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Inflation is all the rage today, or at least the cause of today’s rage.  Whether it is filling up your gas tank or your grocery cart, the pump and barcode price shocks are breathtaking. Prices in the financial markets are shocking as well – but they all seem to be down, what with stocks and bonds off to their worst start since 1970.  But while stocks and bonds are in bear market mode, there is a bull market in things related to carbon.  Carbon-based fuels like oil (+38%), gasoline (+65%), natural gas (+81%), coal (+127%) and add to that, carbohydrates that fuel everyday human bodies.  Wheat is up (+22%) as are soybeans (+19%).  Food prices at restaurants and grocery stores are up double digits.  Serious people are worried about the prospects of global famine.  On June 24th, U.N. Chief Antonio Guterres warned of “unprecedented food shortages causing a global hunger crisis.” The U.S. is not included in the warning, but poor countries in the developing world are at great risk.  Some of this, no doubt, is related to the Russia – Ukraine conflict; but regardless, many estimates are predicting shortages in farm staples by year-end 2022.

As one can tell from these scary headlines, the breakout of once dormant inflation is not just an American phenomenon.  Energy and agriculture commodities trade on global markets and their prices are rising everywhere.

Another ingredient critical to civilization as we know it is electricity.  This past April, the United Kingdom saw their residential gas and electricity prices increase by 54%.  The U.K. energy regulator is Ofgem (Office of Gas and Electricity Markets), and they adjust rates for residential gas and electricity rates semi-annually.  Ofgem is expected to increase rates again in October another 40% on top of the 54%.  High prices for electricity in the U.K. and Europe have already caused many companies to shutter their European operations for competitive reasons.  Is this a harbinger for U.S. electricity prices?

For most of the past century, the focus of U.S. electricity regulators at both the federal and state level has been cheap and reliable electricity.  But over the past two decades, that focus has been overlayed with the desire for ‘green’ energy and the aspiration of decarbonizing the U.S. economy.  The effect of that overlay has been the reallocation of billions of capital investments towards wind and solar farms while older coal and even nuclear plants have been decommissioned.  The net result is a more expensive, more intermittent, and more complex grid to manage.  In April, Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) warned of possible brownouts and blackouts this summer across their 15-state area, including Mississippi, due to capacity shortfalls.  Similar warnings have been issued by ERCOT, the Texas system.  These are bad omens of what may lie ahead.  Europe and the U.K. are ahead of the U.S. in the ‘green’ transition, and they are now suffering the consequences.

The inflation fear that is gripping today’s financial markets is focused on the

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The Supreme Court ruled that a school district in Washington was wrong to fire a football coach for quietly praying on the field after games.

It began in 2008 when Bremerton High School football coach Joseph Kennedy started a tradition of kneeling down to pray after football games.

What started as a personal and private act soon caught the attention of students that began to join him kneeling on the field. In 2015, school officials took notice after a complaint from the opposing team. Kennedy was asked to cease the public prayer after the games, to which he refused. Soon after Kennedy was placed on administrative leave.

The non-profit legal organization First Liberty stood behind him and took up the case in 2016. They lost multiple times in district court and the Supreme Court denied the request in 2019. Following the denial, however, four Justices expressed concern about how the public school district handled First Amendment rights for public school teachers.

The Supreme Court then sent the case back to U.S. District Judge Ronald Leighton who sided with the school district once again. The Supreme Court finally agreed to hear the case in February 2022.

“People of faith or no faith, everybody has the same rights and that is what the Constitution is all about,” Kennedy said. “It’s rights for all Americans.”

This cased forced the court to wrestle with how to balance the religious rights and freedoms of public school teachers and coaches along with the freedoms of students not to be pressured to participate in religious practices.

The siding justices emphasized how the prayer took place after the game when the coach was no longer responsible for the players and was free to do as he pleased.

Justice Neil Gorsuch also added that Kennedy “prayed during a period when school employees were free to speak with a friend, call for a reservation at a restaurant, check email, or attend to other personal matters” and “while his students were otherwise occupied.”

Kennedy also mentioned that any students that expressed discomfort in joining the practice were given full freedom to skip the prayers and no one on the team was treated differently by participating (or not participating) in the short time of prayer.

On Monday morning in a 6-3 decision, the Court sided with Kennedy in a decision that further respects the Constitutional rights of all public-school teachers and coaches to engage in a brief, personal prayer in public.

This put an end to a conflict that had been brewing since early 2015.

“This is a tremendous victory for Coach Kennedy and religious liberty for all Americans,” said Kelly Shackelford, President, CEO, and Chief Counsel for First Liberty. “Our Constitution protects the right of every American to engage in private religious expression, including praying in public, without fear of getting fired.  We are grateful that the Supreme Court recognized what the Constitution and law have always said – Americans are free to live out their faith in public.”

Twenty-two years ago, The Tomato Place was nothing more than one of four fruit and veggie stands run by Luke Hughes.

“I was here sorting tomatoes, when this guy comes up, takes a look at my tomatoes and asks if we could make him a sandwich. I made him a sandwich. Guess he must’ve really liked it,” Hughes says with a chuckle. “Because the very next day, he came back for another one. The rest, as they say, is history.”

