Opinion

Enthralled by the disruptive power of Trump’s DOGE team as it stamps Godzilla-like on the federal government to make it smaller, the GOP-controlled Kansas Senate has created its own version.The Sunflower edition, called COGE — Committee on Governmental Efficiency — doesn’t have a mad tech oligarch as its head or platoons of teenage ninja hackers with monikers like “Big Balls” to inspect your state tax return. But what COGE lacks in testicular fortitude it makes up for in rhyming with DOGE, and that’s really the point.Kansas is one of several red states to launch their own interpretations of DOGE, all conceived in the belief that waste is rampant and dedicated to the proposition that social programs must be trimmed.Kansas COGE has a web portal to field suggestions on where the committee should look to find government waste.“The purpose of this portal is to receive ideas from the public about ideas to make Kansas government more efficient and effective,” the webpage says, oblivious that the first place it should cut is the redundancy of “ideas” in the sentence.

Mid-February 1945 witnessed the invasion of Iwo Jima by U.S. Marines.

We have mostly been fairly successful in growing potatoes in our garden. I don’t know how many potatoes other people get, so I do not know whether we are doing well, doing OK or doing worse than other potato growers, but we produce enough for ourselves and can often give some to the neighbors.

The Wizard of Oz means so many different things to so many different people.At one level it’s a classic children’s book, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” published by L. Frank Baum in 1900.

As of last week, 26 bills related to elections had been introduced into the state Legislature this session. Four of these bills have passed one of the houses — two in the Senate and two in the House.Three of these bills are functionally redundant as they do not change the state’s status quo and instead seem to be driven mostly by political posturing.

I was going into Price Chopper on Monday before the winter storm hit. For the record, I was not buying milk, bread or beer – the staples of the winter storm shopping list.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I was teaching a photojournalism class. Twenty undergraduates at the University of Kansas enrolled, each of them hoping to learn about making candid images.The challenge was obvious: no one wanted to be the subject of photography in the middle of a contagious public health crisis.

Last month I wrote an article on managing your dog’s environment to stop problem behaviors. This month’s article is on counter or table surfing.

As a fifth-generation Kansan who has spent more than two decades building up Kansas communities, I was honored to be appointed by the White House as state director for U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development in 2022.