The morning sun wasn’t yellow. Rather it was a dulled reddish- orange, made that way by smoke from millions of acres of wildfires burning in Canada last week.

To the Editor: I was disappointed (although not surprised) that the La Grange City Council and Police Chief decided to sell their souls to ICE. Just like the County Commissioners and Sheriff, the lure of free money was just too much.

To the Editor: The AI revolution was supposed to look like the future, but in communities across the country, it looks like an industrial nuisance. As hyperscale data centers race to build the infrastructure required to train the next generation of artificial intelligence, they are running headlong into the limits of our physical world.

The older I get, the more I realize that reading and learning are not the same thing. Sometimes an idea deserves to be read slowly, thought about, and internalized before we can truly understand it. That was my reaction to a recent letter in The Wall Street Journal by Professor Jamie Wagner of the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Weather averages are useful but they will never predict the weather in Texas. When average rainfall statistics state we will get more rain in one month and less rain in another, along comes a drought or flood and throws the averages out the window.

To the editor: Tyler O’Neil reported in the Daily Signal, 7/16/2026, “according to a state watchdog”, there is a nonprofit based in Los Angeles that receives millions in government funding (your tax dollars at work) accused of establishing an immigration-to-elections pipeline across three entities.” The name of the organization is CHIRLA, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. O’Neil quotes from CHIRLA’s website, “the Immigrant Political Power Project “targets new citizens, Latinos, and English learners to build a voter base from scratch, with enough power to sway state politics.” I visited the website to attempt to understand the organization’s mission.

To the editor: My cousin once told me that cows are dumb, but they know one thing: how not to get penned up. Most people around here know that to be true, but we also know there is an exception.

To the editor: As we bask in our nation’s 250th anniversary and celebrate it in Fayette County, remember that our nation’s “birth” nearly failed to produce a healthy infant. Not until the Treaty of Ghent took effect on February 17, 1815, after the War of 1812, could Americans truly say they had achieved independence.

To the editor: Somewhere along the way, we’ve begun confusing courage and character with appearance. A real man is judged by how deep his voice is, how big he is, how aggressively he talks, or whether he projects a tough-guy image.

To the editor: In recent contributions to this paper, Cindy Rodibaugh has consistently leaned on a strategy of fearmongering. She paints complex modern challenges as simple moral crises while frequently misrepresenting both historical and contemporary facts.