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Twenty-five years ago this month, ascendant Republicans in lockstep with the state’s deepest pockets convinced [hoodwinked?] 447,072 Oklahoma voters in a special election to approve right-to-work. The State Chamber heralded it as a great day for worker choice and business recruitment. Why? Because laborers no longer would be required to join unions at businesses where […]

School already started. Food was ordered. Programs and schedules were set. Faculty and staff were hired. Without warning, Oklahoma’s interim state superintendent of public instruction abruptly pulled the plug on a state-federal program that extends the academic day … in order to help schools provide a late-afternoon supper to needy students. The decision was so […]

Like Donald Trump’s Justice Department, Oklahoma’s Attorney General’s office has strayed from its historically independent, just-the-facts approach to enforcing the law into a murky, disconcerting world of hyper-partisanship. For Oklahoma, the slide began with Mike Hunter’s 2021 resignation. Like Trump’s latest choice of Todd Blanche as the nation’s attorney general, Gov. Kevin Stitt tapped a […]

Are Oklahomans satisfied with being 49th in education? The worst state in the union in which to be a woman? Of being the 21st century’s Mississippi – the punch line: thank God for Oklahoma? If not, they have their next chance at demanding change on Tuesday, Aug. 25. Registered voters across the state – regardless […]

Oklahoma’s political elite are fond of crowing that we’re an oil and gas state. But the truth is, we should be prouder – and more thankful – that we’re a state with abundant, clean water. After all, there is no substitute for water, our one irreplaceable, sustainer of life – a resource the world-renowned geostrategist […]

Why were Oklahoma’s legislative leaders gung-ho to slip two proposed constitutional amendments onto the Aug. 25 runoff ballot – traditionally the campaign year’s lowest turnout election? As Observercast returns for its fall season, Del City Rep. Andy Fugate joins us to help answer that question in an episode we’re calling Everyone Should Care, a deep-dive […]

With all the pomp and circumstance they could muster, Gov. Kevin Stitt, House Speaker Kyle Hilbert and other statehouse luminaries gathered recently with students at an OKC charter school celebrate Stitt’s signing of SB 1778 – the state’s greatest education reform package since … what? … the invention of the alphabet? OK … so it […]

Remember when Republicans vowed to run government like a business if they ever got in charge at NE 23rd and Lincoln Blvd. The implication was: Unlike free-spending Democrats, GOPers would squeeze every penny, ensuring taxpayers got way more bang for their bucks. In the two decades since they seized the statehouse levers of power, Republicans […]

It’s a good bet not very many had Markwayne Mullin leaving a safe U.S. Senate seat to become Donald Trump’s Homeland Security guru on their Bingo cards. But here we are. Markwayne Mullin officially on Team Trump. So many questions … Who knew Trump would go all Richard Nixon on us and appoint his own […]

Across Oklahoma, in urban areas and rural, students alarmed by the Trump administration’s sometimes deadly anti-immigrant crackdown are walking out of Sooner classrooms to make clear their opposition. Unsurprisingly, the fact students are exercising their First Amendment right to free speech and assembly alarms the Oklahoma Legislature’s Freedom Caucus. Those hard-right ideologues are not only […]