Editorials category, Page 85
Editorial: Learning about campus sex assault
There are things you need to go to college to learn. How to design a skyscraper. How to perform brain surgery. How to split atoms. There are things you shouldn’t have to learn in college. Like how to keep your hands to yourself. That’s more of a kindergarten thing. Nonetheless,...
Laurels & lances: Cookies, phishing, kidney and overtime
Laurel: To aiming high. The 2.36 million boxes of Girl Scout cookies sold each year averages out to about 150 boxes per scout. But Stella VanWhy, 6, of Arnold thought she could sell 2,020 boxes this year. Her leader suggested something more realistic, so the Daisy Scout came up with...
Editorial: Hempfield still has issues to address
Hempfield Area School District’s residential tax assessment appeals program will be ending. Eventually. On Monday, the board voted 7-2 to discontinue the broadly criticized program that served as a back-door reassessment for properties with a $250,000 difference between fair market value and selling price, as calculated by district-hired law firm...
Editorial: The black and white of guns
It is easy to paint any issue in pure, unyielding black and white. Abortion. Environment. Poverty. Health care. Energy. Immigration. Taxes. Everything can boil down to pro or con. But is that accurate? Almost never. Let’s look at guns. Pennsylvania is often tagged as a gun-friendly state. It’s hard to...
Editorial: FDA should scrub in on recall
There are things that are done with an abundance of trust — things done with the belief that they are safe. Like surgery. When going into an operating room, people are vulnerable. They know things can go wrong, but they also trust everything that can be done to ensure it...
Editorial: Reaching for the dream
There once was a man who had a dream. He stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He looked back 100 years to a great day in American history and spoke about how far we have come, but he also...
Editorial: Is gambling too convenient?
Legal online poker made $2.5 million in its first full month of being legal in Pennsylvania. That’s not a lot in the great scheme of things. It’s less than 1% of the state’s December gambling revenue. But it’s a start. The question isn’t how much will it grow from there....
Editorial: Bus routes are connections, not prizes
One of the hallmarks of a how well a community works is always transportation. Are the roads paved? Are they plowed? How bad is the traffic? And how good is the public transit? According to a report from trip-planning app Moovit, the people of Pittsburgh have it pretty good compared...
Laurels & lances: Develop, restart, honor
Laurel: To realizing big change can start small. Pittsburgh is looking beyond big development projects and placing emphasis on rebuilding neighborhoods and modeling transformation with its own blighted properties. Mayor Bill Peduto made the announcement Wednesday, pointing to the potential impact that rehabilitating neighborhood business districts and the city-owned buildings...
Editorial: Small businesses are tariff casualties
Not every company that uses steel is a global giant. They aren’t all traded on the stock exchange. They don’t all employ thousands. Sometimes it’s a small company with small margins. But manufacturing matters whether it’s a major power or a minor one. That is why many buckled in for...
Editorial: Cut through sticky red tape
It was supposed to signal something that was important. In a pile of government documents — decimated forests of paper and ink — ribbons of red tape would signal that one sheaf was more weighty than the others. But red tape spreads like weeds and it wasn’t long before everything...
Editorial: Clean air takes hard work
Before you do anything hard — anything that might be painful or take great effort — you are often advised to do something to steel and steady yourself to do what needs to be done. Take a deep breath, you are told. But how do you do that when the...
Editorial: Working together in new year
January is that time of year when you might think about starting over. It’s not just about resolutions. Everything about the new year speaks of starting over. You have a new insurance deductible. Your vacation days reset. It’s the perfect opportunity to set goals and try to make new habits,...
Editorial: Turnpike crash showed hospital skill
One car slams into another at an intersection. It might be no one’s fault. Slick roads. A blown tire. Something goes wrong, and now there are people that need help. This scenario has people brought to emergency rooms everywhere every day. It can mean sudden, serious injuries that focus the...
Editorial: Donation is gift of life
The math surrounding organ transplant is amazing. In 1953, there had never been a successful transplant of one person’s organ into another person’s body. Today, 67 years later, it happens every day. According to the World Health Organization, about 100,800 people have the life-saving procedure annually. About 70% of those...
Laurels & lances: Hard job, bad look, new name
Laurel: To a hard job done well. A crash can be hard to handle, even for people who handle things like that every day. A crash with five dead, 55 injured and twisted wreckage that takes hours to navigate is worse. It isn’t something that allows the people rendering aid...
Editorial: Mayors shouldn’t act like children
A mayor’s job isn’t the same in every Pennsylvania community. In a small borough, the mayor may be little more than a figurehead for ceremonial events like a Memorial Day flag service or a tie-breaker in case someone hasn’t shown up for a council meeting. In a larger city, like...
Editorial: The case of the trashed sheriff’s office
The smooth transition of power is always important after an election. It reinforces the will of the people. It proves that the office is bigger than the occupant. It also shows that the people involved are mature adults who can play by the rules of the game. In Allegheny County,...
Editorial: Is there enough talk about Pa. Turnpike safety?
There is a lot of talk about the turnpike. People gripe about the annually escalating tolls and the large amount of debt the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission carries with huge annual payments to the state Department of Transportation for non-turnpike-related services. But is there enough conversation about how safe the turnpike...
Editorial: Why we need librarians
Libraries are more than a place to borrow a book, although that would be remarkable enough. Libraries help us achieve and explore knowledge in so many more ways. Today they navigate us through the internet and videos, recordings and toys, classes and meetings and as quiet spots to think. That...
Nancy Patton Mills: Trump’s broken tax promises
In the crisp October of 2016, presidential candidate Donald J. Trump gave a speech at the Eisenhower Complex in Gettysburg. He fired up the crowd with promises to remember the “forgotten man and woman” of our country, to bring jobs to struggling communities and deliver a tax plan where “the...
Editorial: Mental health is important
“Your mental health matters, and it’s OK to reach out for help.” That simple message needs to be repeated until it is accepted as a truth — basic and incontrovertible as the alphabet and gravity. Gov. Tom Wolf said it Thursday when announcing a public outreach campaign and efforts to...
Editorial: Opioid companies profit from cure
According to statistics from Allegheny and Westmoreland counties, the number of fatalities resulting from drug overdoses is expected to have fallen for the second year in a row. That is undeniably good news. It means fewer people are grieving the loss of loved ones. What it does not mean is...
Laurels & lances: Sports, spats, skates and scams
Laurel: To little bits of sports history. Close to 300 people gathered on New Year’s Day in a North Huntingdon auto dealership to get a glimpse of some of the pieces of the past that made up Bill Mazeroski’s 17-year Hall-of-Fame career with the Pittsburgh Pirates. More than 120 participated...
Editorial: Preparation is never a problem
It is now 20 years since the world didn’t end with the crash of all the computers. The Y2K bug didn’t do what everyone feared. Years of increasing anxiety about what would happen when the calendars flipped from the 1900s to the 2000s in a digital world that was often...
