Editorial: The inevitable stadium The nation’s football audience was legitimately incredulous several weeks ago when the NFL’s random rules denied the Bills offense a chance at the ball in its overtime loss – in a championship game, no less – to the Kansas City Chiefs. It’s a fair wager that New York sports fans took it particularly hard, as “our team” had a shot at the Super Bowl and then lost it in the closing seconds thanks to the reality…
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Taking on the bullies Editorial: March 10, 2022 You have to start somewhere. We will admit to some heavy-duty skepticism when this newspaper received a press release last week announcing three days of anti-bullying assemblies and break-out sessions at Cooperstown Central School. It all sounded rather gimmicky – “a student empowerment and empathy activation team” calling itself “Sweethearts & Heroes” and co-founded by a Cooperstown High alum, Tom Murphy. Students participating in “Circle,” which, said the release, is “based…
Editorial: The Sideshow “New York will create a bureaucracy out of anything.” So wrote one of this newspaper’s Facebook followers after reading a post about the state’s new “Office of Cannabis Management,” set up as the agency tasked to regulate legal weed and its derivations. The Office was a long time coming; ex-Governor Andrew Cuomo had stalled his appointment of potential agency leadership and then he stepped down. His successor moved (relatively) quickly and, voila, we have a new state…
Editorial: Hello in there Where have all the people gone? Seems like there’s no one hangin’ on. Look through the windows, The houses are empty. Hey! Everybody’s out of town. Seems like I’m the only one around. Hey! Better send some people down. Everyone on Earth Is out of town. Hal David wrote that apocalyptic lyric back in 1970, Burt Bacharach added some appropriately dyspeptic music with a wobbly trombone, B.J. Thomas sang it with the right tinge of loneliness.…
Editorial: Maybe not Far be it from this page to look a gift horse squarely in the mouth, but open wide, equine friend: Term limits aren’t government reform. We do not blame Governor Kathy Hochul for saying eight is enough when it comes to years in office for a governor. Her predecessor’s bullying monomania for cementing his legacy by winning the fourth term that eluded his father was his undoing. She calls for that same two-term limit on the lieutenant…
Editorial: Omicron’s Paradox A COVID-weary public confronts the conundrum daily: Is this good news? Is it bad news? We have to admit that we’re a little bit confused. The Omicron caseload is frightening on its surface — ridiculously high numbers on a daily basis, top-of-the-fold newspaper coverage, lead-story status. We’re so attuned to scary numbers and frightening graphs that when we hear about record-shattering daily positive tests coming back, the first thing we want to do is retreat to our…
Editorial: Timely guidance? New Yorkers learned late December 6 exactly which hospitals around the state would be subject to Governor Kathy Hochul’s Executive Order limiting certain elective surgeries and procedures beginning roughly 36 hours later, on December 9. The order initially exploded out of Albany seemingly moments after South Africa’s first report of Covid-19’s Omicron variant. We recognize and appreciate Governor Hochul’s proactive effort, but there’s a big disconnect at play reminiscent of just about every Covid-19-related Executive Order her…
Editorial: Omicron, is it? It sounds a lot like something out of Hollywood — one of those action/sci-fi movies that demand we suspend our disbelief more than usual and go along for the ride in a world where it can’t happen here. The problem, of course, is that it can. And it is. We had barely dried the Thanksgiving dinner dishes when word came out of the World Health Organization that it was meeting in emergency session over a newly…
Editorial Small business, every day We publish this week on “Black Friday,” the day in the calendar year when the nation’s retailers would sell so much merchandise to Christmas shoppers that their operations for the entire year would stop running in the red and move into the black. It really is not the busiest shopping day of the year — these days, that comes a couple of days before Christmas itself, when all of us wake up and realize that…
Editorial: How was it? A big success We salute the Cooperstown Central School’s varsity boys’ soccer team for a 2021 season that was a resounding success, a joy to witness, and a giant step forward on our slow walk ‘back to normal.’ We send that same salute to the Cherry Valley/ Springfield boys’ varsity soccer team, Cooperstown’s girls varsity swimmers, Oneonta’s boys’ varsity cross country runners, the Head of the Fish and Head of the Charles rowers, and every…