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Opinion

Merger progress stays quiet, even after funding

The OBSERVER’s View

We are not against the recent action by the Chautauqua County Legislature to approve additional funding to the town of Pomfret for a study to investigate options for shared services and mergers. We do believe, however, that not enough is being said regarding where the effort stands. In July, lawmakers approved a resolution to award Pomfret $25,000 from the county's Government Reduction initiative for the initiative. The money is not part of the county's budget but rather will be coming from its reserve accounts. To his credit, Chautauqua County Executive PJ Wendel called upon the ...

U.S. seems paralyzed by ‘devastating chaos’

Commentary

Recently, the media has pinned the phrase “a failure of imagination” on Donald Trump’s presidency. That phrase applies to the actions (or inactions) of the Trump administration, but the real failure of imagination may lie with all of us who are subject to it. The phrase expresses the challenge of grappling with the question of “what if?”— gaming out the consequences of our actions and decisions. We make countless cause-and-effect calls on a daily basis, predicting outcomes based on past experiences and on our imaginative power to contemplate future scenarios. Initially, ...

Socialism, Welfare State not the same thing

Commentary

Many confuse the Welfare State with Socialism. Some confuse the Welfare State and Socialism with charity. Nobody is more confused about these definitions than the new generation of self-proclaimed Socialists. Charity involves voluntary assistance without expectation of repayment. Jesus admonished his followers (Matthew 6) to never announce their charity in public. This separates charity from the politics of “free stuff”. Charity might require reciprocation. Biblically, food was provided for the poor by leaving 10% of the crops unharvested in the fields where recipients could ...

Other voices: Democracy doesn't require truth police

Commentary

It became fashionable a few years ago for people to blame “misinformation” for others holding views they find wrongheaded. Social media platforms, sometimes jawboned by the federal government, invoked this supposed crisis to justify censorship, especially during the pandemic. This insulted the intelligence of the American people, who can make up their own minds without being told what to think. A new study explores how exposure to “misinformation” on social media affected voters in 2020. The answer, drawn from a three-month experiment on nearly 16,000 users, is very ...

Reagan movie superbly made, worth seeing

Commentary

CHAUTAUQUA — After seven decades of tyranny, the Soviet Union and its empire collapsed due in no small measure to the efforts of two former actors and a grocer’s daughter. One actor—named Karol Wojtyla—grew up in Wadowice, Poland, and later moved to Krakow, where he eventually became a Roman Catholic priest, bishop, archbishop, and cardinal. The other actor—nicknamed Dutch—was born in Tampico, Illinois, grew up in nearby Dixon, and became a sports announcer at WOC in Davenport, Iowa, and WHO in Des Moines before moving on to acting. The two, of course, are John Paul II, ...

Taking on a crisis is unpopular, lonely at top

Editor's corner

At the conclusion of Dunkirk’s Common Council meeting, department heads and elected officials gathered around to congratulate newly approved Police Chief Doug Switzer. Since the retirement of Chris Witkowski in February, Switzer had been handling the duties before being officially approved ...