Opinion

Josh Hawley, Missouri’s firstterm junior U.S. senator, works overtime to try to make himself sound like a big deal.

The right to redress government is part of the U.S. Constitution and is practiced with vigor in Missouri, but some Republicans want to change that and are meeting opposition rightly from conservatives within their own party.

From its beginning in 1918, Russian Communists led by Lenin and then Stalin sought to control populations by intimidation, brutality and death. Lenin murdered 6 million people and Stalin three times as many. During Stalin’s reign from 1925 to 1953, Communism spread to Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba. President Reagan referred to the USSR as the “evil empire,” and President Eisenhower stated the Soviet government believed in the “force of huge armies, subversion and rule of neighboring nations.”

I hear a lot on TV about rising gas prices and have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, Missouri has some of the lowest gasoline taxes in the United States, so that saves me money.

Our Missouri legislators really do not seem to care for the poor or the will of the people. We the people voted to expand Medicaid to cover about 200,000 more poor Missourians.

Complex issues require hard work to solve, making them too difficult to use to win political campaigns, so politicians fall back on the tried-and-true practice of faking problems, blowing them out of proportion and then offering solutions to those phantom problems.

Missouri Department of Transportation policies, at least as evidenced in Ray County, are far less friendly toward the military and veterans than promised in a state where former Gov. Jay Nixon, present Gov. Mike Parson and other political leaders seek to present a friendly face.

I took out the trash Nov. 30.