Forget fentanyl, oxy, and crack. The most powerful drugs damaging St. Louis and America are selfishness and stupidity. And the cut-taxes-at-any-cost movement is a CDC-worthy epidemic of both.

As the noted economist 50 Cent has pointed out, everyone wants to get rich or die tryin’. And that’s one of the reasons conservatives have been able to get away with their tax-cut trickle-down scam for so long: most of us fantasize that someday, we too will be rich, just like the oligarchs w…

It was early 1995. I had just moved to St. Louis from Miami to work at KMOX, and the Downtown Rotary Club had invited me to give a speech. It was a mistake they would not repeat.

My stepdaughter’s South Side apartment wasn’t huge, but it was a nice little place, a second-floor walk-up where I would roll on the floor with the grandkids in the small front room with the bay window and the decorative fireplace that had burned coal in the early 20th century, when the two-…

One of the big selling points of the city-county merger plan from the Better Together group is that it would eliminate dozens of often-tiny police departments in the county, along with the county and city police departments, and replace them with one, unified metro-city cop shop.

Like the old saying goes, “A camel is a horse designed by committee.” That, of course, is unfair to the camel, since a camel is perfectly designed for the world in which it lives. A camel is a wonderful camel. It’s just a lousy horse.

Once again, outside prosecutors have decided that prosecuting violent crimes in federal court is the best way for St. Louis to lose its reputation as the deadliest city in the United States. And once again, they’ve gotten it wrong.

Unpaid TSA screeners at St. Louis Lambert International Airport (whose original purpose was to screen for radical Islamic terrorists) were fed free lunches by the Islamic Foundation of Greater St. Louis. In Texas, unpaid federal prosecutors were in court, telling the judge they were only all…

In its continuing drive to re-constitute the Confederacy by attempting to make racism a coherent political philosophy, the American conservative movement and its Supreme Court are preparing to gut Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s. legal legacy over the next two years.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. saw the dangers of American nationalism over a half-century ago, convinced that nationalism in the United States would translate into white nationalism.

When the Medical Cannabis Business Conference and Expo rolls into St. Louis’ Union Station Monday, March 11 and Tuesday, March 12, the speakers, vendors, exhibitors, and participants will probably be overwhelmingly white. That’s because the regulations governing the medical and recreational …

Donna Rogers helps get the crops planted and keeps the money flowing in rural Missouri. The 51-year-old North County single mother of two processes loans from the federal government to farmers, loans used to buy everything from seed for spring planting to new tractors to irrigation systems. …

When St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner said back in August that she would no longer prosecute cases submitted by 28 city cops because she thinks those officers are liars, you would have thought an alien spacecraft had just landed on the Arch grounds.

When former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio headlines the St. Louis County Republican Party’s annual Lincoln Days Dinner on March 23, Tony Singleton, Marty Atencio, and Debby Braillard won’t be able to make it.

Republicans have been on a jihad to bankrupt the government for almost 40 years for two reasons: they believe government is inherently evil and that the rich are better than the rest of us by virtue of being rich.

2019 will be the year that determines whether the rule of law and the Constitution are strong enough to boot an unstable criminal from office and whether a sociopathic president of the United States will be able to dig his claws in deeply enough to hold onto power, shredding the Constitution…

Cities and regions don’t stagnate and die by accident. It takes a lot of thought and purposeful action to take an area with world-class institutions and reduce it to irrelevance. St. Louis managed, though, through a century and a half of selfish decisions that were often racist, usually the …

U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill’s exit interviews are heavy on advice and conclusions, many of them dead wrong.

Maybe because he was born, raised, and still lives in Canada, former Wall Street Journal editorial writer and George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum never bought into the GOP’s inevitable drift into white nationalism.

Christians have been disguising one thing as another at least since 336 AD, when the Roman Emperor Constantine decided to co-opt the Roman solstice celebration of Saturnalia and the “barbarian” Celtic Yule festivities by officially declaring December 25 Jesus’ birthday. That way, Christians …

According to U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the best way to handle mass murders at schools is to make it easier to expel and suspend black kids, since all of the shooters have been white.

The St. Louis Police Officers Association (SLPOA) is a “labor union” in the same way the Ku Klux Klan is a “fraternal organization.” The description is technically correct as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Old St. Louis Region tossed in his bed. The Ghost of Christmas Past had already shown him what once was – manufacturing, a big population, racist segregation, white flight.

Americans are like St. Louis barbeque sauce—sweet, but thick. We’re pleasant enough most days, but we believe in ghosts, aliens, healing crystals, and phony Facebook rumors. Like Kurt Andersen wrote in his book “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire,” Americans “have an almost promiscuous de…

Calling Missouri Republicans pious, gun-toting, racist frauds doesn’t make them any worse than Republicans anywhere else. It’s the brazen stupidity that sets them apart.

