Lori Falce Columns category, Page 5
Lori Falce: The Supreme Court, George Santos and the vanishing art of ethics
There is a difference between ethics and the law. But that doesn’t mean the two don’t coexist. Laws are codified rules that spell out what can happen, what should happen, what circumstances might change that and what the consequences are for stepping outside those lines. But ethics? Ethics are trickier....
Lori Falce: Rick Santorum and the secret sauce of democracy
On Wednesday, after the dust had settled on the 2023 general election and people were analyzing the ups and downs and wins and losses, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania went on Newsmax to discuss his disappointment. Republican Rick Santorum once was a leading voice in the party and had...
Lori Falce: Time to fall back, but let’s move forward
We get the reminders around this time every year: Don’t forget to turn your clocks back. They come, of course, because Sunday is the end of daylight saving time, that effort to trick ourselves into having longer functional days. Benjamin Franklin first proposed it in 1784 as a way to...
Lori Falce: Lighting candles for the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting
I am known among my friends for my common response to times of pain and trouble. I will cry with them. I will hold their hands and hug them close. But, more than anything, as my friends are scattered across the map, I light candles. As the product of a...
Lori Falce: Words matter, but actions behind their meanings don’t
I often lament the way people try to harness language like a horse that just needs to be broken in an attempt to solve a problem rather than addressing the problem. Take the vocabulary surrounding people with developmental delays and other challenges. The words we have used over the years...
Lori Falce: Israel, Hamas and object lessons for America
The conflict between Israel and Hamas is not new. The bombs falling and the hostage taking and the outright murder are this week’s problem, but the enmity is as old as the sands in this disputed land, despite Israel being just 75 years old and Hamas only 35. Could we...
Lori Falce: Lessons from the first Speaker of the House
The first Speaker of the House of Representatives was the son of a German immigrant. Frederick Muhlenberg was born in what would later become Montgomery County. He was a theologian and statesman. He served as speaker of the Continental Congress in 1780. He signed the Bill of Rights. And in...
Lori Falce: Chuck Schumer is no Neville Longbottom
At the end of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” the benevolent wizard in charge of the magic school took the opportunity to deliver an object lesson. He upended the annual competition between the school’s four houses by delivering a few last-minute points to the main characters for saving the...
Lori Falce: Group shot spoiled picture-perfect ending to manhunt
For almost two weeks, Pennsylvania State Police, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, U.S. marshals and other law enforcement were combing Chester County for one man. Convicted murderer Danelo Cavalcante spider-walked up a wall in the county prison like a spy in an action movie. The man who brutally stabbed his...
Lori Falce: Chilly Billy and the real Hollywood scare
For some kids, their childhood heroes were sports figures. For others, they might be actors or pop stars. For me? Well, mine was a local television host. I couldn’t get enough of Bill “Chilly Billy” Cardille. His Saturday night film fest on WPXI wasn’t the beginning of my love affair...
Lori Falce: Hey, Big Pharma, negotiation isn’t tyranny
Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America really doesn’t back away from its reputation. Do you want to call the coterie of companies it represents Big Pharma? Fine. The trade group that lobbies for those companies leans into the name using its cheeky initials — PhRMA. The organization is so forthright...
Lori Falce: Presidential debate or cafeteria food fight?
If you are a politics nerd like me, you probably spent Wednesday night watching the first Republican presidential primary debate of the 2024 election season. For some, this might be comparable to the other periodic ritual trial-by-combat going on right now — NFL preseason football. There definitely are parallels to...
Lori Falce: Troubling trend in journalism
People have an idea in their heads about what it is like to work for a newspaper. It’s an idea that, like many things, is shaped by movies and television. Editors bark orders and chew cigars like the Daily Bugle’s J. Jonah Jameson. Reporters flock on the steps of every...
Lori Falce: Age limits for elected officials would protect them and voters
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s health is at issue. Again. The California Democrat fell in her home and was sent to the hospital. A spokesman said everything was fine, and she was released and is now at home. I wish her well. But concerns about Feinstein’s health are rooted in her...
Lori Falce: The impact of Pittsburgh synagogue shooting remains for all victims
Victim impact statements are an important part of the criminal sentencing process. After guilt has been decided but before a sentence is delivered, there is a period when the depth of the damage is demonstrated via statements — written or read or bravely spoken — by those keenly affected. With...
Lori Falce: There are other small-town problems, Jason Aldean
Jason Aldean set off quite the brush fire with his latest video. The country singer’s single “Try That in a Small Town” plays to a regular trope of the genre: the inherent nobility of small-town life. Aldean talks about small towns a lot in his music. “Hicktown” was one of...
Lori Falce: In support of writers
I have a serious love of television, and so I take things that stand between me and my ability to binge-watch it personally. How dare someone make me wait an additional year to see what happens on “The Last of Us.” I’m not sure I can live in a world...
Lori Falce: Hardest part of jury’s job starts now
Whether or not Robert Bowers was guilty of the murders of 11 members of three Jewish congregations at a synagogue in Pittsburgh was never really in doubt. When the jury returned a guilty verdict in June, it was what everyone knew it was: the first milestone in a trial that...
Lori Falce: Focus on beating opponents sets up bitter grudges, bigger battles
The crowing came quickly after a routine political back-and-forth turned into an unexpected upset with long implications. On Wednesday, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers took a pen to the state’s budget, meant to govern spending over a two-year period. He signed the plan into law — but not without a little...
Lori Falce: Do we owe Titanic sub billionaires empathy?
My sister is a 5-foot, 2-inch walking encyclopedia of all things Titanic. She was about 6 when the obsession started. She was 8 when Dr. Robert Ballard discovered the wreck. That was when she began to carry around a coffee table book that was almost as tall as she was....
Lori Falce: Titanic loss prompted change. So should Titan’s
The Titanic often is thought of as the quintessential example of a shipwreck. It isn’t the only boat to sink. It isn’t the only ocean liner to meet a watery end. In fact, the famously “unsinkable” sunken ship was part of a family of three identical sisters of the White...
Lori Falce: Court’s job is to find justice. Finding forgiveness isn’t as easy
The justice system is an odd balancing act. It must be impartial, yet it weighs more than just guilt and innocence. It also takes into account harder-to-quantify qualities like remorse and regret, grief and loss — and perhaps the hardest of all, forgiveness. We are told to forgive and forget,...
Lori Falce: Where there’s smoke, there’s wildfires — and serious questions to answer
Problems can get out of hand when you decide they don’t affect you. Maybe it’s because you don’t have the time or the money or the ability to do anything about them at the moment. I get it. That’s why my mail accumulates on the passenger seat of my car...
Lori Falce: Synagogue shooting trial spotlights a horror that hasn’t changed
Everyone sees terrible things every day. We just see them from a safe distance. We see people die in horror movies in ways that make you question the sanity of the person who wrote the script. Television serves up the kind of fictional crime dramas that are a staple of...
Lori Falce: PTSD, kids and the schools where tragedy happens
Post-traumatic stress disorder is a mental health condition that arises for people who have been through events that are a tragic shock to the system. Just like an old injury to a bone can flare up when a wrong move or the right weather tweaks the spot and makes the...
