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Attracting, retaining public defenders is a mighty, but absolutely crucial challenge

Last month, a work stoppage by lawyers in Massachusetts who represent indigent defendants forced judges to dismiss cases against hundreds of people who had been accused of crimes, including violent offenses, because they lacked legal representation. This isn’t just a problem in Massachusetts: in Centre County, a group of local bar advocates have warned that a growing shortage of lawyers willing to accept court-appointed cases is similarly threatening the integrity of the local criminal justice system. While it may seem counterintuitive to release criminal defendants before their ...

What’s the point of taxes?

America has a tax problem. Well, several. But there’s a particularly big one. Have you read the column by Georgia Garvey directly to the right? Or, for those reading online, it is also publishing on Saturday, July 29, and the headline for it is “Drinking hemlock, eating in the shade and following dumb rules.” If you haven’t, we recommend it — it directly pertains to this Our View. We’ll wait. Welcome back! Assuming you went and read that, anyway. If you’re just still here because you already read it, awesome. We’ll keep going on. We see Garvey’s opinion ...

Floods in region a warning: get prepared for disaster, or suffer consequences

Heavy rains — and the attending floods — have been in the news for some time now. Nationally, of course, there’s been the devastating, and lethal, floods in Texas, which we have printed substantial Associated Press coverage about. Within our local region, however, there have also been several significant rainfall events which have threatened (or caused) flash flooding — and, in some cases, evacuations. Consider the torrential rains in eastern Lycoming County and Sullivan County from Sunday into Monday. Our sister paper, the Williamsport Sun-Gazette, had coverage of this ...

Gaslighting doesn’t exist — you’re just crazy

Our government lies to us. Sometimes bluntly, sometimes through fine print, sometimes under the guise of national security and sometimes just to avoid accountability. This isn’t new. Governments around the world have lied to their citizens for as long as governments have existed — and it’s a subject extensively documented in academic research, if you feel like getting depressed. Helen Norton, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Colorado Boulder, has written about this throughout her career. In her paper, “The Government’s Lies and the Constitution,” ...

Way too much information

The human brain, in general, is pretty lazy. It’s a powerhouse of electrical signals and neural connections, constantly processing information, but it also loves to conserve energy wherever it can. That’s why you don’t memorize the color of every house you drive past, or think about how your teeth taste (although you probably are now — sorry). The idea of information overload isn’t new. The term gained popularity in the 1960s among management and information scholars to describe how too much information makes it difficult to process complex issues and make effective ...

The America we believe in

Everyone has a different concept of America. Ask any person on the street what America means to them, and you’ll get a different answer — ask a hundred, and you’ll get a hundred different answers. There are similarities, sure. Themes? Absolutely. But much like we are all, ultimately, strangers to one another — so, too, is our national identity unique to us. Many Americans these days become trapped in a negative spiral about our nation — this is true across the political spectrum. When President Biden was in charge, many people felt America was the worst it’s ever ...