And, so began The Tomato Place, located just south of a wicked curve on the blues highway — U.S. 61 South — in Vicksburg.

A sign in the business brings a smile to the faces of all who come: “Welcome Home! We are a slow food, smell the roses, hear the music, feel the atmosphere kind of place.”

So, there was never a need for a Robert Johnson-esque deal with the Devil for success. The great food, friendly atmosphere, Americana art and souvenirs have made the little roadside business a worldwide attraction.

The post The Tomato Place, a Mississippi treasure appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mississippi showed remarkable improvement on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is known as the “Nation’s Report Card.” This included the highest improvement in the country on several measures.

That improvement gives the state the chance to overcome its reputation as the least educated state in America. Sadly, such impressions are sticky and people are slow to update what they think they know. As one who has worked with education reformers in Florida for many years, I can tell you its reputation as “Flori-duh” was not overcome in a day or even a decade. In fact, judging by the comments sections of newspaper articles, there are still people entirely unaware of Florida’s improvement.

But no state can rest on its laurels. It is not uncommon for states to relax their standards over time or for the players in the system to learn how to circumvent the safeguards that originally worked.

Above all, Mississippi can’t rely on standardized test scores as the only measure of success. The pandemic helped make that abundantly clear to parents.

Parents certainly want their children to learn to read and to figure out math, but they have other priorities as well. They want their children to be happy, engaged, and challenged. Instead, we see childhood anxiety and suicide on the rise. Even before the pandemic, 70 percent of teens saw anxiety and depression as major problems among people their age. COVID lockdowns only made that worse, as students were kept from the human interaction they need to grow.

Students are not happy, and neither are teachers who show record levels of job dissatisfaction in polls. The solution lies not merely in running big-box schools better, but also in doing something truly radical: setting teachers free.

From left to right these teachers are Alexa Altamura, Nikki Duslak and Greg Wenderski. I’ve described Altamura’s school to Empower Mississippi readers before but the photo alone speaks a thousand words. Altamura and Duslak run micro-schools in Florida, whereas Wenderski is a wandering teacher from Austin, Texas who travels from city to city teaching students how to cast their own bronze-age swords. Duslak, a former public-school teacher of the year reached her breaking point when she was criticized for having posters on the “wrong wall.” What these and growing legions of teachers left behind the bureaucracy before it could kill their love of education.

Plenty of teachers in Mississippi want to be free as well.

Disintermediation is underway in K-12 education: teachers are cutting out the bureaucratic middlemen and bringing their visions of high-quality and fun education directly to families in delightfully small communities.

Some states southern states have been supporting the teachers yearning for freedom for decades with each success informing the next reform. Other southern states are struggling at a glacial pace to implement 1990s-era choice reforms.

Can you imagine a future where some states have a pluralistic system of schooling while laggards can’t quite figure out why the factory school model fails yet again to deliver? Can you imagine families and teachers flocking to innovative states and shunning the laggards?

I certainly can. Mississippi has the opportunity to be a leader but faces the very real danger of being a laggard.  As Mississippi public school teacher Khrysten Glass put it:

If you want citizens in our state to be productive members of society, then you have to teach them how to do that, and that’s supposed to be my job. That’s what I got into to teaching to do. I’m supposed to teach them life skills and prepare them for where they go after high school, but I need the freedom to do that, and with test after test there is no time for that kind of instruction. Where does it end? It’s disheartening for me, and that fire to educate inside of me has begun to grow dim.

Glass should not have to move to another state in order to fulfill her dream to be an educator. There are plenty of students in Mississippi who need the opportunity to learn from her.

Mississippi leaders should not compromise on high-quality content, but they should be open to innovation in how that content is taught and how schools are structured. A good start would be to avoid the bureaucrats and listen to the people who know what works for students and what doesn’t, because they are closest to them: parents and teachers.

Mississippi Today on Saturday won awards for its investigative reporting, COVID-19 coverage and general excellence at the Mississippi Press Association’s Better Newspaper Contest.

This is the first year the Ridgeland-based online news publication competed in the contest.

Forty-four MPA member newsrooms submitted a total of 1,981 entries in the 2021 editorial division contest. Judging was conducted in the spring by volunteers from the South Carolina Press Association.

Mississippi Today staff members Adam Ganucheau, Geoff Pender, Will Stribling, Kate Royals, Vickie King, Bobby Harrison, Sara DiNatale, Molly Minta and Nigel Dent won the Bill Minor Prize for Investigative Journalism for their coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Reporters and photographers covered various facets of the pandemic as Delta ripped through Mississippi. Through wide-ranging, compelling reports on low vaccination rates, strains on hospitals, masking in schools and the governor’s response to the pandemic, Mississippi Today served as a go-to source for coronavirus news,” the announcement said.

The news publication also won 3rd place for General Excellence.

