Featured Commentary category, Page 135
Mark Kudlawiec, Daniel Webb, John Zesiger & Arnold Nadonley: Level playing field for public, charter schools
As school superintendents with decades of experience as educators, we continue to look forward to the start of school each and every fall. While our enthusiasm has not waned, some things have changed. One is the intensifying struggle each year to finalize a budget that can deliver what our students...
Wayne Jones: Entrepreneurial education essential for Pittsburgh youth
Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto’s Gender Equity Commission recently presented findings on the city’s inequity across gender and race. Those findings revealed that although Pittsburgh’s white residents are on par with white residents in other cities, the same does not apply to black residents. Black people living in Pittsburgh face higher...
Jonah Goldberg: Does Team Trump think we’re idiots?
What offends me most about the whistleblower-Ukraine-Biden story isn’t the obvious corruption of it all. It’s the way members of Team Trump assume we’re all idiots who won’t notice they’ve abruptly shifted their narrative. At first, it seemed like a familiar scenario of allegations met with denials. The Washington Post...
Walter Williams: Camille Paglia, intelligent radical feminist
Camille Paglia is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she has been a faculty member since 1984. Paglia describes herself as transgender, but unlike so many other transgender people, she is pro-capitalism and hostile to those who’d restrict free speech....
John Stossel: Oceans new frontier for seasteaders
When political arguments aren’t getting you anywhere, what can you do? Start your own country! Unfortunately, most of the world’s land is controlled by rapacious governments unwilling to let others experiment. But fortunately, that still leaves oceans. If people move 12 miles offshore (or 24 miles in the case of...
Tom Richard & Justin Schwartz: Universities must lead on climate solutions
Headlines from around the world increasingly reinforce a sobering point: Climate change is the defining crisis of our time. A new poll shows the number of Americans who see climate change as a crisis is growing — just after the strongest hurricane on record. For the sake of the planet...
Pat Buchanan: Can Trump still avoid war with Iran?
President Trump does not want war with Iran. America does not want war with Iran. Even the Senate Republicans are advising against military action in response to that attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities. If neither America nor Iran wants war, what has brought us to the brink? Answer: The...
G. Terry Madonna & Michael Young: Election reform standoff
Lawmaking has often been compared to sausage making. One may relish eating it but not want to know how it is produced. Never has this been truer than watching the Pennsylvania General Assembly tackle modern election reform. The Legislature has a precious few weeks left in 2019 to decide a...
Jonah Goldberg: Candidates & constitutional boundaries
It’s exhausting being both a conservative and a critic of President Trump. When I aim my pen at the White House, many of my comrades on the right go nuts. And readers who love it when I go after Trump turn into a cage full of poo- flinging monkeys when I...
S.E. Cupp: Andrew Yang isn’t angry, & that’s great
Two upstarts in the 2020 presidential election — Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson — are both polling well below the front of the pack. The three front-runners — Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — currently enjoy a full 60% of Democratic support nationwide. But despite their lack of...
Robert Daley: Sam Davis’ death shows reform needed in long-term care
Steelers Nation has been rattled by the death of Sam Davis, a former offensive lineman for the team and four-time Super Bowl champion. After a 13-season career in the National Football League, Davis, who had been suffering from dementia and was legally blind, was recently in the care of a...
Colin McNickle: Pittsburgh’s anemic labor market
Job growth has slowed significantly in Greater Pittsburgh over the last few months. And while there typically are myriad factors in the job-creation equation, the proverbial “usual suspects” can continue to be tagged for the region’s anemic employment performance, an analysis by the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy finds. “(T)he...
John Stossel: Despite cable’s perspective, there’s good news
I rarely watch cable news anymore. It’s all hysteria, all the time. CNN: “We are destroying the planet.” MSNBC: “The middle class is disappearing!” I’m glad my favorite magazine, Reason, cuts through the gloom and tells us the truth: There is less war and more food. We live healthier and...
Walter Williams: Racist exam questions?
The U.S. Department of Justice recently sued the Baltimore County government, alleging that its written test for police officer recruits is unfairly biased against black applicants. It turns out that black applicants failed the written test at a rate much greater than white applicants. That results in fewer blacks being...
Donald Boudreaux: In defense of so-called ‘price gouging’
It never fails. Every natural disaster brings in its wake higher prices for goods such as plywood and propane, and for services such as plumbing repair and carpentry. Just as surely, politicians and pundits and the general public — as they did in response to Hurricane Dorian — blame these...
Jonah Goldberg: White liberals have moved to left of black voters
“No Democrat is going to win the nomination for president of the United States without African-American support. Nor should they,” Kate Bedingfield, Joe Biden’s deputy campaign manager, told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Bedingfield was pushing back on a single bad poll for Biden (from Monmouth University) that had the media and...
Pat Buchanan: After John Bolton, Trump goals remain unrealized
The sudden and bitter departure of John Bolton from the White House was baked in the cake from the day he arrived there. For Bolton’s worldview, formed and fixed in a Cold War that ended in 1991, was irreconcilable with the policies Donald Trump promised in his 2016 campaign. Indeed,...
Jonah Goldberg: A theory on Trump’s GOP approval rating
Early one recent morning, Donald Trump tweeted: “94% Approval Rating in the Republican Party, a record. Thank you!” Where the president got this specific number remains a mystery. Recent polls by YouGov put his GOP approval roughly 10 points lower, and Gallup, which has tracked Trump’s popularity since he took...
S.E. Cupp: Attorney’s stunning plan to discredit Harvey Weinstein accusers
The right of every citizen to an attorney during a criminal prosecution is one of America’s most important democratic tenets, protected by the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution. This holds for even the worst among us. Serial killers Ted Bundy and Charles Manson had attorneys. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh...
Peter Morici: How to win trade war with China
According to the Trump administration, America is winning the trade war with China. The Middle Kingdom’s economic machine may be slowing, but President Xi Jinping is unlikely to sue for peace anytime soon — at least not on terms acceptable to American interests. China’s economic system is antithetical to American...
Joseph Rogan: College admissions scandal hurts students with disabilities
The national college admissions scandal creates many problems, but it especially harms students with real disabilities. That parents paid a corrupt private counselor tens of thousands of dollars to fudge their children’s college applications raises concerns about their ethics, but also about the admission standards and processes of the institutions...
Cal Thomas: Dealing with the Taliban devil
PARIS — President Trump was right to cancel a “secret” meeting with leaders of the Taliban and the Afghan government following two bomb attacks by the terrorist group that killed 10 civilians, an American soldier and a Romanian service member in heavily fortified Kabul. The president is eager to fulfill...
Sen. Vincent Hughes: PA Forward gives students chance at better future
When the school year begins, I am always encouraged to see so many students from across the nation pouring into our state, where higher education is an important industry. Colleges, universities and trade schools employ tens of thousands of people and breathe life into so many of our communities. For...
John Stossel: Charter schools, better schools
With most services, you get to shop around, but rarely can you do that with government-run schools. Philadelphia mom Elaine Wells was upset to learn that there were fights every day in the school her son attended. So she walked him over to another school. “We went to go enroll...
Jonah Goldberg: Biden’s best bet is front-porch campaign
Here’s an idea: Joe Biden should run a front-porch campaign. Front-porch campaigns were once a common feature of American presidential politics, though the term wasn’t always applied to the practice. The most famous front-porch campaigns were in the 1880s and 1890s, culminating in William McKinley’s successful bid in 1896. While...
