Editorials category, Page 7
Editorial: Canceled town halls, shrugged-off support staff disrespect value of Pittsburgh VA
The Veterans Affairs Pittsburgh Health System is dealing with deep losses to its workforce. In an exclusive interview with TribLive, Pittsburgh VA director Donald Koenig spoke about the reductions. Since January, 238 employees have been lost. Another 87 will be gone by the end of the year. There are 151...
Laurels & lances: Fire & food
Laurel: To making progress. Four Hempfield fire departments are moving ahead with dissolving their charters. The good thing here is not that they are going away. It is that they are finding a way to continue to serve their communities. By dissolving as individual chartered entities, the departments will move...
Editorial: Lessons from Steelers training camp for government
The boys are back in town. On Wednesday, Saint Vincent College in Unity became the center of the Pittsburgh Steelers universe as players arrived on the scene for their annual training camp. This is where the players begin the process of becoming a team. Sure, they all have numbers and...
Editorial: Should a corrections officer be suspended over a racist video?
The Allegheny County Jail leadership did the right thing Monday in suspending a corrections officer. Brian Davis has worked at the jail for five years. He most recently worked in the facility’s intake unit. That is where new detainees are brought into the system and processed. It is the introduction...
Editorial: What happens to nursing homes if Medicaid takes a hit?
The total population of senior citizens is 55.8 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Of that, 1.3 million are in nursing homes. That’s about 2.3%. Maybe that doesn’t seem like a lot, but the issue is it’s a moving target. For some people, a stay in a nursing home...
Editorial: The risk of nuclear war waned after the Cold War. It’s back with a vengeance
When the first nuclear bomb test took place 80 years ago, the scientists who gathered to observe the explosion in the New Mexico desert recognized they were playing with fire. Physicist Enrico Fermi tried to break the tension by taking bets on whether the bomb would ignite the atmosphere and...
Editorial: What are limits of expression on college campuses?
Protesting on college campuses is a rite of passage — part of the process of growing up and learning. It is universal. Student protests happened in medieval France, in the streets of China in the 1980s and in South Africa against apartheid in the 1970s. It is all over the...
Editorial: Was McCormick event at Carnegie museum political?
When is a political event not a political event? When everything is very carefully phrased. On Tuesday, Pittsburgh sat at the intersection of politics and money. Carnegie Mellon University was the site of the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit. It was coordinated by U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Pittsburgh. President Donald...
Laurels & lances: New tech, new info
Laurel: To new access. We hear a lot about the dangers of technology, especially related to artificial intelligence. Yes, there are valid questions to raise. Yes, Hollywood movies and science fiction books have postulated vivid scenarios. But artificial intelligence also can give back accessibility that makes life easier. In some...
Editorial: Energy and innovation aren’t the same as money and power
The Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon University was ostensibly, as the name implied, about energy and innovation. In reality, it was about money and jobs. The event provided an opportunity for investors and politicians to get a moment in the sun as they announced a roster of...
Editorial: The impact of Bella Seachrist’s death
Bella Seachrist never had a chance. Bella missed an opportunity for simply living. She was just 3 years old — almost 4 — when she died, slowly, of starvation. Poverty will do that to a child. That isn’t what happened to Bella. Her stepmother, Laura Ramriez, had a room in...
Editorial: Faith in 911 system needs to be maintained
We take some things for granted. Turn a faucet, and water will pour out. Flip a switch, and lights will come on. Those can be interrupted by circumstances. Don’t pay a bill, and the water or electricity can be cut off. But there are some services we rely on so...
Editorial: Deep in a fiscal hole, Congress just keeps digging
In a remarkable achievement, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act got worse with each iteration before finally being enacted. On plausible assumptions, the final version will add more than $5 trillion to deficits over the next 10 years, moving the track of public debt from unsustainable to all but unhinged....
Editorial: Prediction, prevention are critical to natural disaster response
Rising waters threatened. Alerts were issued. Girl Scouts were evacuated. It might sound like the story of the flash floods in Texas, where 27 people were killed at a Christian girls camp by the sudden weather. But it isn’t. It’s the story of 105 people escorted from a Kummer Road...
Editorial: Should Pennsylvania eliminate sales tax exemptions?
When government needs more money, it has a few options. There are fees: a cost for a driver’s license or a hunting license or a copy of your birth certificate. There are fines, although this should never really be looked at as a revenue source. It’s more about enforcing the...
Laurels & lances: Awareness & animals
Laurel: To intervention. There is no tragedy greater than a loss of life — except a loss that could have been prevented. In Westmoreland County, an effort is being made to find ways to reduce the number of suicides. The county’s Suicide Fatality Review Team convened for the first time...
Editorial: Questioning how funds are spent is how oversight works
Oversight is important. One function of government is to decide how money is spent. Whether it’s the state, a municipality or a school board, government agencies take in tax money, grants or pass-through funds from a higher level of government and plan how best to distribute it. Another function is...
Editorial: What does the future of diversity look like?
Is diversity disappearing? In 2015, the Westmoreland Diversity Coalition was created. Carlotta Paige founded the organization by expanding her work on the annual Unity Rally. “The issue of diversity, nobody wanted to deal with (it),” she said. “It’s been a challenge every day.” After 10 years, Paige is retiring and...
Editorial: Less-than-lethal weapons are good move but still require restraint
A serious interaction with law enforcement can have deadly consequences. In 2024, there were 32 fatal incidents of police shootings in Pennsylvania. The first was Jan. 7, when Christopher Lee Shepherd, 48, of Upper St. Clair was shot as SWAT officers responded to his home during a mental health event....
Editorial: A reminder in Africa that the religious freedoms we take for granted are fragile
As Christianity declines in the West, the faith is flourishing in sub-Saharan Africa, which is seeing the fastest growth in Christianity the world over. By 2060, more than 4 in 10 Christians worldwide are expected to live in sub-Saharan Africa, compared with just 1 in 10 in 1970, according to...
Editorial: Giant Eagle might be just what the doctor ordered for pharmacy problems
Are grocery stores the key to fighting back against the high cost of prescription drugs? In recent years, drugstores have been caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock is Medicare and Medicaid co-pays. The hard place? Pharmacy benefit managers that act as a middleman between pharmaceutical companies...
Editorial: What’s happening with police on the South Side?
In June 2024, a TribLive reporter and a photographer spent a night walking on Pittsburgh’s South Side. They were documenting the crime and general atmosphere. It had been almost a year since Pittsburgh police implemented a special patrol to address an uptick in crime and a perception that the area...
Editorial: Let freedom ring
The greatest thing America has ever done is to stand up to tyranny and declare itself to be free. Before our nation was a nation, we sowed the seeds of what we would become. Before we had a representational democratic republic, people acting in our collective interest sat in collaboration....
Editorial: Public defender did not help client by going to Orphans’ Court
Isreal Moseby, 19, has multiple issues to face in court. There are charges of stabbing a woman in the neck and dragging her around her home in 2023. There are charges related to the June 4 death of Samantha Howells, 53, in Crafton Heights. As terrible as those crimes are,...
Editorial: Does video sell Pennsylvania as state for business or just roast NYC?
Pennsylvania is trying to whisper sweet nothing in the ears of New York businesses. New York State Rep. Zohran Mamdani, a progressive Democrat, presumptively won his party’s nomination for mayor of New York City in the June 24 primary. He defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and a host of others,...
