Joe Herring

Joe Herring

  • Nebraska RINO gets the cold shoulder from his own state party

    February 9, 2024

    Nebraska RINO gets the cold shoulder from his own state party

    When you, as an incumbent, discover the GOP Central Committee of your own state declines to endorse you, a little soul-searching might be in order.  This is what happened to Congressman Don Bacon (R-Neb.). In Bacon’s defense, no on...

  • January 26, 2024

    A RINO in Nebraska Starts Sweating

    Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), the frequently embattled 2nd District congressman, has spent much of his political career redefining what it means to be an independent leader representing a “purple district” in otherwise deep red Nebraska. Wh...

  • January 18, 2024

    Who is Trump’s real opponent? Not Biden.

    The post-Iowa consensus appears to be coalescing around the idea that Trump ought to ignore his GOP challengers and turn his focus entirely on Joe Biden.  Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, of the Clay and Buck Show, suggested this would result i...

  • January 4, 2024

    ‘First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Lawyers!’

    Shakespeare famously wrote, “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”  This startling suggestion is offered by the character “Dick the Butcher” in Shakespeare’s play, Henry VI, Part II. Often co...

  • June 5, 2022

    Where Can We Put Prisoners if Not in Jails?

    "We can't build our way out of this!" is the common, knee-jerk response to the question of overcrowding in Nebraska's state prison system.  Although rarely accompanied with evidence, that statement is nonetheless parroted ...

  • April 30, 2022

    How to Turn a Whole State's Power Production to Wind and Solar Dreams

    Many ideas considered radical a decade ago now enjoy mainstream support in the environmentalist movement.  Demands to "decarbonize" electricity production are proceeding apace despite the limitations of generating electricity reli...

  • April 7, 2021

    Critical Race Theory joins loathsome 18th-century racist pseudosciences

    There is an interesting (and telling) consequence of the propagation of Critical Race Theory (CRT) throughout the collective American intellect, creating a dissonance that fuels the continuation of the very ideas CRT claims to banish. The elements...

  • April 26, 2020

    Stealing the Election in Plain Sight

    If you were still harboring naïve notions of free and fair elections when Democrats are involved, perhaps this will help disabuse you of those fantasies. From a Fox News report a few days ago: A prominent Democratic lawyer who represente...

  • January 25, 2020

    A knife at a gunfight? Disarm the House Democrats

    The strategy the House impeachment managers are employing as they "make their case," has become apparent, and if not countered, Republicans may win the battle but lose the war. The Laurel & Hardy of the House (Adam Schiff and Jerrold...

  • December 15, 2019

    The Democrats are engaged in a coup. What do we do about it?

    Stories are freighted with an inherent power to influence, persuade, even form perceptions from whole cloth among those who hear them.  Were it not so, Hollywood would be just another town. It is that raw power that has taught us to exer...

  • May 31, 2019

    Maxine Waters Let Obama's Cat Out of the Bag in 2013

    When assembling a cabal, prudence dictates that one choose the participants with an eye toward circumspection.  After all, a loudmouth is not the best repository for your darkest secrets. President Barack Obama may be about to learn that...

  • May 11, 2019

    Tough love from Donald Trump

    The president's decision to declare the entirety of the Mueller Report subject to executive privilege places that document (and all associated materials) off-limits to the grubbing hands of congressional Democrats.  Remarks by administr...

  • April 20, 2019

    We were warned: Leftists making dystopian fiction into reality

    When someone insists on bridging vast chasms of logic with ephemeral constructs of fantasy, we rightfully reject his conclusions, usually with words like "unsupportable" or, my personal favorite, "bat-s‑‑‑‑ crazy." The Mueller ...

  • April 10, 2019

    Nebraska Flooding: When the Government Cares More about Birds than People

    When I recently discussed (in these pages) the degree of responsibility for the current catastrophic flooding that should accrue to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), I clearly stated that the entirety of flooding could not have been prevented...

  • March 24, 2019

    Green Insanity Is Flooding Towns and Destroying Lives

    Having written extensively in these pages (read here, here, and here) on the catastrophic flooding of the Missouri River basin in 2011, I believe that the occasion of this present flood disaster plaguing Nebraska, Iowa, and South Dakota has given ris...

  • November 1, 2018

    Nebraska's Medicaid Expansion Is a Dangerous Fraud. Its Advocates Know It.

