Featured Commentary category, Page 139
Jonah Goldberg: Unity can be worse than partisanship
I want to put in a good word for partisanship. This might sound strange to some readers. I’ve written a lot about our problem with tribalism, including hyper-partisanship and political polarization. It was a major theme of my cheerily titled book “Suicide of the West.” So I’m happy to concede...
S.E. Cupp: Republican Party owns all of Trump, not just parts they like
When we talk about people or a party being on the wrong side of history, it usually requires some hindsight, a position of informed advantage to see clearly missteps that were less clear at the time of events. Not so now, with today’s modern Republican Party and its utter cowardice...
Mitchel Nickols: Making decisions as we age
My childhood pastor in Aliquippa, the late Rev. Asa W. Roberts Sr., used to often say at funerals, “The only way not to get old is to die young.” Both he and his father lived into their 90s. The same is true for my mother-in-law, Magnolia Combs of Brackenridge, who...
William Gamble: Black police recruiting requires resources
“Black arrests up, police recruits down” (July 20, TribLIVE) was one of the most positive editorials I have seen to address crime in black communities, if understood and taken in the right light. For the past 30 years I have been working with local police departments and local officials conducting...
Cal Thomas: End immigration to mend it
For safety reasons, fire marshals control the number of people who can occupy a building at any one time. We’ve seen what happens when crowds get too large and a fire breaks out, causing panic and often death. So why not control the crowd illegally entering America? We control water...
Walter Williams: Solution to high-crime rates rests with black people
Let’s think about priorities. Say that you live in one of the dangerous high-crime and poor-schooling neighborhoods of cities like Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit or St. Louis. Which is most important to you: doing something about public safety and raising the quality of education or, as most black politicians do, focusing...
John Stossel: The negatives of raising minimum wage
Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign was disrupted by campaign workers demanding the same $15 per hour Sanders demands government force all employers to pay. It serves him right. Years ago, the activist group ACORN faced the same problem. After fighting for a higher minimum wage, they tried to convince a...
Kevin Hancock: Medicaid waiver program aims to solve nationwide problem
A recent Tribune-Review story (“Lower Burrell woman’s story personifies failures in Medicaid waiver program,” July 13, TribLIVE) and editorial (“Medicaid waivers real roller coaster,” July 16, TribLIVE) detailed a family’s difficulty securing home care for an aging loved one. The story equates the staffing struggles as a personification of “failures...
Colin McNickle: Troubling comparisons for Pittsburgh
An updated statistical analysis by the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy of how the City of Pittsburgh stacks up against four comparable “benchmark cities” should prompt much, and necessarily robust, discussion among local public policy makers. Since 2004, the Pittsburgh think tank has, every three years, compared the erstwhile Steel...
Pat Buchanan: Is new US Mideast war inevitable?
In October 1950, as U.S. forces were reeling from hordes of Chinese troops who had intervened massively in the Korean War, a 5,000-man Turkish brigade arrived to halt an onslaught by six Chinese divisions. Said supreme commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur: “The Turks are the hero of heroes. There is no...
Alex Azar: Trump putting patients in control
A few years ago, my doctor recommended a routine heart exam. I would be paying for it out of pocket, since I had a high-deductible plan, so naturally I asked what it would cost. After a great deal of effort, I was told the list price was $5,500, and my...
Clarence Page: Is Trump’s latest race-baiting a 2020 campaign strategy?
If you were relieved, as I wanted to be, by President Donald Trump’s next-day repudiation of the “Send her back!” chant directed at a Somali-born congresswoman during his North Carolina rally, perk down. The vitriol that welled up so visibly and disturbingly in that crowd Wednesday night symbolized the unusual...
Lawrence John: Legislation another barrier to opioid addiction treatment
Last year, Pennsylvania took a major step forward in helping those addicted to opioids by becoming the first state in the nation to remove the prior authorization insurance requirement for medication-assisted treatment (MAT). Unfortunately, our state Legislature is now considering a measure that would set us back in helping those...
