Opinion

Need to learn how to unclog a shower drain, jump-start a car, shave your face without bleeding to death or successfully address dozens of other practical adult daily activities? Rob Kenney offers this kind of basic “dad advice,” and millions are tuning into his YouTube channel “Dad, How Do I?” to hear it. Kenney, who promises his subscribers he’ll do “my best to provide useful, practical content to many basic tasks that everyone should know how to do,” told Buzzfeed he began making YouTube videos after his 27-year-old daughter would call him “with countless ‘adulting’ questions.” “Every day she was calling me and … I thought, ‘What do other people do when they don’t have that resource?’ ” Kenney was painfully aware of what it was like to lack a fatherly resource.

Some asinine positions taken by most of the Republican-dominated Missouri General Assembly got resolved this year, when lawmakers agreed to collect online sales tax, raise the gas tax and approve a statewide prescription drug monitoring program.

After about a decade of wriggling and whining, with copious amounts of pretense sprinkled liberally upon nonsense, the Republican-dominated General Assembly – kicking and screaming to the last – finally agreed that online businesses should pay the same sales tax that mom-and-pop businesses have paid all along.

Whenever prominent people are pitted against each other in a court case, their friends tend to take sides. That is the situation regarding people involved in the case of former Superintendent Mike Aytes vs. the Richmond Board of Education.

In April 2018, voters passed a 1% sales tax to be used for the funding of 911. The Board of Directors at the time pushed for a tax that would provide a secure, long-term source of income, which would be able to sustain Ray County 911 services, both now and in the future. This funding is used to meet payroll needs, maintain and update equipment, pay utilities, provide and maintain a building to house 911, and cover other expenses necessary for the operation of a 911 dispatch center. Each year, the Board of Directors is obligated by state statute to review and adjust the tax rate if income surpasses needs.