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Highmark

Editorials

United Way organizations across the country serve their communities by connecting those in need to resources to support them as they face their challenges. “When you donate to United Way, you help kids succeed. You help adults secure jobs. And you help families become healthier. Your support fuels our mission and creates stronger communities where all can thrive,” according to its website. Plenty of financial support comes from individuals, of course, but there are also reliable community partners who make a big difference for the organization. One of those partners is the ...

Credit

Editorials

If the folks in Charleston want to take credit for positive reports from ratings agencies such as S&P Global, they’d better be ready to be held accountable for the negatives. While reminding elected officials they must be ready to make corresponding adjustments if there are negative revenue effects from Medicaid changes, S&P Global Ratings went on to express great concern over the sustained loss of population over the past 75 years. Combine our hemorrhaging of people with the fact that a high percentage of those who DO stay are living below the poverty line, and/or growing older ...

Vigilant

Editorials

Over the years, television has provided an accurate perspective of the problem — “affliction” sometimes might be the better descriptive word — of hoarding. We’re referring to people who have, in essence, ruined their lives, homes and also, perhaps, relationships because of having collected and having remained hellbent on continuing to collect virtual “mountains” of household and other items “too good” to throw away, sell or give away. In many of the sad and otherwise troubling situations upon which television has focused, homes had become such a repository for the ...

GOP brass over-reacts to rallies

Columnists

So much for riot and mayhem in the streets. The “No Kings” movement rallies went off without a hitch, despite dire predictions by critics of failure and violence. Moreover, the weather smiled on the demonstrators, lending a festive air to the proceedings. Once again, the GOP critics proved wide of the mark with their apocalyptic predictions and alarmist rhetoric. Before this second round of protest, Republican officials called them nascent rebellions, if not out-and-out revolutions. The Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, called them “hate America rallies,” which proved far ...

School Choice

Columnists

West Virginia Board of Education President Paul Hardesty took aim recently at parents who choose something other than the traditional public school system. He has blamed the HOPE Scholarship, homeschooling and other school choice options for declining enrollment. He fails to admit the truth: parents are leaving the system because the system failed them and their children. Mr. Hardesty had many fallacies in his impassioned yet misplaced speech. I must correct one of the most glaring: under HOPE Scholarship Exemption M, which receives state money, those who choose the IIP (Homeschooling ...

Changes

Editorials

There are young people today who don’t have a clue what a rotary telephone was all about. They’re even more in the proverbial dark about the former existence of party lines and what they entailed — and what had to be endured — when part of one. Many young people probably can’t fathom a time when cellphones didn’t exist and how people accomplished anything without having one always at the ready. With time comes change, and now a significant change is happening on the federal front. It was a change destined to happen sooner or later and that “sooner” is now. Based on ...