of the Vietnam War is currently ongoing. This national commemoration was authorized by Congress, established under the secretary of defense and launc…
The California Department of Finance announced that the state’s population fell just 40,000 people short of a historic 40 million residents. Sacramento demographers, as well as population expe…
Traditions are an important binding mechanism in the human experience and oral history is an integral component in passing traditions from one generation to countless subsequent generations.
Do you share my frustration at being required to update smartphone apps at the most inopportune of times?
Donald Trump has angered progressives in so many ways recently — including mean tweets to Swedish teenagers, mean letters to the speaker of the House, and mean comments about women in the Squa…
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through America, people were angry or delighted, and most uncomplimentary.
Winter Solstice. The darkest day of the year, but also the day the earth will tip once again toward light. Slowly, slowly. In fact, the word solstice means “when the sun stands still.” It’s a …
I appreciated your prompt response to my previous email, but was extremely disappointed by the lack of logic in its contents. It has taken me all the past 11 days to find a way to express my d…
I indulge more deeply in Christmas nostalgia with every passing year, but it turns out that doing so is a good thing.
What contributes to student success? Across Oregon, educators, parents, students and community members are gathering to discuss just that, and to determine how funds from the recently enacted …
Access to the Internet is critical for life in the 21st century, not something that is simply nice to have. To ensure our rural communities have quality health care, college-level math classes…
It was Christmas week. A couple of miles above me, the haunches of the Big Island had shed precipitation for a thousand millennia. According to the map, it was about 8 miles as the mynah bird …
Do you value public radio, music, libraries, museums and monuments? If so, please take advantage of Oregon’s most generous offer to support them.
On a recent foggy, cold, miserable-weather day, I was enjoying the comfort of my heated shop. I was busy working on a couple of projects, when the folks on the radio posed a question to listen…
Consumer knowledge is consumer power. That is why hospitals fight tooth-and-toenail against any efforts to post turnkey prices for medical procedures.
Thanks in large part to social media, and in equally large part to the mean-spirited discourse of the day, virtually anything can be turned into a national controversy.
There are a lot of times in my life when I’m not certain of where I’m going exactly. Often times I’m following a path that’s already been made — but following now in my own unique way.
In a mad dash to expand all their favorite “green” cash grabs before the end of the year, House Democrats have published their most bloated smash and grab yet.
Efforts to reduce the influence of money in Oregon politics face an uphill battle in next year’s legislative session for the simple reason that lawmakers will need to vote for rules that limit…
The top priority of Pendleton’s citizenry is to fix Pendleton’s deteriorating streets and to provide sustainable funding to keep the streets in good condition. In response, the city council ha…
Chief Petty Officer Eddie Gallagher is a highly decorated combat veteran who made the mistake of posing for a photograph with a dead ISIS combatant.
It’s hard to know whether to laugh, cry, shrug or shake our heads at the results of a recent poll on where most people get their political news — and how much they trust that source.
As we survey the havoc that President Trump and his sycophants have wreaked on the institutions of government, we can at least be thankful, during this holiday week, that the federal judiciary…
Six months ago, I stepped into the editor’s chair at the East Oregonian with a lot of expectations and hopes, and I can honestly say, I have not been disappointed.
You could be forgiven for missing it in the build-up to Thanksgiving and the blizzard of impeachment news, but America’s fact-challenged chief executive was up to some old tricks this week.
Despite Mayor John Turner’s recent comments that I don’t like competition, I do like competition. I grew up with four competitive brothers and went to college on an athletic scholarship. I thr…
Economic inequality in the United States is at its highest point in more than five decades since the Census Bureau first started measuring it. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet togethe…
The latest Democratic presidential debate was disappointing. Not because the participants weren’t articulate — in fact, many of their answers were excellent — but because the DNC and the netwo…
“Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.” — Mark Twain
I adored the story of “Cinderella” as a child. The prospect of having a man so in love with me that he’d crisscross the Kingdom searching for my size 6½ foot was heady stuff. It never occurred…
A month after Gov. Kate Brown’s Council on Wildfire Response raised eyebrows throughout the Oregon by estimating that it will take $4 billion over 20 years to improve the state’s ability to re…
If Ambassador Bill Taylor didn’t exist already, we’d have to invent him.
When will the city of Pendleton act with greater fiscal responsibility? Everyone acknowledges the degrading condition of Pendleton’s roads as a result of deferring years of maintenance, but th…
People are still talking about last month’s First Draft Writers’ Series and Portland poet and novelist Harold Johnson — sharing his books, wanting more. An African-American who was raised in W…
It’s been almost 50 years since Americans were riveted by gavel-to-gavel live coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings that eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
The Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program just released a study that casts serious doubt on President Trump’s insistence that the economy is improving, and that the employment ma…
