Blogs

I’d like to apologize to the people of Greece.

I’ve been pretty hard on them over the years. I’ve made fun of their freewheeling spendthrift habits, their unwillingness to pay their taxes, and their early retirement ethos.

When they were given membership in the Euro zone, I made fun of that too, or at least of the rest of Europe’s willingness to cast its lot with the Greeks. “That’s like going mountain climbing with your safety rope tied to the town drunk,” I said.

If Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech is the 20th century equivalent of Abraham Lincoln’s magnificent Second Inaugural — and I think it is — then what President Barack Obama gave us in Charleston, South Carolina is our century’s Gettysburg Address.

He gave a marvelous eulogy that was powerful and eloquent. He was moving without resorting to sentimentality.

As the Davenport City Council contemplates how it ended up paying millions in site work for its new land-based casino, Bettendorf aldermen also should be asking questions about its development agreement with the Isle of Capri Casino.

Revisions to that agreement in 2007 allowed Green Bridge Company (owned by the Goldstein family) to wiggle out of a pledge to create $27 million worth of riverfront development on land adjacent to the casino.

One of the biggest questions of the day is: Why do the rich keep getting richer and the middle class keep getting poorer?

This also ranks as the dumbest question of the day, week, month, or year. To anyone who’s been paying attention, it’s obvious why economic inequality in our land is growing:

That’s what we asked for.

When Dennis Hastert was indicted for trying to cover up some $3.5 million in hush money payments to a man he’d allegedly sexually abused decades ago, Washington was shocked. I wasn’t.

I was shocked that Hastert, who’d spent the better part of his life in public service after working as a high school teacher and wrestling coach, could afford to contemplate a $3.5 million payout.

Today's pollution of Iowa rivers and streams from farm runoff echoes an earlier chapter in Iowa history when agricultural industries – livestock slaughterhouses and sugar beet processors – caused severe widespread pollution of those same state waterways.

Hardly a day goes by that another candidate doesn’t announce his or her intention to run for the presidency. One day it’s Carly Fiorina, the next it’s Mike Huckabee, Bernie Sanders, or Hillary Clinton, even.

It’s like the circus — when the little car rolls into the center ring and a clown gets out, then another, then two more, and on and on until the ring is overflowing with 1,000 clowns, or so it seems.

Race riots, as we used to call them, are as American as baseball and apple pie.

What started out as righteous protest over the death of a young black man in the hands of Baltimore cops (he had been accused of “making eye contact with a police officer”) quickly degenerated into a full-scale riot. By nightfall the city was on fire, its hopes for a better tomorrow in ruins.

U.S. President Francis Underwood in the popular Netflix series 'House of Cards' has hit the Iowa campaign trail, just like the real presidential hopefuls now crisscrossing our state.

And in one of this season's episodes, Underwood's female challenger, Heather Dunbar, fires up a blue-collar crowd in a small, union hall calling for a higher minimum wage and criticizing WalMart. As she leaves the meeting, the sign in the background proclaims the location as "Bettenberg Union Hall." A smaller message on the same sign advertises "Sweet Corn Roast Thursday."