Opinion category, Page 206
Letter to the editor: End violence to stop more violence
I would like to offer a corrective to the “Paw Patrol” vision of global conflict in the letter “Cease-fire won’t work in Gaza” (Dec. 24, TribLive). The writer invokes the term “bad guys” multiple times, without identifying who the “bad guys” are and why they keep fighting Israel. The reason...
Laurels & lances: Hello, goodbye, God bless
Laurel: To a fresh start. So many people start out Jan. 1 with the intent to be a whole new person. The only people who really accomplish that are the babies born after midnight. “New Year, new me!” actually applies to Jonathan Mrockosky and Emily Hibling’s daughter Madison, who showed...
Letter to the editor: Resolve to take climate action
The new year is a time to reflect on the past year and decide what to change. 2023 was the hottest year on record. Antarctic sea ice hit a record low. Historic wildfires in Canada kept Pittsburghers indoors with a code red air quality alert. Phoenix suffered a record-shattering heat...
Paul Kengor: Putin’s ominous message for 2024
Vladimir Putin this week gave his customary year-end speech. What he said should give us pause. Interestingly, the speech was considerably shorter than usual; in fact, it was quite brief, running just under four minutes. Also quite curious, some media sources noted that Putin “made little mention” of Ukraine, at...
Lori Falce: Minimum wage, self-worth and pizza
My first job was babysitting. In 1983, at 12 years old, I made $5 an hour. Minimum wage in Pennsylvania was $3.35 at the time. By the time I was 15, I had a regular client that paid $10 an hour plus pizza. Minimum wage hadn’t budged. When I had...
Cal Thomas: President Gay is a symptom, not the cause
The resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay after “facing national backlash for her administration’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work” does not solve the problem at America’s oldest college and other elite schools. She and many other university presidents are only a...
Vanessa Lynch: Celebrating EPA’s new oil and gas safeguards
Clean air advocates — and those of us living in front-line oil and gas communities — have something to celebrate as we start a new year. New Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) safeguards are poised to significantly slash methane pollution from the oil and gas industry. Parents across Pennsylvania are ecstatic....
Letter to the editor: Tax hike will hurt struggling Westmoreland County
Shocking that the property taxes in Westmoreland County are going up by over 30%. Yes, 30%. Nothing was said during the recent election by the incumbent commissioners who were reelected. Strange strategy or … ? They don’t seem to be as honest and forthcoming as we might want! Maybe an...
Letter to the editor: Westmoreland County seniors deserve better
I’ve been a nurse at Westmoreland Manor for 26 years. Like every year, caregivers like me spent the holidays with your loved ones at the nursing home. We love our residents like they’re our own family. My only wish is more time to care for them. Our elderly spent their...
Editorial: Cybersecurity is important to infrastructure
Infrastructure is one of those words that we think we know. Then something happens that shows us infrastructure is a lot bigger and a lot more complicated than we believed. When a bridge falls in Pittsburgh on the morning the president is due to visit for an infrastructure speech, that...
Letter to the editor: The left isn’t very tolerant
I am always fascinated when I hear people speak or see writings about tolerance as exemplified by the op-ed “Pittsburgh can use the arts to fight intolerance” (Dec. 11, TribLive). Tolerance in the conventional sense is a good thing. When I hear a car pass my house playing music I...
Jonah Goldberg: Nikki Haley’s slavery gaffe is a rare misstep for a good politician
Nikki Haley gave a bad answer to an easy question: What caused the Civil War? She replied with a word-salad on freedom and the role of government while failing to mention the word “slavery” at all. We don’t need to dwell on why it was a bad answer. The Civil...
Chris Heck: Bipartisan hope to protect Medicare
In the complex and often contentious world of health care policy, a glimmer of hope has emerged on the horizon. A bipartisan group of members of the U.S. House of Representatives has taken a stand to protect Medicare from looming cuts to physician compensation. The introduction of House Resolution 6683...
Letter to the editor: Steelers’ coaching controversy
For two years I have spoken about what Steelers Nation saw in the Dec. 23 shellacking of the Bengals. It knocked those rose-colored glasses right off Mike Tomlin’s nose and the rest of the excuse-making Kenny Pickett supporters. Only Matt Canada is laughing harder than yours truly. Tomlin finally let the...
Letter to the editor: God save us from ourselves
America has become a place of evilness. A Congress that doesn’t do anything about gun violence and immigration. Do nothing and become millionaires from political donations. All we hear is excuses. Every day we are bombarded with lies, fear, hate and conspiracy theories to where we can’t figure out the...
Editorial: Keep track of your gun or face the consequences
There is only so much you can rely upon people to do for themselves — especially when it’s clear they aren’t doing it. Given the opportunity, people will drive their cars faster than the speed limit. To address that, we have speeding tickets that make it expensive to ignore the...
Letter to the editor: Biden should be impeached over immigration
Article II, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution states: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The Constitution is very clear about what constitutes an impeachable...
Elwood Watson: Generation X is almost 60
Latchkey kids. Slackers. Caffeine lovers. Grunge. That’s how a lot of people have referred to Generation X, the 46 million Americans, like myself, who were born between 1965 and 1980. We were a generation that has been perennially pegged as cynical, self-indulgent, aimless, contrarian and often peripheral when it comes...
Noah Feldman: The New York Times has an edge in suit against OpenAI
The lawsuit filed by the New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement pits one of the great establishment media institutions against the purveyor of a transformative new technology. Symbolically, the case promises a clash of the titans: labor-intensive human newsgathering against pushbutton information produced by artificial intelligence....
Jason Opal: Even as American colonists defied the British, they understood the importance of the rule of law
The dominant storyline of our American Revolution is about patriotic defiance — refusing to pay taxes, dumping tea into the Boston Harbor and shooting redcoats once we saw the whites of their eyes. It’s about virtuous lawbreaking in the name of freedom. There is plenty of evidence to support this...
Letter to the editor: Westmoreland County tax increase and commissioner raises
Regarding the article “Westmoreland commissioners blame past fiscal neglect in approving 32.5% tax hike” (Dec. 21, TribLive): Dear Westmoreland County commissioners: How dare you! Raise property taxes 32.5%? Give yourself a 3.5% raise? I will not be getting a cost of living raise. When I have a debt to pay,...
Letter to the editor: Space pigs on PRT buses
On Pittsburgh Regional Transit buses, the first two seats behind the driver and the first three seats by the door entrance have the back toward the windows. The first two seats on each side that face the front, along with those first five seats, have one thing in common —...
Editorial: Humans over machines — New York Times seeks to protect journalism in suing OpenAI, Microsoft
The New York Times is not content to let OpenAI and Microsoft get rich using the newspaper’s web content for artificial intelligence like ChatGPT without paying and sued this week in federal court. We don’t know if the pun on the word “content” is particularly funny or if an AI...
Letter to the editor: From Reaganomics to Bidenomics
After 40 destructive years of supply-side Reaganomics, the vulture capitalism that President George H.W. Bush called “voodoo economics,” where big donors are enriched and budget deficits are increased, finally we are seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. Thanks to the American people, no matter what religion, race,...
Editorial cartoons for the week of Jan. 1
Editorial cartoons for the week of Jan. 1....
