Sanity is breaking out all over Topeka: Thursday morning the Kansas House voted against repealing the one-cent sales tax increase, 80 to 39 — a stunning two-to-one margin. What a St. Patrick’s Day blessing!

The state Senate moved Kansas a bit toward the common sense center Wednesday. A Senate committee voted to recommend that a bill not be passed which repealed a 2004 law that allowed the undocumented children…

Senate President Steve Morris stepped out front Tuesday with a pension reform bill that would actually reform the state employee pension system. KPERS is out of balance by about $7.7 billion. It will fall that…

Plants not only breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, they also do a remarkably good job of absorbing harmful chemicals from the air. A peace lily, for example, removes acetone, ammonia, benzene, ethyl…

Without waiting for the federal government to do it for us, we seniors should put two-person death panels — ourselves and our doctors — into action to plan for the inevitable. The agenda for the…

To the editor,I, Carey Goodman, and Beverly Higinbotham disagree with what Richard Luken wrote about us in the paper on March 10.We are all for the Allen County Animal Rescue Facility and are happy that…

I live in an assisted living place here in Iola. I had to be moved from one place to another, and I had three personal friends move me.As everything could not be moved in one…

Hour by hour the world watches in horror as Japan sits on the precipice of nuclear disaster as a result from Friday’s 9.0 magnitude earthquake. Fears mount of a nuclear meltdown at any one or…

Gov. Sam Brownback used his authority to cut the state budget to the  break-even level all by himself last week, and handed the Legislature his decisions. Because that’s where the money is, Brownback trimmed public…

Readers of the Register were robbed Wednesday of a twice-a-week source of political wisdom when David S. Broder died at 81 of complications from diabetes.Broder covered every presidential election from the 1950s on. He was…