DeSoto led his conquering armies through DeSoto County nearly 478 years ago, stopping just long enough to discover one of the world’s largest inland waterways, the mighty Mississippi River.
Debate in Congress has always been contentious. The levels of vitriol may seem especially acute these days, but confrontation is not new. I can remember times on Capitol Hill when “debate” was actually more of a screaming match than a civil discussion.
After more than 35 years in the newspaper industry, 18 of which have been spent at this newspaper, your community editor at the DeSoto Times-Tribune is turning the page, writing a new chapter.
It’s true that George H.W. Bush was the last president from The Greatest Generation. This week, commentators have pointed out that when Bill Clinton defeated Bush for a second term, Clinton’s youth was a big plus.
Have you ever had to do extra work in a job interview? One of my most intense interviews ever was at Target. I interviewed there after graduate school for a project management role. The process was unlike one I had ever seen up to then.
Much of today’s incivility and contempt for personal liberty has its roots on college campuses, and most of the uncivil and contemptuous are people with college backgrounds. Let’s look at a few highly publicized recent examples of incivility and attacks on free speech.
Total student debt hit an astronomical $1.48 trillion this year. The average graduate now leaves school with $40,000 in loans hanging over his head.
Stan Lee wrote just for me.
In 2018, Mississippi voters elected two U.S. senators. The two elections saw about $27. 6 million expended with $11 million of that coming from partisan outside groups – and armed with that money, Mississippians witnessed the near destruction of the reputations of at least two of those candidates.
Tension between the press and public officials is a good thing. The greater worry for this public is if reporters and politicians are too buddy-buddy.
Tyson Timbs made a mistake, but not one as important as Indiana’s Supreme Court made in allowing to stand the punishment the state inflicted on him. He was a drug addict — first with opioids prescribed for a work-related injury, then heroin — when his father died. He blew the $73,000 insuran…
I’ve been talking to a number of job seekers lately about illegal interview questions. They keep coming up, and I keep asking myself why that is. When you’re a job seeker, you may not realize how common illegal questions are because you’re interviewing for only one or two jobs at a time. But…
Wherever I go I seem to meet people who are either dealing with trauma or helping others dealing with trauma. In some places I meet veterans trying to recover from the psychic wounds they suffered in Iraq or Afghanistan. Sometimes it is women struggling with the aftershocks of sexual assault…
Now that all of the controversial elections, recounts and re-recounts are over, let us review some of our lessons learned.
People who follow politics, even casually, learn not to expect high moral standards from politicians. But there are some outrages that show a new low, even for politicians.
Yeah, I know that this is the last column I have before the Mississippi U.S. Senate runoff, but the truth is I really don’t have much more to say about a race that I’ve been writing about all these many months. I think I’ve said my piece on that subject.
The world’s oldest political party has developed an aversion to discretion. The Democratic Party is manacled to an over-caffeinated base that believes that deft government can deliver parity of status to everyone while micromanaging the economy’s health care sector, which is larger than all …
Long-time readers (for whom I am grateful) may recall Thanksgiving columns have often been homilies on how choosing an attitude of gratitude lessens stress, enhances enjoyment of life. (Too, long-time readers may not recall any such thing – what with op-eds having the same lifespan as grease…
When I was in college, I never joined a sorority. But, like you, I’ve heard some of the horror stories about what it can sometimes be like to become part of Greek life. For some (but not all) student led organizations, hazing rituals are just a part of life. Looking back, it seems like they’…
In the hierarchy of pleasures, schadenfreude ranks second only to dry martinis at dusk, so conservatives are enjoying Harvard’s entanglement with two things it has not sufficiently questioned -- regulatory government and progressive sentiment. The trial that recently ended in Boston -- the j…
Thousand Oaks, California: a city torn apart by wildfire and gunfire. Both are unnatural disasters.
One lesson of the midterm elections is that economic growth is losing its power to unite the country and to reduce explosive conflicts over race, religion, ethnicity, immigrant status and sexuality. This is unfamiliar. Economic progress has been a routine part of our election narratives. The…
And how we can make a difference in their lives.
