“Rod Stewart Hair”
“I like your hair!” a woman at the party said.
Opinions
“Lucky”
“It’s not about luck,” my friend Andrew insists, “it’s about gratitude.”
Andrew is not some sort of New Age guide, in case you were wondering. He is a slightly curmudgeonly tax preparer and not given to feel-good platitudes.
He was refuting what I had said, which was that luck has played...
Once again, a new variant has emerged in the ongoing pandemic, and along with it, misinformation, speculation, and prejudice.
The recently discovered omicron variant has led to travel bans from select countries, but the logic behind the selection of these countries definitely comes off as...
Some Constitutional Amendments end up merely clarifying or adjusting elements of governance. Others were transformational. The 17th Amendment joined the latter group.
Article 1, Section 3 of the unamended U.S. Constitution established the method for selecting senators as follows: “The Senate of...
Q: What is the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction?
A: As a senior member of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, I helped steer the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law that led to the greatest economic expansion in America in the last half-century. The 2017 tax law provided tax relief for...
“Fifty Shades”
My husband, Peter, is a man of few colors—black and gray, to be exact.
He has always been this way, as far as I know. Peter is not opposed to color, but I think it makes him a little nervous. He worries that one color might not go with another or that there might be too much color...
The long Thanksgiving holiday weekend proved to be a bit of a mental/emotional rollercoaster—and not just for me, I imagine (sorry, Mom).
Some health issue popped up that consumed most of our Saturday, driving from one location to another to verify the problem. The issue was a known possibility...
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, is often misunderstood as favoring urban residents over rural. Formerly known as food stamps, a new study analyzing this program shows the opposite may be true.
SNAP provides nutrition assistance payments to one in eight Americans every month...
Thirteen months ago, the 2020 federal election drew America’s highest voter turnout—66.7 percent—in more than a century. It is alleged the former president (Donald Trump, Rep.) and some GOP die-hards attempted a coup at the U.S. Capitol (Jan. 6), overturn the Electoral College process and place the...
The League of Women Voters of Iowa and nine Iowa-based co-sponsors will present petitions to the leadership of the 89th General Assembly at Iowa’s Capitol. The petitions, which contain signatures of Iowa voters, seek legislators to repeal sections SF413 and SF568 from the newly-enacted voting laws...
“What Thanksgiving
Looks Like”
My mother sent a photo of a huge female turkey sitting on her bird feeder.
The giant, ungainly creature looked ridiculous, perched on the little wooden roof of a feeder intended for chickadees and nuthatches.
“She has been hanging around for two days now,” my...
