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Orchids & onions

ORCHID: To Jamie Ciccone for her exemplary civic engagement that led to her well-deserved appointment last week as the newest member of the Austintown Township Board of Trustees. Ciccone, who is no relation to embattled Mahoning County Clerk of Courts Michael Ciccone, won high praise from fellow Trustees Monica Deavers and Bruce Shepas. She can rightfully boast of a laundry list of community and nonprofit groups she has served in and powered. She also bested at least 12 other candidates, many of whom brought strong credentials themselves. For her part, Ciccone vows that in her new ...

Join the race to win war on breast cancer

The ongoing war on breast cancer brings both good news and bad news to the Mahoning Valley. The good news is that Mahoning and Trumbull counties have made great strides in attacking the disease and lowering the death toll from it. According to the National Cancer Institute within the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, those two counties rank among the lowest in the state and below the national average in incidence and in fatalities from the disease, and trend lines continue to edge lower. The bad news is that those trend lines are not diving downward as deeply or as ...

Summertime political reruns

When I was younger, so much younger than today (credit The Beatles for that lyric from “Help”), television networks would rerun programs that had originally been broadcast the previous fall and spring. A few still do, like “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy,” but those are syndicated shows. Still, it can be fun to watch programs you missed, or even ones you have seen, especially if you can impress someone with “Jeopardy” answers because you know them. Reruns that always annoy are the political ads, which start before primaries and continue until the day before the ...

News flash: We live in a mixed economy

Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan keeps calling himself a capitalist. And the Democratic Socialists of America keep backing him to the eyeballs. Why? Because the DSA understands that El-Sayed has to say that to win over even Democrats in a moderate state like Michigan. They firmly expect that once elected, he would do as they say, which happily conforms with what he truly believes. Confusing? Yes, on purpose. But let’s move beyond this war of labels. Let’s stop using socialist and capitalist as either compliments or denunciations. The United States has a ...

The normalcy of American wars

The war in Iran is unlawful and unconstitutional, but in post-World War II America, it is normal. Here is the backstory. When President Donald Trump decided to begin bombing Iran last June, he did not state a coherent or lawful reason for doing so. His director of national intelligence and his own CIA had publicly told him that Iran did not possess a nuclear weapon and had ceased building one in 2005. His secretary of state told him that Iran and Israel had threatened each other, but he could not articulate how Iran imminently threatened the United States. Yet, since Israel ...

Criminals in control and what we must do

This past weekend, the Republican-led Senate confirmed acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to be the next U.S. attorney general. Like Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, Blanche has carried out the illegal orders of a president of the United States. As was Mitchell’s fate, Blanche should be behind bars. 2 1/2-year sentence for conspiracy and obstruction of justice in the Watergate scandal. Instead, Senate Republicans have given Blanche a promotion. Last week, a Republican-led Senate panel voted to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress for his refusal to ...