    There are only two sorts of people roaming this earth: those who just want to be let alone and those who simply cannot keep their hands to themselves.  We institute governments to restrain the latter from tormenting the former without relen...

  • September 6, 2018

    A guess at identifying the NYT's infamous anonymous Trump insider

    The New York Times published an anonymous op-ed, purportedly penned by a "senior White House official" in the Trump administration. Read the missive, and note that there are several clear "tells" in the piece – clues tha...

  • August 4, 2018

    Socialism can't flourish without ignorance

    The capacity of human beings for making the same mistake again and again is exceeded only by the capacity of their governments to enshrine those mistakes in law. To err is human; to forgive, divine – but what are we to do when a significant ...

  • July 18, 2018

    If Not Russia, Who Is Hillary's 'Foreign Entity'?

    I've long said Hillary Clinton is insufficiently stupid to have believed she could operate an unsecured home server without compromising the security of any data transmitted through it or stored on it. For just as long, it has been my contenti...

  • June 28, 2018

    We're seeing the violence of the '60s again...but worse

    Nowhere is it more evident than among the political left that "there is nothing new under the sun."  Having long ago lost the debate over which political system best serves humanity, leftists have resorted to a toxic combination o...

  • April 27, 2018

    Alfie Evans: Another Child Sacrifice on Britain's NHS Altar

    I admit, my reaction to the plight of young Alfie Evans is colored by my experience with my own grandson, Joseph, who suffers from a similar disorder. I see Joseph's innocence in Alfie's eyes, and I struggle with the marked physical resemb...

  • March 8, 2018

    Socialized medicine demands another sacrifice

    The ghouls of the NHS (Britain's National Health Service) are demanding that another soul be sacrificed to burnish their "infallibility" bona fides. Young Alfie Evans, a 21-month-old boy in England, is suffering from an unknown neuro...

  • March 8, 2018

    Tell the Truth on Tariffs!

    So much huff and puff surrounds Trump's tariff talk, I thought it time to inject a little perspective into this heated (and often misinformed) debate. Senator Ben Sasse was on Newsradio 1110 KFAB in Omaha, Nebraska the morning of March 7, issu...

  • February 21, 2018

    Zero tolerance policies: the seedbed of school shootings

    Since the Parkland, Florida school shooting, many commentators have laid blame on the diminished state of morality in today's society, and there can be no doubt as to the corrosive effect on people of depictions of violence, hyper-sexuality, and ...

  • February 16, 2018

    School shootings and clairvoyant government

    The harsh reality of the Florida school shooting is that prevention is possible only if our authorities are clairvoyant, or given unthinkable powers to pretend so. Gun control arguments, whether relating to restricting access to guns or banning th...

  • February 7, 2018

    Where the bodies are buried

    While a great deal of intensity is properly focused on FISA warrants relating to the supposed "Trump-Russia collusion" investigation, there remain two aspects to this story as yet unexamined by major media.  The first is the circu...

  • January 26, 2018

    Beware a scorched-earth Deep State retreat

    With the layers of corruption being peeled back from the illegal and unconstitutional collaboration between Deep State federal bureaucrats and a left-wing-driven "shadow government" (which is nothing less than a continuation of the worst el...

  • January 20, 2018

    Playing McClellan to Trump's Grant: The NeverTrump Traitors

    Some learned and accomplished folks, who deservedly command a great deal of respect and admiration, view the Trump presidency in an entirely different light from what millions of Americans see. To these sage and wizened critics, the president'...

  • December 12, 2017

    #MeToo really means #GetTrump

    When the #MeToo hashtag began, I warned anyone who would listen against unqualified participation by those honestly seeking to make things better.  I was concerned that the structure, rapidity, and prepackaged nature of this "move...

  • November 1, 2017

    The swamp floats a plea bargain

    The Wall Street Journal again illustrates its willingness to overlook nearly anything as long as we can just get back to making money...regardless of whether privately or by skimming off the public. Mr. Trump can end this madness by immediately ...

  • October 31, 2017

    Judicial hubris has escalated into a judicial coup

    A federal judge has ventured far beyond mere judicial activism in declaring that the president cannot alter the policy of his predecessor regarding men who consider themselves women, and vice versa, serving in the military. In effect, this judge h...