For weeks if not months, there is media and coffee club speculation about the hearts and minds of American voters. Then election day comes, and we find out. The answer in Mississippi was, “We’re pretty much where we were two years ago, four years ago, six years ago …”
In the previous 50 years, the state of Mississippi has validated Lord Tennyson’s belief that “men may rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things.” Now the state has until Tuesday to explain to the U.S Supreme Court why a state court was sufficiently serious in ruling that …
In the previous 50 years, the state of Mississippi has validated Lord Tennyson’s belief that “men may rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things.” Now the state has until Tuesday to explain to the U.S Supreme Court why a state court was sufficiently serious in ruling that …
November 11th is the anniversary of the signing of the armistice that ended World War I hostilities. There were over 100,000 soldiers lost in that war but that was only a fourth of those lost in World War II. This was the beginning of the national observance of the 11th day of the 11th mon…
The First World War ended 100 years ago this month on Nov. 11, 1918, at 11 a.m. Nearly 20 million people had perished since the war began on July 28, 1914.
One day after most of us engaged in the single most important duty of American citizenship – exercising the precious right to vote – can we please take a deep breath as a country and stop the national hysteria over whether this or any U.S. president can nullify the 14th Amendment guarantee o…
Until last week it seemed that the Division 1 college basketball industry could produce nothing more risible than its pieties about cherishing the amateurism of the “student-athletes” who generate, but get mere crumbs of, the industry’s billions. Last week, however, a New York jury, which pe…
Perhaps it was naivete, ignorance or stupidity — or all three — but when I was growing up in the 1950s in a suburb of New York City, I had no sense of anti-Semitism. By that, I do not mean that I looked around and found little evidence of anti-Jewish feeling. I mean that I had no concept of …
Several candidates this election season chirped about immigration. In Mississippi, this was strange because while legions of foreigners may be coming to America, they’re not coming here.
I recently had the opportunity to attend LinkedIn’s annual human resources event: Talent Connect. Held in Anaheim, California, the event showcased everything LinkedIn’s been working on in 2018, and their plans for the future. It’s always a great educational event. The information presented r…
So much of our reasoning about race is both emotional and faulty. In ordinary, as well as professional, conversation, we use terms such as discrimination, prejudice, racial preferences and racism interchangeably, as if they referred to the same behavior. We can avoid many pitfalls of misguid…
Here’s a question: To which layer of society do you feel most attached: your neighborhood, town, county, state, nation or humanity as a whole?
Democratic Gautier city councilman Tobey Bartee faces Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, former Clinton administration secretary of agriculture and Democratic U.S. Rep. Mike Espy, and Tea Party Republican state Sen. Chris McDaniel in Mississippi’s U.S. Senate special election on Nov. 6.
There’s no shortage of threats to our democracy. The vulnerability of state voting systems to hacking, politicians’ assaults on the media, and political leaders’ growing fondness for policy-making in secret – all of these pose a real challenge to our system’s viability.
If you’re a hiring manager, there’s a good chance you’re finding it harder to hire this year than one year ago. The unemployment rate just fell to the lowest level since 1969, so the competition is fierce for good workers. In fact, it’s taking 82% longer to fill open jobs than just a few yea…
We should have seen it coming in 2001. That’s when President George W. Bush selected U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering of Laurel for promotion to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Pickering was met with a verbal assassination, and it has only become worse.
“Life happens,” Stacey Abrams instructs a small but boisterous crowd in a sun-drenched park south of Atlanta. She says: Your car breaks down. Your child gets sick. Could happen on election day. So, vote early. Today. In her campaign to be the first Democrat elected Georgia’s governor since 1…
Thirteen states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia — have enacted laws to combat what is seen as price gouging in the wake of natural disasters. Price gouging is legally defin…
For only a few hours each month, she gets to be a mom.
Will you be able to retire? Maybe not.
Sen. Ben Sasse is right — he has not recently been wrong about anything important — the nation’s most-discussed political problem is entangled with the least-understood public health problem. The political problem is furious partisanship. The public health problem is loneliness. Sasse’s new …
Question: What do you call a person with no body and no nose?
Sometimes, you want to feel like your work means something. You want to feel like a person who is performing a craft. You want to feel like a professional. Somehow, looking for a job can make you feel like a discount item on a shelf at a big box store.
Not long ago, in Spartanburg, S.C., I visited the offices of something called the Spartanburg Academic Movement (SAM). The walls were lined with charts measuring things like kindergarten readiness, third-grade reading scores and postsecondary enrollment.
When you’re clicking along and things are working, it’s easy to take forward motion for granted. You get in your car, turn it on and drive to work, so preoccupied that once there, you can’t remember the ride in. You were driving on autopilot: Everything was working, so you did not pay attention.
As of this year, nine states and the District of Columbia – including Alaska, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Maine, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington – have legalized the possession and recreational use of marijuana. Those same nine states plus 22 more have legalized the use of m…
Commented