Opinion category, Page 694
Editorial: Open records, not open identity info
Newspapers are big fans of open records. We want to be able to find out what our government and public entities are doing. What did they buy? What did they spend? Where did the money come from? Who did something wrong? How was it punished? How was it corrected? What...
Letter to the editor: Helping children around world
I am writing to thank area residents for sharing the true meaning of Christmas with children in need this past holiday season. Because of the generosity of donors across the United States, Operation Christmas Child, a project of Samaritan’s Purse, collected more than 8.9 million shoebox gifts in 2019. Combined...
Letter to the editor: Dems, media won’t fool us again
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. How did the Democrats and deep state take the House in 2018? Simply stated, they fooled a lot of voters. First, they pushed for the Russia investigation hoax to make President Trump look bad. Second, the Democratic candidates...
Letter to the editor: Impeach & remove Trump
Thank you for covering this year’s women’s march (“Women’s March rallies for 4th year in Downtown Pittsburgh, with anti-war, anti- Trump focus,” Jan. 18, TribLIVE), albeit on the back page. The guy you photographed had the sign correct: “Impeach & Remove.” I was there along with 1,000 other people, at least...
Colin McNickle: Allegheny County’s real economic performance
Elected and appointed government officials have a troubling habit of engaging in what we’ll call “sound bite promotion.” They go on a radio or television program making wondrous claims of economic progress yet offer only vague support of those claims and seldom are challenged by their interviewers. Thus, for the...
Lori Falce: Groundhog Day all over again
Groundhog Day isn’t here until Sunday but I feel like I’ve been living it for months. Remember the Bill Murray movie where Groundhog Day never ended? Where no matter what happened when he got up in the morning, no matter how he screwed things up or fixed what went wrong,...
Laurels & lances: Out of the box and in the pool
Laurel: To wacky new ideas. Hey, maybe Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto’s thoughts about gondolas connecting the Strip, the Hill District and Oakland is a little out there. Or maybe it’s up there? But give credit where credit is due. It’s definitely something new and different. The idea isn’t about the...
Letter to the editor: Impeachment rumors can’t be true
Well, impeachment is upon us. I was worried about what Sen. Mitch McConnell and some of the Republicans would come up with. I heard an awful rumor that they were going to have 12-hour days so a lot of the testimony would be heard after most people were asleep. That...
Letter to the editor: Democratic circus
Watching the Democratic Party leadership is a lot like watching a movie titled “The Three Stooges Meet the Keystone Cops.” The Russia hoax blew up in the Dems’ faces. The Steele dossier was paid for by the Democratic National Committee on behalf of the Clinton campaign and was never verified....
Jonah Goldberg: Discrediting Bolton won’t be easy for Team Trump
“I’m with the Bush-Cheney team, and I’m here to stop the count.” Those words were bellowed by John Bolton in a Tallahassee library in December 2000, when he was part of a team of Republican lawyers trying to stop the Florida recount of votes cast in the presidential race between...
Editorial: Who should pick the Lt. Gov.?
Elect a president and you get his running mate, too. It’s like a buy-one-get-one-free offer. You don’t get to split the deck. You don’t get to take George H.W. Bush but swap Dan Quayle for Newt Gingrich. You don’t get Jimmy Carter without Walter Mondale. It’s all or nothing. With...
Letter to the editor: Media shouldn’t print names of arrested
Regarding the article “Police: Pittsburgh woman accused of arson in Greenfield apartment fire case” (Jan. 16, TribLIVE): The American criminal justice system is founded on the principle that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty. Yet news outlets print the names of arrested adults, regardless of acquittal or conviction. A...
Letter to the editor: Pelosi, Democrats fear Trump
I disagree with everyone who says the Democrats hate President Trump. Nancy Pelosi said she hates no one. Hate can be changed with love or doing good to those who hate you. Pelosi does not hate; she and her friends in the House who voted to impeach Trump have a...
Letter to the editor: Trump has brought out worst in us
Don’t you know that the world will stop rotating if Donald Trump isn’t reelected president? Don’t you know money is America’s god? Does it matter how many sins Trump has committed in the past or will commit in the future? We have become a nation of sins. When the church...
Pat Buchanan: Hillary puts Bernie in her basket of deplorables
“Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician.” So says Hillary Clinton of her former Senate colleague and 2016 rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders. Her assessment of Sanders’ populist-socialist agenda? “It’s all just baloney and I feel so...
Dr. Lawrence John: On mental health, physicians should lead by example
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf launched a campaign earlier this month aimed at expanding access to mental health services for all Pennsylvanians. As president of the Pennsylvania Medical Society, I applaud Wolf’s commitment to combating this growing issue. While strengthening insurance parity and network adequacy serve as essential solutions, an equally...
Editorial: Hazing can’t be dismissed
Hazing can be easy to dismiss as a common team-building activity, or even a comic exercise. It isn’t. Hazing is that time-honored practice of taking new members of an organization and putting them through a series of ritualized tests or torments. It might be beatings or degrading psychological abuse. It...
Letter to the editor: Taxpayers & cost of climate action
Pennsylvania Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, R-Butler, is correct to oppose Gov. Tom Wolf’s October executive order to direct the Department of Environmental Protection to take steps to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. First, the initiative is a carbon cap-and-trade program that does not solve the greenhouse gas problem; it merely...
Letter to the editor: America’s great without Hillary
I hate to bring Hillary Clinton into the conversation again, but I have this thing about her. The Republicans had two years when they controlled the House and Senate and could have indicted her, but didn’t. Why not? Was she too big to challenge? No, the Republicans simply have no...
Letter to the editor: ‘Prisoners’ have rights
Regarding the article “Tempers flare briefly on 8th day of jury selection in Wilkinsburg mass shooting case” (Jan. 15, TribLIVE): I am disgusted by the murderous acts that Cheron Shelton and Robert Thomas are charged with committing. Nobody should be exposed to the experience that the victims suffered and that...
Tom Purcell: Clarity’s cost — the $5 million comma
Clarity is in short supply across America, but no longer at dairy farms in Maine. In 2014, you see, drivers for a dairy company in Portland, Maine, sued their employer for overtime pay because a state law pertaining to overtime-pay exemptions failed to include the Oxford comma. What is the...
Jonah Goldberg: Our nation is paying for Trump’s refusal to be presidential
I’ve long argued that Donald Trump’s presidency will end poorly because he’s a person of bad character. I still think that’s true, though I very much doubt the impeachment trial now underway will result in his removal. Regardless of its outcome, his impeachment illustrates the damage bad character can do...
Editorial: DUI is deadly serious
How serious does a crime have to be in order to be considered a “serious crime”? In a precedent-setting opinion delivered this month, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals called a Montgomery County man’s DUI a grave enough offense to preclude him from buying a gun. Raymond Holloway Jr....
Letter to the editor: Guns & gun owners
Many changes have been made to gun regulations over the years, but when will people finally think it is enough? After working with a bipartisan nonprofit, I know positive change can be made. Now I see, though, that there are many things wrong. But it isn’t the guns; it is...
Letter to the editor: On Trump, who’s gullible?
As I read Bob McBride’s letter “Trump haters should be mindful of facts” (Jan. 18, TribLIVE), I had to laugh when he brought up the word “gullible” to broadly paint anyone who believes that the House has indeed presented enough facts to impeach President Trump. Talk about gullible. A crowd...