  • July 25, 2017

    In Hell we remain

    Charlie Gard's parents have reportedly withdrawn their legal challenge to the Great Ormond Street Hospital's demand to quit wasting time and get on with the business of killing their son in the name of "compassion." While an appa...

  • July 21, 2017

    Repeal and Unleash: Shrugging Off Government in Health Care

    After eight long years of "We have a better way!," congressional Republicans are proving a case for their own irrelevance. The repeal-replace concept isn't particularly difficult to understand or to implement, unless one is tryi...

  • June 18, 2017

    The widening gap within American politics

    There is a very good reason behind the growing divide between conservatives and liberals, and it has nothing to do with rhetoric, parties, over-sensitivity, or generally uncivil thinking. It involves shared principles of government and the sad rea...

  • April 28, 2017

    Congress can rein in activist judges

    President Trump has issued two executive orders directing a temporary halt to immigration from certain countries along with the most recent order to withhold federal funds from so-called sanctuary cities and counties.  The travel-related orde...

  • December 5, 2016

    The Left's Coming Counter-Attack

    When the Soviet Union fell, all the little commies didn't wake up the next morning and say, "You know, those wacky Americans were right all along!  Let's go do some freedom and liberty stuff!" No, they woke up bitter and fur...

  • October 17, 2016

    A 'Real War for Oil'

    The brinkmanship in which President's Obama and Putin are now engaged over Syria was entirely avoidable.  It is the result of supremely misguided and – in many cases – entirely illegal policies implemented by our president and me...

  • May 9, 2016

    Trump vs. Clinton: Safer with 'The Devil We Don't Know'?

    There's a movement percolating among some segments of the Republican party, known by the hashtag #NeverTrump.  Essentially, this group believes that a vote for Trump represents a step over that "line which must not be crossed" ...

  • May 2, 2016

    Clinton Was Never Intended to Be the Democrat Nominee

    Former speaker of the House John Boehner recently spoke ill of fellow Republican Ted Cruz in a Q&A at Stanford University.  His comments likening the candidate to "Lucifer in the flesh" got all the media attention, leaving this vir...

  • April 20, 2016

    What We Sow in Spring, We Shall Reap in Fall

    We have reached a dangerous place – a juncture, beyond which lies either hope of recovery and restoration of our Constitutional Republic or the continuing erosion and eventual erasure of our protections as citizens against a rapacious governmen...

  • March 4, 2016

    It Ain't Even Close to Over

    With Super Tuesday receding in the rearview mirror, it is prudent to turn our attention to the road ahead.  This isn't an ordinary election year – at least not in the fashion we have come to know in the post-WWII era – where prim...

  • January 12, 2016

    How Welcome Should Obama Feel in Omaha?

    Omaha, Nebraska has been largely shielded from the economic and social paroxysms that have beset our nation in the last decade – not because we are protected by our many famous and powerful residents, but because we yet adhere to the core value...

  • November 20, 2015

    The Refugee Resettlement Tango

    Under normal circumstances, the screening process for a refugee coming to America takes, on average, between 8 and 14 months, frequently stretching to a full two years if the refugee is from an area of high concern. The process begins with a desig...

  • November 1, 2015

    Genocide in the 20th Century, Suicide in the 21st

    Germany, Europe's largest economy, is expected to take in up to a million "refugees" this year alone, sparking anger among native Germans and spawning the rise of the PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident)...

  • September 24, 2015

    Importing Our Own Destruction

      The 1,400-year-long cycle of Islamic violence is fed not by injustice or fresh new assaults on sovereignty.  Rather, it pre-exists the rise of Western capitalism by several centuries, and it constitutes the heart of the Muslim world....

  • September 22, 2015

    Ben Carson's right

    Ben Carson isn't a bigot – he is absolutely right.  A Muslim should not be president of the United States.  If Islam were merely a religion, then Dr. Carson would indeed be misguided, but Islam is so much more.  Islam is ever...

  • September 14, 2015

    The Caliphate Growing at the Feet of Obama

    The international left wasted no time in using the below tragic image as fodder for the multiculturalism/open borders war, suggesting that somehow the West's reluctance to provide safe haven for potentially every human being on the planet is resp...

  • February 6, 2015

    Bowing before ISIS

    The horrific act of burning someone alive was long ago relegated to the musty corners of the Western mind…something people did to witches hundreds of years ago, and even then rarely. Thanks to ISIS, this hideous method of execution has been...

