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Politician names on public works are free ads

When workers scraped Donald Trump’s name off the Donald Trump and John F. Kennedy Performing Arts Center, they should have kept going. They should have taken Kennedy’s name off as well and restored the building to its original, simple title, the National Culture Center. After President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Congress renamed the center after him. The New York International Airport, charmingly referred to as Idlewild, suddenly became the John F. Kennedy International Airport. And hundreds of schools across the country plastered “John F. Kennedy” on their ...

It’s a requiem for privacy

When President Donald Trump appointed an obviously unqualified friend, a home builder executive, to be acting director of national intelligence, he inadvertently triggered attention to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The director of national intelligence is the head of the umbrella agency that gathers intelligence from the 17 federal spying agencies and from that data prepares and delivers the president’s daily briefing. Sec. 702, which permits warrantless spying, expires this month. Trump prefers to receive his briefings directly from the CIA and its ...

Anthony’s race doesn’t matter

The system failed Karmelo Anthony — he stabbed someone to death and is going to jail for it. If this doesn’t strike you as an injustice, you haven’t been paying attention to the voices defending the 19-year-old who was just sentenced to 35 years in prison for murdering another teenager at a high school track meet in Texas two years ago. The case has garnered national attention entirely for its racial angle. Anthony is black, and his victim, Austin Metcalf, was white. But there is no evidence that race played a role in the incident, and if both young men had been white or both ...

Platner’s populist challenge excites Dems — cautiously

When I heard President Donald Trump go ballistic over Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, it made me want to hear more about Graham Platner. After Platner won Maine’s Democratic primary last week, Trump trolled Platner as “thug” and called the Democratic Party hypocritical for lining up behind someone with so many questions about his past personal conduct and treatment of women. “He’s worse than any human being that’s ever run for office probably,” the president said. Well, if anyone should know about questions on past conduct and treatment of women, it ...

America’s other Independence Day has arrived today

Today the Mahoning Valley joins the rest of the country in celebrating a national holiday of freedom and independence. No, we’re not leapfrogging two weeks ahead to the massive America250 Fourth of July hoopla. Rather, June 19 marks Juneteenth or as former President Joe Biden proclaimed it for the first time in 2021, the Juneteenth National Independence Day. The two federal holidays remain intimately entwined. This year marks 250 years since the 1776 Declaration of Independence, which proudly pronounced “all men are created equal.” But for millions of enslaved African ...

Rising cost of fast food puts people in a pinch

We know how to make good food at home — when we can. What comes out of our gardens and woods is better than much of what is prepared at a five-star restaurant. But the trouble is these days, not everyone has a garden or the luxury of time to head into the woods, let alone time to prepare such meals. And affordable, accessible, fresh and healthy food is not always an option either, in a region riddled with food deserts. So families turn to what is available, and do their best to afford it. In fact, a recent WalletHub survey that looked at the cost of fast food as a share of median ...