Opinion

As an election year dawns, Republicans and Democrats should stop to reflect on why our politics seems so stagnant. No one expects President Joe Biden to earn a mandate even if he wins reelection; it won’t be a victory for Biden so much as a defeat for Donald Trump.

Cheers to 2024! Dear Annie: When I was growing up, my father used to tell my brothers and sisters and me how important it was to set New Year’s resolutions. He would write down one or two goals for the coming year, and then periodically tell us how he was doing over the months that followed.

One way you can tell that journalists are a panicked pack of partisans who earnestly feel President Joe Biden’s pain is how they’re currently reporting on the economy. They don’t question whether the news is good. They question when will Biden receive credit for all the alleged great economic improvements since he took office.

For the average Oklahoman, the State Department of Education essentially has two main responsibilities — distributing federal funding to local districts and making sure that schools and educators have the resources and support they need to thrive.

Dear Annie: A few weeks ago, a friend and I had a trip to Costco planned. The night before, I fell in my house and wasn’t sure if I sprained or broke my hand in the wee hours. I couldn’t make up my mind whether I should go to urgent care in the morning or the ER that night. I was in pain, but it wasn’t killing me, so I decided to reevaluate it in the morning. I was hurting enough in the morning to decide to go.

How’s America doing? Government statisticians provide mounds of data that provide useful clues, and none more so than the Census Bureau’s estimates of population, announced in the holiday weeks at the end of each calendar year. The latest numbers measure the estimated population of each state as of last July 1 as compared to the constitutionally required decennial census dated April 1, 2020.

There’s a neurotic need in the right-leaning media to declare that California is going down. The future belongs to Texas and Florida, where “woke” is a discouraging word -- and climate change is somebody else’s problem, if it is a problem.

The Year’s Highlights in Blame Shifting After two former Georgia election workers sued Rudy Giuliani for falsely accusing them of committing massive fraud in 2020, his attorney argued that the real culprit in that calumny was The Gateway Pundit. Meanwhile, Gateway Pundit publisher Jim Hoft, who faced a separate defamation lawsuit by the same plaintiffs, was arguing that his website “fairly and accurately reported on the claims made by third parties, such as Trump’s legal team,” which Giuliani led.

Dear Annie: My 16-yearold daughter is relentless in begging me to have a sleepover with her boyfriend. She insists they are not sexually active and that she simply wants to hang out with him, watch movies and sleep next to him. For some reason, nothing I say to explain why my answer is no seems to make any sense to her.

At first glance, the price of attending college may seem astounding. “In 2023-24,” reports the College Board, “average estimated budgets (tuition and fees, housing and food, and allowances for books and supplies, transportation and other personal expenses) for full-time undergraduate students range from $19,860 for public two-year in-district students and $28,840 for public four-year in-state students to $46,730 for public four-year out-ofstate students and $60,420 for private nonprofit fouryear students.” In its report on “Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2023,” the College Board includes a graphic that breaks these numbers down by their components.