  • January 15, 2015

    A Nebraska David Outmaneuvers a Global Goliath

    A group of young men in Nebraska are singlehandedly (or multi-handedly, to be more precise) eviscerating the stranglehold broadcast and print media have had on political speech since the first reporter scratched “Og no good” on the commun...

  • October 12, 2014

    My Father's Name Was Roy, and He Died on His Own Terms, Too

    There is a story going around the internet about a young woman who has chosen to “die with dignity,” on her own terms, rather than put herself and her family through the expected horrors of a painful and ugly death. She has a brain tum...

  • June 8, 2014

    A Mosque, a Synagogue, and a Church: What Could Go Wrong?

    The Tri-Faith Initiative in Omaha is a project that raises questions.  The planned co-location of a synagogue, a mosque, and a church on the same campus is a novel enough idea to stir curiosity.  Add in connections between the proposed mosq...

  • November 6, 2013

    I Am Now a Dissident (and You Should Be, Too!)

    dissident n. a person who opposes official policy, esp. that of an authoritarian state. We live in a nation where the constitutionally respectful are becoming increasingly outnumbered by those who neither understand the underpinnings of our foundin...

  • March 16, 2013

    Medicaid Expansion: An Unquenchable Thirst

    In The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), we see the worst of both baron and busybody.  Having combined forces, each receives from ObamaCare the nutrition he craves -- the crony capitalist devours lucre, and the busybody feasts on...

  • November 23, 2012

    The 'Balanced Approach' Is an Unbalanced Lie

    As the Republicans in Congress struggle to find relevance in a world that ignores sanity, those of us who yet retain a grasp on our faculties must be careful to not lose our way.  While we are understandably stunned by the grasping nature of so ...

  • September 24, 2012

    The Achilles Heel of ObamaCare

    The clock is ticking on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) among the 50 states.  Heavy pressure from the Obama administration is focused on convincing states to establish their own health insurance exchanges under the law,...

  • September 9, 2012

    On 9/11 and Forgiveness

    Today, before the sun had melted the morning into afternoon, I had been told three times that forgiveness was the order of the day for this upcoming 11th anniversary of 9/11.  Once was by the carnival barker/news anchor on the television.  ...

  • August 4, 2012

    'Why Not ObamaCare?'

    Millions of people like ObamaCare.  The idea of universal coverage appeals to many Americans, as does the ability to cover adult children on a parent's policy.  Addressing the subject of pre-existing conditions and portability of health ins...

  • March 23, 2012

    The Way Forward for the Keystone XL

    "Under my administration," President Obama crowed recently, "there is more domestic drilling than at any time in the last 8 years."  Perhaps if this president were more concerned with truth than appearance, he might've finished that sentence wit...

  • March 20, 2012

    The Executive Order Controversy

    On Friday, 3/16/2012, President Obama issued an executive order called "National Defense Resources Preparedness" (NDRP), posting it on the White House's official website. Almost immediately, the blogosphere exploded with the news.  Citizens bega...

  • January 28, 2012

    'Thank You, Warren.' 'No, Thank You, Mr. President!'

    The "tar-sands" oil from Canada, and the crude from the Bakken and Three Forks formations in North Dakota, will be extracted regardless of the ultimate fate of the Keystone XL pipeline, but should the pipeline not be built, nearly all of the transpor...

  • January 6, 2012

    The Promise of ObamaCare: Hospice for the Healthy

    I find it sadly illustrative of the liberal state of mind that liberals would see the death penalty forever banned for fear that one innocent person be executed, yet they enthusiastically support the concept of euthanasia, where there is a proven lik...

  • October 22, 2011

    The Corps of Engineers Doubles Down on Flood Folly

    It has been five months since the Missouri River overcame its banks, and for that entire time, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been peddling the line that there was nothing they could have done to avoid the worst flooding to ever occur on this r...

  • October 6, 2011

    Warren Buffett, the Keystone Pipeline, and Crony Capitalism

    A decades-long crusade by the environmental left to convince us that oil is evil, unsustainable, and destroying our planet has yet to accomplish its goal of eliminating oil as a fuel, but it has succeeded in making oil damned expensive.  However...

