Columns

Alan Guebert

One devil’s advocate thoughts
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Scott Shalaway

Critical responses to mandatory national service
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Hazard a Guess?

Do you know what this is?
No one has guessed yet!
Will you be the first?

Judith Sutherland

Life puts us where we are supposed to be

“The bright sun filtered through the clouds, warming the fields of alfalfa that my father was mowing. Within a day or two it would be put into bales of hay, gathered from the field, stored in the hay loft and used to feed our livestock. I stood at the fence line with the lunch my […]

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Kymberly Foster Seabolt

School trip is growing experience — for me

Our sixth-grade son, Wonderboy, has gone to camp. Camp being yet another thing the school district cooked up specifically to test me.
Much like the whole “Fifth graders totally belong in middle school with big giant huge children who look like they eat fifth graders for mid-morning snack!”
They have helpfully decided that in sixth grade, […]

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Susan Crowell

Where do these people come from?

I’m not a Scrooge, really, I’m not. So I can’t blame it on the upcoming holiday season. Maybe it’s just because I’m getting old(er). Or maybe I just need more chocolate. But for whatever the reason, I seem to be getting less tolerant of some of the news that crosses my desk.
For example, there is […]

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Marlin Clark

Crop harvest drags into Thanksgiving

USDA released the Sunday night Crop Progress Report Monday after the close, and it was not pretty. Harvest still drags on, and rain coming into the Midwest this week will not help.
Thanksgiving will come and go with corn, and even soybeans, still in the fields.
One of the biggest traditions of my youth was […]

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Miranda Reiman

Put more black ink on your bottom line

If Walmart were in the cattle business, it would probably serve as an operating definition of “least-cost producer.” People might refer to its cowherd enterprise as the model for slashing expenses.
That’s the way to make more money in this margin business, isn’t it? The simple economic equation is income minus expenses equals profit, so […]

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