Jonah Goldberg: Paul Ryan once again being cast as pariah
Paul Ryan is getting the hate treatment — again. The former GOP House speaker and 2012 vice presidential candidate is a unifying figure these days. Liberals have long despised him — unfairly in my mind. Anti-Trump conservatives are infuriated by his “surrender to Trumpism,” in the words of Charlie Sykes,...
John Dame: Unintended consequences of medical marijuana
More than 40 years ago I ran a rock radio station, Starview 92.7-FM, in central Pennsylvania. We offered special midnight movies, including “Reefer Madness,” which warned of a decent into madness for those lured into trying marijuana. This 1930s propaganda film was quite campy and funny, especially in the culture...
Antony Davies & James Harrigan: Tech companies are watching; do we care?
Google Assistant records conversations, and now those recordings have been leaked to the public. Is anyone really surprised? Judging by Google’s stock price, the answer is a resounding “no.” Consumers introduced listening devices into their homes, and they seem relatively blasé now that humans on the other ends of those...
G. Terry Madonna & Michael Young: As goes Pennsylvania, so goes the 2020 election
While Democrats wade through a marathon of intra-party debates, the national punditocracy is increasingly asking two urgent questions about the impending 2020 presidential contest: Can President Trump win Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin again? And can he win a second term without those three states? Both questions reflect a stark reality...
Walter Williams: Our deviant culture hasn’t always been the norm
Here’s a suggestion. How about setting up some high school rifle clubs? Students would bring their own rifles to school, store them with the team coach and, after classes, collect them for practice. You say: “Williams, you must be crazy! To prevent gun violence, we must do all we can...
John Stossel: Ag-gag laws hurt search for truth in farming
Recording events from public land shouldn’t be a crime. Yet when a woman in Utah, standing by a public road, filmed farmworkers pushing a cow with a bulldozer, the farmer told her, “You cannot videotape my property.” Soon the police came and local prosecutors charged her with “agricultural operation interference.”...
Donald Boudreaux: Chinese IP ‘theft’ doesn’t justify Trump’s tariffs
Among the most politically potent arguments for President Trump’s punitive tariffs on your, my and other Americans’ purchases of imports from China is the claim that these tariffs are a tool for reducing Chinese theft of Americans’ intellectual property (IP). While IP theft in China does occur, as my Mercatus...
Ira Bedzow & Stacy Gallin: Truth about Holocaust, Holocaust education
Principal William Latson of Spanish River Community High School in Palm Beach County, Fla. was removed from his position and reassigned to a different position in the Palm Beach County school district after refusing to admit that the Holocaust was a “factual, historical event.” It is not that he personally...
Timothy McMahon: Veterans’ GI Bill choices should not be limited
After four years of serving our country in the Air Force, I began a career as an educator in Pennsylvania. For 4½ decades, I have worked with students and employers all across Pennsylvania to give students in-demand skills and give employers career-ready graduates. At Triangle Tech, we have had the...
Pat Buchanan: Are Yanks, Brits going their separate ways?
When Sir Kim Darroch’s secret cable to London was leaked to the Daily Mail, wherein he called the Trump administration “dysfunctional … unpredictable … faction-riven … diplomatically clumsy and inept,” the odds on his survival as U.K. ambassador plummeted. When President Trump’s tweeted retort called Darroch “wacky,” a “stupid guy”...
Doyle McManus: Coming soon: Impeachment for dummies
WASHINGTON — Robert S. Mueller III isn’t expected to roll out any bombshells when he testifies before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees on July 24. “The report is my testimony,” he said in May, the first time he had spoken in public in nearly two years. But that’s OK....
Michelle Malkin: Democratic donors’ sex-creep club
Well, well, well. “Follow the facts,” Democratic strategist Christine Pelosi advises fellow liberals in the wake of billionaire and high-flying political financier Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking indictment . Some of “our faves” could be implicated in the long-festering scandal, she warned, so it’s time to “let the chips fall...
