by Jonathan Reisman

Branded was a mid-1960s TV western starring Chuck Connors as US Army cavalry captain Jason McCord who is court-martialed and cashiered for cowardice. McCord is innocent but maintains silence to protect the reputation of his mentor and commanding officer, and to prevent corrupt Washington elites from launching another genocidal war against Native Americans. McCord travels around the 1880s west trying to prove he is not a coward, protect the innocent and punish the guilty.

by Sarah Craighead Dedmon

Newspaperwoman Ruth Leubecker was a journalist’s journalist. Born and raised in the Machias area, she went on to create and run a magazine in Singapore, edit multiple daily and weekly newspapers abroad and at home, especially in Maryland, lunching annually with part-owner Walter Cronkite, and create and host a cable news program, before returning Downeast and into the pages of the Machias Valley News Observer where she has been the backbone of this newspaper for decades.

by Sarah Craighead Dedmon

My normally easy relationship with the English language went through a low point when sentence diagramming dominated the eighth-grade curriculum. I can only assume a mathematician developed the macabre practice, perhaps looking for ways to make language more math-like and, therefore, worse. There may be a variety of opinions on the matter today, but a quick Google search found an Atlantic magazine article titled “The Wrong Way to Teach Grammar” and I agree, so I’ll leave it there.

From the Desk of the Editor, Sarah Craighead Dedmon

My tall and skinny husband played the Machias town Santa Claus for two years, which is one way I know the amount of effort that goes into the Machias Community Christmas celebration. And I’m not even counting the work it took to make him look fat. 

by Andy Egan

by Pravda Gladio

For the first time in Maine, on May 16, Democrats controlling both the House and Senate in Augusta have passed taxpayer-supported abortion services under LD 820.

Many Mainers who objected to the use of taxpayer dollars for abortion attended the Committee Hearings in April and gave testimony.  Mainers testified that they did not want their tax dollars being used to fund abortion, which is an elective procedure 99% of the time.

by Sarah Craighead Dedmon, Editor

I was chatting with a local businessman last month when he said, “So, how is the newspaper doing, you know, now that no one reads newspapers anymore?” The newspaper is doing pretty well, I said, in part because people actually do read community newspapers like ours.

That said, a recent Pew Research Study on the news habits of American adults found that 41 percent preferred to get their local news from television, 37 percent online, 13 percent in print, and 8 percent from the radio.

by Brian Lonergan

by Conrad Black

The most immense and dangerous public scandal in American history is finally cracking open like a ripe pomegranate. The broad swath of the Trump-hating media that has participated in what has amounted to an unconstitutional attempt to overthrow the government are reduced to reporting the events and revelations of the scandal in which they have been complicit, in a po-faced ho-hum manner to impart to the misinformed public that this is as routine as stock market fluctuations or the burning of an American flag in Tehran.