Don Walton: It’s time for Lincoln to think big again

It is good to see the Pershing mural being rigorously dismantled now, lastly clearing the way in which for removing of the storied previous auditorium that has been sitting there empty like a ghost for eight years.

An array of neighborhood improvement tasks, together with reasonably priced housing, a wellness middle, a toddler care middle and neighborhood inexperienced house are already deliberate and ready for a inexperienced gentle.

And a brand new downtown library ought to get in line now.

A multipurpose downtown recreation middle — consider all the school college students who’re going to be residing downtown now — with actions for all ages? 

A downtown park?  With a stage? 

Massive Ten hockey and bushes within the Haymarket? 

Or one thing actually huge, Pinnacle Financial institution Enviornment huge, from the minds of the actually huge thinkers?

And let’s hear from that younger workforce that is already right here and nonetheless must be attracted. What would they suggest?

Time for one more jolt of power. 

Should you stand nonetheless, you fall behind. 

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The coup in Kearney that upended Nebraska Republican Social gathering management could have been a comparatively tame rebellion in comparison with what apparently occurred in Idaho.

The change in Idaho’s Republican Social gathering management achieved on the social gathering’s state conference in Twin Falls prompted an Idaho Statesman editorial final week declaring that “essentially the most excessive parts of the Republican Social gathering are totally in management.”

“If the brand new GOP management have been merely loopy, that would not be the most important change on the planet,” the editorial acknowledged.

“In any case, the social gathering’s present platform holds that you simply should not be allowed to vote in U.S. Senate races.

“However the brand new GOP has signaled it additionally intends to be merciless.  ‘Our weapons are loaded,’ (new social gathering chair Dorothy) Moon cried in her victory speech.”

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* The variations between Republican Rep. Mike Flood and Democratic challenger Patty Pansing Brooks are piling up nearly day by day with Flood’s early Home votes and that is most likely hardening supporters on either side. It will be a battle centered on turning out voters in November.

* Legislative redistricting final September offered Republican Rep. Don Bacon with what presently is a 8,420 GOP-voter registration benefit in his November contest with Democratic nominee Tony Vargas. Metropolitan Omaha’s 2nd Congressional District has 153,601 registered Republicans and 145,181 registered Democrats, in response to July figures.  

* Politico studies that Gov. Pete Ricketts made a $250,000 contribution to a brilliant PAC that is centered on “torpedoing Missouri Republican Eric Greitens’ Senate marketing campaign.”  Greitens stepped down from the governorship in 2018 within the midst of a scandal centered on allegations about sexual relations together with his former hairdresser.

* So, even the Secret Service? 

* A present Washington Submit story on Republican marketing campaign rhetoric ends with quotations from Republican gubernatorial nominee Jim Pillen lifted from a TV marketing campaign advert: “Should you love America, they hate you.  Should you assist the police, they name you racist.”

* Liz Cheney, talking Sunday throughout a CNN “State of the Union” interview: “It is a harmful second. … I imagine our nation stands on the sting of an abyss.”

* A glance forward would forecast a extra conservative Legislature in 2023. However who is aware of? That may have been the identical forecast eight years in the past when nobody knew that 5 new senators who have been Republicans would grow to be so independently average. 

* Fox Sports activities turned the baseball all-star recreation into its plaything.

* Final week moved world warming into world warmed — accompanied by alarm bells.