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SCOTUS must protect against exec overreach

As legal challenges to the actions of the Trump administration mount, President Trump declared in a social media post: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” The quote was not original — it has been attributed to the French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte. But the laws and the Constitution of the United States were crafted to prohibit Napoleon’s form of authoritarian leadership. A key principle is that we are a government of the people with three distinct branches, each meant to serve as a check and balance to the other two. Since its foundational ruling in ...

Fear of cost must not stall prison plan

It is an important development that possible sites for a new Blair County prison — three total — have been identified. However, what is even more important is that the three current elected county commissioners — Chairman Dave Kessling, Amy Webster and Laura Burke — have made a verbal commitment to move the new prison project forward, unlike predecessor boards who talked about the need for a new lockup but did nothing — or next to nothing — to advance such a project. Reasons for the predecessors’ inaction were obvious — fear over possible political ramifications ...

Students must think before tragedy strikes

Sometimes an editorial needs to take a broader, if not unconventional, look at situations in the news. The Feb. 12 Mirror article about six Penn State Altoona students under investigation regarding an Oct. 27 early morning vehicle crash that claimed the life of a 17-year-old high school student is one such circumstance. First of all, the purpose of this editorial is not to imply guilt, predict a finding of guilt in a court of law or mention names part of that case. All of the individuals allegedly being investigated are innocent until proven guilty. The tragedy of the young ...

Re-entry group faces hard work

The one indisputable reality encompassing the work of the Blair County Prison Re-entry Coalition is that its efforts will continue to necessitate utmost patience and understanding. Absent one or both of those two assets, the coalition will be doomed to failure and, ultimately, extinction. All of that became clear from reading articles in the Mirror’s Feb. 8-9 and Feb. 10 editions. What also became clear from reading those articles was that the coalition is — and will continue to be — dependent upon support from the community in general and certain important entities within ...

Editorials in this space in recent weeks focused on cancer’s link to alcohol and that doctors and researchers currently are studying gut health in their probe of cancer’s causes. “There’s no question we’re missing something” was the comment of a California gastrointestinal oncologist quoted in the Mirror’s Jan. 25-26 edition under the headline “Doctors eye gut health as part of cancer probe.” The doctor was lamenting about the cancer mystery of why cancer rates have fallen for older adults in recent years, but gastrointestinal cancers, across the globe, are ...

Review board instrumental in blight fight

Altoona should not ignore any potential resource in the fight against blight. That’s why the city should revive the Vacant Property Review Board, which has been dormant since about 2008. Evidence in the form of blight — now and perhaps as far back as 2008 — has shown how inactivity of the review board can affect this municipality’s work to reduce the number of problem properties. Relegating the review board to an entity of inactivity probably should have been avoided and, hopefully, that will change in the near future. As part of acknowledging updated thinking about the ...