  • September 7, 2011

    EPA: Fundamental Transformation through Regulation

    What happens when the information our government's "specialists" provide becomes driven by agenda rather than fact?  We are witnessing the answer writ large as the feds shepherd radical environmentalism into mainstream law and regulation. The EP...

  • August 17, 2011

    Green Ideology Trumps Flood Control

    As late as April of 2011, the Water Management Chief for the Corps of Engineers, Omaha District, expressed an opinion in an e-mail to a concerned citizen that the mountain snowmelt this year would "be nothing to write home about."   This in...

  • June 22, 2011

    The Purposeful Flooding of America's Heartland

    The Missouri River basin encompasses a vast region in the central and west-central portion of our country.  This river, our nation's longest, collects the melt from Rocky Mountain snowpack and the runoff from our continents' upper plains before ...

  • May 10, 2011

    The Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) is NICE

    In March of 2010, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi famously said, "We have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can find out what is in it."  Subsequent study of this leviathan legislation has brought some truly startling r...

  • March 12, 2011

    Futilitarians

    In his novel That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis wrote of a government-funded organization with the innocuous title of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE).  The novel was something of a "what-if" history of England,...

  • January 11, 2011

    Free Speech in the Crosshairs

    This can't be happening again.  A terrible tragedy, followed by vile recrimination and politically motivated accusations.  Were no lessons learned after the slander of conservatives following the Oklahoma City bombing?  Aside from the ...

  • November 22, 2010

    The Threat of Leftist Violence

    Politics can be described as the process through which citizens attempt to educate and persuade each other to not kill each other. History shows that differences in political philosophy create very real differences in perception. What appears "s...

  • October 30, 2010

    Scrooge

    Perhaps Dickens' Scrooge said it best, "Let them die, and thus decrease the surplus population!"  In these days of economic turmoil, governments at all levels are feeling the squeeze between diminishing revenues and increasing demand f...

  • October 29, 2010

    Many Americans unaware that they are 'rich'

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  • May 1, 2010

    Malevolent Neglect

    Much has been written about the substandard care and appalling conditions that led to the premature deaths of as many as 1,200 people at Stafford Hospital in England. As the story unfolds, it appears that the government's insistence that this was an ...

  • April 13, 2010

    ObamaCare's Key to the Kingdom

    The enacting legislation of ObamaCare creates a Disney World for micro-managers and other assorted scolds. But in Title V of the bill, we find the key to the Magic Kingdom, or at least the kingdom's treasury. Under the heading of "Health Care Wo...

  • April 9, 2010

    Once upon a Mattress

    In an unalloyed example of bureaucratic overkill, the Metropolitan Town Council of Bolton, England decided that a mattress dumped in a roadside ditch in the village of Little Lever would prove too daunting for mere mortals to remove. Locals had notic...

  • March 1, 2010

    Misery, Thy Name Is Bureaucracy

    It has been said that you can judge a nation by the way it treats its most vulnerable citizens. By that standard, Great Britain deserves little in the way of accolades. The nation embraced a socialized medicine program in 1948 known as the National H...

  • January 16, 2010

    Norman

    Norman hurried back to the bedroom, coffee in hand. A glimmer of faltering winter sun filtered through the window, reflected off the falling snow outside. The days were short now, though time meant little lately. Recently, not much of anything matter...

  • December 22, 2009

    In Pursuit of Death

    Americans are hopeful and forward-thinking, ever-eager for what lies beyond the next bend in the road. Given that we are a bright and enthusiastic lot, isn't it odd that a fascination with death has become fashionable in our politics and culture to t...

  • November 28, 2009

    Midwifing Leviathan

    American medicine is the benchmark for the world. Our physicians and hospitals are the elite in the war against death and suffering, and they have been winning. Ever-lengthening life spans show that the enemy is in retreat, while sickness and disabil...

  • November 12, 2009

    What's Wrong With Socialism?

    I recall a conversation I had with a young coworker in the latter weeks of Obama's campaign for president. Joe the plumber had just exposed the redistributionist bent of the candidate, and I expressed my assessment of Mr. Obama as a not-so-closeted s...

  • November 1, 2009

    Will We Lose It All?

    I'm an American guy. You don't know me; I'm not famous. I have a family and the responsibilities that go with that, and I try to be a man who can be counted on. I don't always succeed, but I've always tried. I was born here, but you don't need to be ...

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