Opinion

The Biden administration regulators see a monopoly boogeyman behind the curtain of nearly every business merger and acquisition from airlines to cellphones to chicken producers. Now they’re trying to stop Capital One from acquiring the credit card company Discover.

I saw it by accident. I was sitting in the kitchen at my family’s ranch in the high foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains -- not far from Yosemite National Park.

Washington’s pink cherry blossoms, a spring sight for sore eyes, are about to be whacked. The Park Service says 150 trees must be cut down to build a new seawall round the Tidal Basin, where the marble Jefferson Monument perches perfectly on the water.

Dear Annie: My daughter is the only grandchild, and my mother gives her a gift every time we see her. I’ve told her several times that we don’t want to overwhelm our child (3 years old) with material things, that she has too many toys she doesn’t play with. It’s very important to my husband and I that our child values what she has. My mother is single and very sensitive. Either she ignores what I say or cries. My husband is getting annoyed with the amount of things coming home and berates me for not standing up for our ideals more strongly. How can I address this? -- Caught in the Middle Dear Caught in the Middle: Grandparents love to spoil their grandkids. It’s part of what makes being a grandparent such a gift; all of the fun, none of the discipline! That being said, I can understand why you don’t want your child to grow accustomed to receiving material things every time she sees Grandma.

News that Catherine, Princess of Wales, has been diagnosed with cancer set off a pointless argument. One side complained that the royal family had not been forthcoming with the truth behind her long hospitalization. The other held that Catherine has a right to privacy and is under no obligation to make her medical condition public.

It’s the new season of “The Apprentice,” only this time Donald Trump isn’t looking for the next business whiz, he’s in the market for a running mate. He has his eyes on several possibilities close to home -- his original and adopted home states of New York and Florida, that is.

Dear Annie: When my nephew was a toddler and his family visited, my mom (his grandmother) got big furniture boxes discarded from stores and made forts and tunnels in our large family room. She got down on the floor and played whatever character he chose her to be in this turf maze. She didn’t care if she played a dinosaur or the Lone Ranger.

Dear Readers: We recently ran a letter from someone who complained that cashiers at grocery stores rarely thank them, the customers. I heard from many of you who have worked as cashiers at supermarkets, and I am grateful for your letters as they provide a firsthand account of the other perspective.

Oklahoma politicians have developed a nasty habit of questioning the will of the voters. Whenever there’s an election outcome for a citizenled petition that they don’t like, lawmakers like to spout off that voters didn’t know what they were doing as they come up with creative — and often offensive – ways to circumvent the will of the people.

For the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, the partisan Democrats of our “legacy media” treated the Pelosi-Picked Panel on Jan. 6 as a dominant story, worthy of hundreds of hours of television coverage, both live coverage of the hearings and breathless cycles of previews and reviews. Once Republicans took over the House, would we have predicted this kind of committee oversight coverage would go from Hero to Zero?