This nation owes a debt of gratitude to Congress for passing the Electoral Count Reform Act as part of the $1.7 trillion year-end funding bill in one of the last acts of the lame-duck session.

Few countries can be said to have truly responded adequately to the deadly threat of the coronavirus, and ours certainly isn’t near the top, with a poisonous fixation on individual liberty that shot even basic collective efforts to ward off the crisis.

The internet and social media have provided organizations and people with a great many windows on the world compared to the three major television stations of the 1950s.

This is peak season for conceiving babies. Coincidentally, this December has also seen a debate over whether and how to expand the child tax credit, and that debate has brought more attention to another one: Why have U.S. birth rates been dropping?

Let’s get right to the point: If and when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Chuck Grassley ever again try to prop up their bona fides as supporters of U.S. troops and our allies abroad, they should be laughed out of the room.

In many ways, 2022 might seem like it was a pretty bad year for Americans on the political right. After all, the year saw record budget deficits, spending bills loaded with corporate welfare, a legally dubious student loan scheme, and disappointing election results for the Republican Party.

There’s no question that 2022 was challenging. A stubborn pandemic, Russia’s devastating war in Ukraine and the resulting inflation have all squeezed American families.

New Census Bureau numbers released last week reveal an unmistakable trend: High-tax blue states are losing residents to low-tax red states. Are elected officials listening?

The House of Representatives spent Friday passing the $1.65 trillion omnibus spending blowout, and the bill is loaded with earmarks and pet priorities from healthcare to public lands that few Members have bothered to read. This is no way to run a government, and compounding the embarrassment is that half of the lawmakers had already ditched Washington for the holidays.

The national debt is much like the weather. Everybody worries about the topic, but nobody wants to do anything about it.

Happy Holidays from the Kona-Kohala Chamber of Commerce! For some in our community, this is a time to downshift and take time off work. For others, these are the busiest two weeks of the entire year at their place of business — all hands on deck!

It’s been one year since the last monthly Child Tax Credit (CTC) payment was issued.

From Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., antisemitism is once again on the rise, being echoed by celebrities with wide audiences such as Kanye West and Kyrie Irving. To Jewish people who remember the Holocaust — or those, like myself, who survived it — this shameless bigotry is nothing new. Although the Holocaust ended more than 75 years ago, these instances point to how hatred toward Jewish people is perpetuated to this day, along with Holocaust denial.

Just because political graft is obvious doesn’t mean it’s any less odious.