WASHINGTON — What kind of people are we? As a society, are we so decadent and insecure that we show "toughness" by deliberately being cruel to innocent children? Is this what our nation has co…

Now that schools have been opened in a variety of ways in South Carolina and across the country, we are learning more about the risk of COVID-19 in a school setting. In South Carolina, as expe…

During the month of October, we often see and decorate with fun or funny scary things in preparation for Halloween. But litter is not fun or funny. It is definitely a scary monster that needs …

Every 13 minutes, a woman dies of breast cancer. Where is the outrage?

They say a picture can be worth a thousand words. If so, the one we ran on the front page of Tuesday’s Aiken Standard certainly fits that description.

National Cheeseburger Day was a recent event, and it prompted me to go out and get a cheeseburger. Newspapers are far more important to recognize, and they aren’t as fattening.

Decades ago, when many Americans began to question our presence in Vietnam, the Department of Defense constructed an explanation of what we were trying to do there. Our mission, they explained…

Chuck Schumer, Senate minority leader, says, "Our No. 1 goal must be to communicate the stakes of this Supreme Court fight to the American people." He continued, "nothing is off the table."

During my career, I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the biggest names in golf. My previous position in Augusta opened all kinds of doors involving the Masters Tournament and August…

Recently, I spent some time in Milton, Delaware, a small town next to Lewes, Delaware, which is another small town. Lewes prides itself on being “The First Town in the First State.” Delaware w…

Sept. 15 marks the beginning of Hispanic Heritage Month. Unfortunately, part of that heritage is a greater risk of heart disease and stroke. During this month, we aim to educate our community,…

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman observed in a column he wrote in 1996 that "no two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other."

They say time flies when you’re having fun. If that’s true, then the past year has been a blur.

Over the next two years, several hundred acres of land near Early Branch, South Carolina will be transformed into greenhouses for farming. Using recycled rainwater and high-tech climate contro…

Each year at this time, horrifying images of the 9/11 terrorist attack in 2001 come rushing back – planes crashing into the twin towers, the raging infernos and thundering collapses that trapp…

I don’t know which scenario is worse: getting ready to go on vacation or coming back from vacation.

Do facts matter? What about values? Opinions? Justice? Elections? Do they matter? What about truth? As Roman Procurator Pontius Pilate asked Jesus Christ: What is truth? Can we know the truth?…

I have returned with some regularity over the years to compare what is going on in our country today to what was going on in the 1850s, the years preceding the Civil War.

I’ve been watching political conventions on TV for a long time. My first was 1952 – Eisenhower vs. Stevenson – and I remember it well. I was 8 years old.

The 2020-2021 school year is the year of transformational teachers and educational leaders. Education leaders throughout the nation are to be commended for coming up with safe ways to continue…

As so much despair has gripped our nation during this difficult time, I decided to go into our nation's most distressed communities with a message of hope and truth.

In less than a day, public schools in Aiken County will open their doors for the official start of the 2020-21 school year. Just a few short months ago the reopening of our schools seemed much…

The extraordinary year that is 2020 continues to amaze me.

South Carolina is uniquely laden with diversity of race, culture, politics, social ecology, regional ecology, religion, education and economics. In respect to our diversity, the history of our…

We’ve got good news for you.

The Trump administration recently rescinded the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, adopted in the early months of the Obama administration.

We are living through one of the most difficult and dangerous periods in our nation's history. The crisis we are now experiencing has to be right up there with the Civil War, World War I, the …

As parents, we learn to push back on youngsters locked in fierce, nonsensical warfare: “DID SO! DID NOT!" We call time out, send them back to their corners and try to inject a bit of rational …

It doesn’t take long as one travels around Aiken to see that people are still trashing our beautiful environment with litter. While this behavior makes no sense and serves no purpose, it will …

On July 20, Gov. Henry McMaster announced the new SAFE Grants program, using one-time emergency CARES Act funding to help 5,000 low- to moderate-income South Carolina students to attend a priv…

Today’s date is one I don’t think I will ever forget.

My first knowledge of the War in the Pacific probably came from then-new episodes of "McHale's Navy" and the 20-year-old "Made in Occupied Japan" dishware that my mother collected.

The Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress has just produced an important new study titled "The Demise of the Happy Two-Parent Home."

What’s the first part of the newspaper that you read each day?

In 1989, the Department of Energy set out on an ambitious but necessary endeavor: the cleanup of 107 sites that bore the environmental legacy of the United States’ work in developing nuclear p…

Editor's Note: This column has been updated to correct an error involving the number of shootings that occurred in Chicago.

Decent Americans who are feeling perplexed today shouldn't be ashamed about it. There is good reason to be perplexed.