Every candidate for governor always promises two things – to cut property taxes, and eliminate the “waste” in state spending. Both of those pledges are awfully easy to make—and play well on a television ad—and much harder to achieve.

I am told—I do not have experience in this area—that, as a parent, one of the experiences you dread is getting a phone call in the middle of the night. While I can see that a parent’s worry would only be exacerbated by having the phone ring in the wee hours of the morning, the truth is, whether you have kids living their best life in this world or not, there is nothing that can instantly snap you out of your slumber like the phone ringing while you are fast asleep.

“When there’s a will, there’s a way.” That was a phrase that surfaced regularly at the end of state legislative sessions. It referred to the hope that bills that appeared dead might be resurrected.

When I was a little kid, my grandma had a big book of illustrated children’s stories, among which was the folktale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” As a little guy, I loved that story. Mainly, because the idea of a king prancing around naked, unbeknownst to him, was comical.

On Saturday, when I woke up, I found the type of site that no one wants to discover on their bathroom floor in the morning. A puddle.

Back in the day, a small, “trial balloon” would be sent aloft to discern wind speed and direction before a balloon carrying people was launched. Folks were rightly concerned about rising into the heavens blindly, without knowing if a catastrophic whirlwind was aloft.

Over nearly twenty years, I lost track of how many times I was required to drive to Whiteclay to report on a protest about the beer stores there. Those four stores sold up to 3.5 million cans of beer a year, and were the liquor stores of choice for the adjacent Pine Ridge Indian Reservation right across the Nebraska- South Dakota border.

The old saying, “Do as I say, not as I do,” came to my mind last week while I was in the most precarious of positions. On Saturday morning, I was driving around Howard County covering the flooding that had occurred in the wake of Friday night’s deluge of rain and spate of storms, when, with some direction from county officials, I found the epicenter of the storm’s wrath.

Many have tried, and few have succeeded, in expanding the state’s sales tax base by taxing things now exempt from taxation. But that is where Governor Jim Pillen is venturing in his pursuit of property tax relief.

Last week, the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission proudly made an announcement. For the first time since 2016, three peregrine falcon chicks had been hatched in a nest atop the Nebraska State Capitol building, and last week, officials with Nebraska Game and Parks had them successfully banded and checked.