Columns

CBS execs wanted profits over politics

When Stephen Colbert became a financial disaster for CBS, its execs fired him. For good measure, they also killed the “The Late Show,” the network’s failing 33-year-old flag-ship late-night program.

AI is a 21st century ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’

My favorite horror movie is the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” closely followed by the 1978 remake with Donald Sutherland. The reason I still sleep with the lights on after watching them is the idea that we can live among facsimiles of reality, when it’s all fabrication.

Barbershop bones brought lots of speculation

Everybody who saw them seemed to have an opinion about the big bones on display at the Dupre Barber Shop in Eunice in March 1943. Delino Miller brought them to the shop. He said his grandfather found them about 1895 in the Atchafalaya Basin, but he didn’t know much else about them.

Are you clinging to ‘poor-people’ habits?

“And we was too broke to even pay heed/But that’s how it is when you’re po’ folks.” — Bill Anderson. I was intrigued by a recent USA Today article about “poor-people” habits (i.e. vestiges of frugality that persist even when a person becomes financially comfortable).

How PBS and NPR can go commercial

“The public broadcasting people are too snooty to run traditional advertisements,” I said to a giddy media consultant. “The Trump-backed bill rescinded more than $1 billion in public broadcasting funds,” said the consultant.

The DOE gets Fs in education

It’s only taken 45 years for my father’s dream to come true — at least in part. But thanks to Donald Trump, a Republican Congress and a conservative Supreme Court, the Department of Education is finally being dismantled. My father called for the DOE to be abolished when he ran for president in 1980.

Covering Uncle Sam’s debt

My hat goes off to them. I speak of the wonderful people who give their own money to Washington in hopes of reducing the national debt. Since 1961, the U.S. Treasury Department has accepted these “gifts” — though by law, they can’t be used to pay down the total debt.

Is bottomless overtime right for you?

Is work-life balance dead, and will you even find time to attend the funeral?

Shot through screen door sealed killer’s fate

No roads led to Cameron in the 1920s, but that didn’t keep crowds of people from gathering there for the trial of the man newspapers called “the pivotal figure in the worst crime ever committed in Cameron Parish.”

Let’s stop using tragedy to make political hay

When 20 children were murdered two weeks before Christmas in Newtown, Conn., my worldview shifted. To me, the violent shooting deaths of babies who were contemplating sugar plums and Santa challenged my belief in a good and loving God.