Other award winners include:

Geoff Pender, 1st place Bill Minor Prize for General News Reporting, Sexual misconduct allegations led to MDA director John Rounsaville’s resignation

Adam Ganucheau, 1st place, Planned Series, How Philip Gunn Changed the Flag

Kate Royals, 2nd place, Planned Series, Underreported and Underpunished

Sara DiNatale, 2nd place Business News Story, A new hospital crisis: Mississippi will soon lose hundreds of state-funded nurses

Rick Cleveland, 2nd place, Sports News Story, The Greenville Christian Dilemma: A terrific team nobody wants to play

Adam Ganucheau, 2nd place, Commentary Column

Geoff Pender, 3rd place, Commentary Column

The complete list of awards can be found here.

The post Mississippi Today wins awards for general excellence, COVID-19 coverage appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Molina Healthcare of Mississippi partnered with the Mississippi Food Network on Thursday to host a mobile food pantry drive-thru event in Pickens.

Hundreds of cars stretched down North 2nd Street next to the town’s municipal building as they waited for their first-come, first-serve boxes of food that included fresh produce, fruit and protein. The Mississippi Food Network prepared the boxes for nearly 250 households. The organization helps with about three mobile pantries a month in the state’s most food-insecure areas. 

Pickens, located in Holmes County, is considered a food desert with the nearest grocery store located almost 20 miles away in Canton.

The county had one of the highest projected rates of food insecurity in the state following Jefferson County due to the impact of COVID-19, according to a study by Feeding America in 2020. Holmes County ranked third nationally in projections of the highest overall food insecurity rates at 34.5%, the study found.

“Hopefully, it will help them get to the end of the month,” said Cassandra Mobley, Mississippi Food Network director of agency relationships and programs. “We have food pantries and senior programs that distribute food on a regular basis here in Holmes County. This just an extra effort.”

The food network’s partner in this mobile pantry was Molina Healthcare, which contracts with Mississippi to offer a Medicaid-sponsored health insurance program for low-income children and adults.

“Food is our biggest disparity, especially with rising prices of everything. That’s why we chose to come to Pickens,” said Marques Slaughter, Molina Healthcare member engagement and growth specialist. “We like to get out into the community to bring awareness to health, help bring healthy options to the area and identify community resources and disparities.”

The Mississippi Food Network will have its next food pantry drive-thru event on July 21 at Mississippi Valley State in Leflore County.

The post Mobile food pantry held in Holmes County, one of the most food insecure places in the U.S. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The Mississippi Public Service Commission announced a $300 million settlement on Thursday with Entergy Mississippi over profits the company received in running the Grand Gulf Nuclear Power Station in Port Gibson.

The settlement, the largest in the PSC’s history, ends Mississippi’s involvement in a multi-state dispute with Entergy. As part of the agreement, $200 million of the settlement will go towards offsetting rising natural gas costs for customers, $35 million will go towards direct payments or bill credits to Mississippi ratepayers, and the remaining $65 million will go towards savings for future mitigation costs.

The $35 million in direct rebates from the settlement will be divvied up and amount to about $80 per Entergy Mississippi customer. Customers can choose to use that money as a credit towards their electric bill or get the amount in a check.

The PSC said in its press release that without the $200 million for offsetting rising natural gas costs, Mississippians would have seen an extra $15 on their electric bills starting in 2023.

The PSC first brought the dispute to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in 2017 over “certain accounting and financing aspects” of the nuclear plant, the PSC said in a release.

When a utility company, in this case Entergy, builds or operates a power plant, the company gets a return on investment for those costs, agreed to by the regulatory body. Because the power from Grand Gulf is sold wholesale, FERC regulates the prices that the energy is sold for.

The PSC alleged to FERC, which ruled on the settlement, that Entergy’s return on investment was higher than what FERC originally allowed. As a result, Entergy made more than it should have from charges that were passed onto customers, Northern District Commissioner Brandon Presley explained.

“Their return on equity was more than what it should have been,” he said. “That’s agreed to by the FERC. We were arguing that profitability was inflated and actually should have been less of a cost and translating to lower rates for Mississippians.”

Separately, Entergy’s other subsidiaries in Arkansas, Louisiana and the city of New Orleans are also facing litigation over Grand Gulf’s services. The regulators for those service areas are alleging that the station doesn’t run as effectively as other nuclear plants and charges customers for the plant to run even when it isn’t producing power, among other complaints.

Those three other regulators are also challenging the Mississippi PSC’s decision to increase output from the Grand Gulf station years ago, Presley said.

“That plant provides some of the lowest cost electricity that Mississippi is getting, with zero carbon emissions,” Presley said.

In addition to the $300 million, the settlement also puts a moratorium on Entergy’s future return on investment for the power station, Presley added.

In a statement Thursday, Entergy said that the “taxing, financing, accounting and operating of Grand Gulf before FERC are proper, well-reasoned and in the best interest of its customers and the company.

“However, Entergy officials explained that the ongoing cost of the dispute at FERC and the uncertainty it created for customers, employees and stockholders led the company to seek a resolution,” the utility provider said.

The post Alleging Entergy ‘over-profited’ from Grand Gulf, PSC announces $300 million settlement appeared first on Mississippi Today.