Opinion

When the American people hear politicians and pundits discuss the economy, the message is often framed in broad and subjective terms – one person says it’s booming, another says it’s weak, and they might use phrases like bulls, bears, and bubbles to describe what they mean.

Rog's Rod & Nimrod As we approach late winter-early spring fishing in South Dakota, most anglers are thinking walleye. With this in mind, I will once again urge our Game, Fish, & Parks commissioners to protect our walleyes as Minnesota and Wisconsin does during the spawn.

Dear Editor: Recently, I received an unexpected call from Mr. Goter. He informed me that Wagner Community School has decided to start a Hall of Fame. He then told me that I was selected to be a member of the inaugural class.

I may not be a farmer, but I know what it’s like to work hard. If you are a farmer duringweeks like this one, where Antarctica looks balmy, there is no option to simply take the day off. Farmers endure. Agriculture endures. Agriculture is our state’s #1 industry.

After listening to the president’s recent State of the Union address, I expressed optimism about his vision for pursuing an agenda that inspires cooperation, commonsense, and compromise.

Rog's Rod & Nimrod On the weekend of February 1st, Betsy and I traveled out to Spearfish to visit our longtime friends, Art and Janice Jones. Art is the best all-around fisherman I know, and I know a lot of good fishermen.

Until the day Ted Blakey died in 2004, he possessed a newspaper clipping from February 1838. It advertised his grandfather, an 11-year-old boy at the time, for sale at a slave auction in Missouri.

THINKING ABOUT HEALTH: Not long ago, the news site ProPublica published an important story about employers who, in their quest for a younger and cheaper workforce, were pushing out “older” workers – often those in their early 50s.

The phone rang, and I answered it because the call was from a nearby community. No big surprise that the caller was obviously not from anywhere near, and the caller was asking for a donation for some organization in which I had no interest. I said, in a kindly tone, “No thank you,” and hung up.

Rog's Rod & Nimrod When Brian Maas of Parkston first let me know about the Sinkebeil wolf a few weeks ago, he sent me some photos that were not used with my column or in the stories that followed in newspapers, on television, and Facebook, etc.