Rick Muccio editorial cartoon for Sept. 4: Gloria and Dolly
Rick Muccio editorial cartoon for Sept. 4: Gloria and Dolly
Mayor McDowell, where are the deliverables?
Youngstown Mayor Derrick McDowell likes the language of business. Strategy. Transparency. Action. Results. And, perhaps most importantly, deliverables. It is a good word. In fact, it may be the perfect word for evaluating the McDowell administration. Because a deliverable isn’t a vision. It isn’t a listening session. It isn’t a slogan, a social-media post, a committee, a meeting or another promise that something better is coming. A deliverable is something that was promised — and then delivered. Mayor McDowell took office Jan 1. His campaign website laid out an ...
Ohio’s childcare crisis continues nearly unabated
Though policymakers have made a few attempts at increasing Ohioans’ access to childcare in recent years, the problem is as bad as ever. In fact, advocates are labeling it a crisis. “We are using the word, and we don’t use it lightly, but we are calling this a childcare crisis,” Tasha Booker, president and CEO of Action for Children, told Spectrum News 1. “In order for childcare to be considered affordable in Ohio, families should be spending no more than about 8% of their income.” Instead, some families with two young children are spending up to 33%. If your reaction ...
Pessimism is a destination that leads to defeat in politics
If you have been paying attention to media reports, many politicians, including some Republicans and those often-wrong pollsters, believe the November election is a foregone conclusion. According to them, Democrats will win a House majority and possibly take over the Senate, too. History proves it, they say, because the party out of power almost always is victorious in midterms. Except when it’s not. Two recent examples should give Republicans hope. In 1994, the year many people remember, a “Republican Revolution” headed by Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich and his Contract ...
The ‘public’ broadcasters go soft on Hasan Piker
Just like the networks spent months helpfully skipping over the Nazi tattoo on the chest of Maine Democrat Graham Platner, they have largely ignored radical leftist influencer Hasan Piker, who has campaigned with Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. ABC and NBC haven’t found him, while CBS broke the mold with two stories. The “PBS News Hour” hasn’t mentioned Piker, although there was a mention on the PBS show “Washington Week with The Atlantic” on Aug. 14. The show’s host, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, volunteered: “The party has developed something of a Hasan Piker ...
Compassionate Dolly Parton was rich in so many ways
One of the unfortunate realities of getting older is finding that the people you like begin to die. There are some, maybe, who are taken before their time and others who go at the end of a complete life, but either way the obituaries pile up. When Dolly Parton died the other day, I felt the weight of another passing. I never met her, but she represented more to me (and to many others, I imagine) than her songwriting, her acting and her singing. I saw in her the way poverty can shape a person — slash their outsides and scar them in ways that never fully heal — while still failing to ...