Site: etsu.edu By now, most of us are onto the truth behind the Federal Reserve's inflation information, because even if we didn't get much beyond basic high school math, we know the price for gas and groceries have gone up a lot more than 2% the past couple years. And, we roll our eyes when the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us the unemployment rate is 8.1%, knowing that we will have to dig through carefully culled data to get to the real unemployment story. According to a Wall Street Journ...

Do you have running water in your home? Does your home have a heating system? Does it contain electrical wiring? Have you ever twirled spaghetti on a stainless steel fork? Did you brush your teeth with toothpaste from a tube? Are the walls in your home made of sheet rock held together with metal nails? Have you ever been immunized? Do you own a car? A bike? A computer? Do you have a stove, refrigerator, microwave, blender, frying pan, camera, cell phone, clock, TV, radio, razor, scissors, paper ...

In November 2001 I was elected to my local city council. In January 2002 I journeyed to the state capitol where I attended a training session for newly elected municipal officials. At the coffee and donuts session prior to the start of the meeting, I overheard one of the presenters comment that "...one thing's for sure, with 9-11 local governments are gonna have a helluva time saying no to firefighters."  Without a doubt, some of the truest words ever spoken, at least for my city. My four years...

Last month, I left my perch on the top of the Continental Divide to attend the Colorado GOP convention in Denver. I went as one of those "unpledged" Ron Paul delegates, and as near as I could tell, most of the unpledged delegates were Ron Paul delegates. With Rick Santorum's exit from the race the week before, there was a lot of new strategizing going on. As most people know by now, many of the "anyone but Romney" Santorum delegates joined forces with the unpledged and Ron Paul delegates to ups...

Modern law, coupled with modern communication and an abundance of lawyers, have rendered labor unions obsolete. We are no longer in danger of having seven-year-olds work 12-hour shifts in unsafe sweatshops for pennies a day. That said, I have no objection to private sector unions as long as membership and employer participation are entirely voluntary. However, public sector unions, or government employee unions, should never have been allowed to exist in the first place. There is a world of dif...

The opinion forum in the April 22 online edition of the Denver Post posed the question, "Should health-care insurers be forced to pay for contraception?"The operative word here is forced, making the answer to this question an unequivocal "No". Protecting the legitimate rights of citizens is  the only lawful use of force under our  system of government, and there is no such thing as a "right" to have sex without consequences anymore than there is a right to excessive eating without consequences, ...