In a country that needs to laugh to keep from crying, a Saturday Night Live sketch this last weekend hit our national funny bone with a ballpeen hammer. Called “Them Trumps,” it asked “What if Trump was black?’ and presented President Darius Trump with wife Malika and their children Darius J…

The White People’s Nationalist Party, formerly known as the GOP, hisses in a rolling boil of rage and grievance, convinced that parasitic and violent black people, drug-peddling Spanish-speaking immigrants, and white elitist liberals have conspired to rob them of money, privilege, safety, an…

Almost a quarter-century before the Republican Party decided that the wrong side won World War II, George H.W. Bush recognized the power of the scary black man to galvanize white voters. On this National Day of Mourning for the 41st president, it’s good to remember that his kindness and dece…

Luther Hall became one of the few black detectives in St. Louis’s racially divided police department despite having cost the city $865,000 in damages in 2010 when a federal jury found that he had beaten a handcuffed suspect in 2008. Since the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners had ruled…

Americans hoping Robert Mueller will remove Trump from office are like the optimistic little boy who wanted a pony for Christmas, but came downstairs Christmas morning only to find a pile of manure under the tree. He broke into a big smile, explaining, “With all of this poop, there must be a…

We’ve known for years that climate change is accelerating more rapidly than anyone thought and that the urban poor will be hit worst. More of them will die, more will get sick, and more will face excess heat, increased floods, and economic disaster with no way to escape. But the media, until…

If you wake up Wednesday morning to find that the newest member of the United States Senate is a racist white woman who looks like the “after” picture in an anti-meth ad, you can blame it on the fact that there aren’t enough black women in Mississippi.

If stupidity were oil, America would be Saudi Arabia. We elected Trump. We believe idiot fake stories on Facebook. We mainline conspiracy theories like a back alley oxy fiend. We think vaccines cause diseases. We love guns, believe climate change is a hoax, and use motorized scooters at the …

I am thankful, in passing, for a lot of things—decent health, relative financial security, bourbon mixed with sweet vermouth, sunset on the South African highveld, NASA, Miles Davis, and baseball. But in my bones, I am profoundly thankful for a few things—my wife, my daughter, my grandchildr…

Evil disguised as common sense is as American as Thanksgiving, and now we have research to back it up. An international gaggle of well-meaning researchers spent a year talking to Americans and have produced a study called “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape.”

The six .40 caliber slugs Darren Wilson pumped into Michael Brown on Ferguson’s Canfield Drive four years ago killed the 18-year old, sparked a rebellion, and started a white backlash that helped to elect Donald Trump.

The bug-eyed MAGA red hats who pack Donald Trump rallies aren’t attending  political events so much as a worship services, with Trump as the angry white tribe’s messiah. And while Trump may be a blovating racist, a narcissistic despot, a cowardly liar, an unfit sociopath, and a gelatinous gr…

In deep-red rural and exurban Missouri, the Democrats’ progressive economic and political policies are pretty popular, while the Democrats themselves are toxic. Democrats can change that if they would go back to being 1938 Democrats and abandon 2018 support for minority rights, abortion righ…

Any country founded by religious fanatics, refugees and hucksters needs a good creation myth to take the edge off the truth, and America found one courtesy of Ronald Reagan by way of Jesus Christ. According Matthew 5:14, Jesus supposedly said, “You are the light of the world. A city set upon…

Republican voters in 2018 are the electoral equivalent of a car full of teenagers with a bagful of blow and a bottle of vodka, six felonies among them and two Glocks stuffed under the seat, ripping down an interstate at 2 a.m. looking for an open convenience store. What they’re doing is bad …

America may no longer exist as a functioning democracy within two years. Donald Trump will make sure of that if both houses of Congress remain in GOP control Wednesday morning.

Next week, voters in Missouri, Michigan, Colorado, and Utah will decide whether to take drawing congressional and state legislative districts out of the hands of political hacks and give the responsibility to non-partisan professionals. So, naturally, the political hacks are upset.

If America were an all-white country, we would have had universal health care decades ago.  Even though cancer, heart disease, and diabetes are color-blind, conservative whites have consistently opposed expanded health care access because many whites would rather be sick than share a waiting…

Like an arsonist returning to look at the smoldering ashes, Donald Trump went to Pittsburgh on October 30 to contemplate the synagogue slaughter he helped cause. “Contemplate,” though, is probably the wrong word, since contemplation implies thought and inner reflection, and Trump is capable …

If the penalties for aiding and abetting right-wing domestic terrorism were the same as those for supporting and funding Islamic terrorism, the next Republican Convention could easily be held inside Leavenworth Federal Prison. The entire Republican Party, from “nothing to see here” types lik…

This ends with body bags. You know it, I know it, Trump knows it, his complicit political sycophants know it, and the bug-eyed hyperventilating racists at his rallies know it.

Like anyone who ever took physics, I always thought that the Pauli Exclusion Principle was absolute, that two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time. But during Professor Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the committee’s 11 white male GOP Sena…

Shortly after civil rights hero and Georgia Congressman John Lewis appeared in East St. Louis last week at a get out the vote rally for Democrats, he tweeted a plea weighted down with history and sacrifice.

If America were an all-white country, we would have had universal health care decades ago.  Even though cancer, heart disease, and diabetes are color-blind, conservative whites have consistently opposed expanded health care access because many whites would rather be sick than share a waiting…

Despite its racist beginnings, Social Security has evolved into a vital lifeline for millions of Americans, white and black. Medicare provides a huge safety net for Americans over 65, as well as people who have been on Social Security disability for over two years. Over half of African-Ameri…