Featured Commentary category, Page 105

It sure seems like President Trump is in serious trouble. According to the latest CNN poll, nearly half of Americans support impeaching and removing him from office. That’s up from 41% in May. Most notably, and alarmingly for Trump, that shift has come largely from independents and Republicans, for whom...

With Gov. Tom Wolf and Lt. Gov. John Fetterman’s recent push to legalize recreational marijuana for adult use in Pennsylvania, many state residents have glistened at the news of no longer hiding their weed stash. And as they should. Why on earth has it taken this long? For small-town Pennsylvania...

Ten years ago the heavily touted Rivers Casino opened on Pittsburgh’s North Shore. But a decade later, its original revenue projections have yet to materialize — even with expanded gambling — and the value of the jobs it has created remains a question mark, concludes an analysis by the Allegheny...

The debate about political power and authority among those who profess the Christian faith has raged since the first century. In modern America, the debate raged throughout Jimmy Carter’s presidency and more recently through the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The debate now looms large for Donald Trump....

During my student days at a UCLA economics department faculty/graduate student coffee hour in the 1960s, I was chatting with Professor Armen Alchian, probably the greatest microeconomic theory economist of the 20th century. I was trying to impress Alchian with my knowledge of statistical type I and type II errors....

One hundred years ago this month, James Buchanan was born on a Tennessee farm. No, not the 15th U.S. president. (That James Buchanan was from Pennsylvania.) The James Buchanan to whom I refer won the 1986 Nobel Prize in economics and taught for most of his career in Virginia, most...

Here’s a take no one will like: I’m confident he did it. I’m confident it’s impeachable. I’m just not so sure he should be impeached for it. Let’s start at the top. It’s obvious to me that President Trump pressured the Ukrainian government to launch a probe of former Vice...

Over the years I have collected funeral cards as I grieved the loss of family and friends. In remembrance of them, I’ve noted a positive attribute or characteristic that they had displayed, and I use it as a means of reflection and growth on my personal journey. Three cards with...

Even before seeing the transcript of the July 25 call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Nancy Pelosi threw the door wide open to impeachment by the Democratic House. Though the transcript did not remotely justify the advanced billing of a “quid pro quo,” Pelosi set in motion...

In the classic 1979 comedy “The Jerk,” Steve Martin plays a very dumb guy who often misses the point. In one scene, while he’s working as a gas station attendant, an assassin tries to kill him with a high-powered rifle. When the bullets start whizzing past his head and popping...

Divorces are messy — Brexit is no exception. All the squabbling in Parliament denies what most British voters have concluded. The European Union, spread over 28 countries and 24 official languages, may make sense as a free trade area similar to NAFTA but virtually none as a broader economic community...

As school superintendents with decades of experience as educators, we continue to look forward to the start of school each and every fall. While our enthusiasm has not waned, some things have changed. One is the intensifying struggle each year to finalize a budget that can deliver what our students...

Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto’s Gender Equity Commission recently presented findings on the city’s inequity across gender and race. Those findings revealed that although Pittsburgh’s white residents are on par with white residents in other cities, the same does not apply to black residents. Black people living in Pittsburgh face higher...

What offends me most about the whistleblower-Ukraine-Biden story isn’t the obvious corruption of it all. It’s the way members of Team Trump assume we’re all idiots who won’t notice they’ve abruptly shifted their narrative. At first, it seemed like a familiar scenario of allegations met with denials. The Washington Post...

Camille Paglia is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she has been a faculty member since 1984. Paglia describes herself as transgender, but unlike so many other transgender people, she is pro-capitalism and hostile to those who’d restrict free speech....

When political arguments aren’t getting you anywhere, what can you do? Start your own country! Unfortunately, most of the world’s land is controlled by rapacious governments unwilling to let others experiment. But fortunately, that still leaves oceans. If people move 12 miles offshore (or 24 miles in the case of...

Headlines from around the world increasingly reinforce a sobering point: Climate change is the defining crisis of our time. A new poll shows the number of Americans who see climate change as a crisis is growing — just after the strongest hurricane on record. For the sake of the planet...

President Trump does not want war with Iran. America does not want war with Iran. Even the Senate Republicans are advising against military action in response to that attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities. If neither America nor Iran wants war, what has brought us to the brink? Answer: The...

Lawmaking has often been compared to sausage making. One may relish eating it but not want to know how it is produced. Never has this been truer than watching the Pennsylvania General Assembly tackle modern election reform. The Legislature has a precious few weeks left in 2019 to decide a...

It’s exhausting being both a conservative and a critic of President Trump. When I aim my pen at the White House, many of my comrades on the right go nuts. And readers who love it when I go after Trump turn into a cage full of poo- flinging monkeys when I...

Two upstarts in the 2020 presidential election — Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson — are both polling well below the front of the pack. The three front-runners — Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — currently enjoy a full 60% of Democratic support nationwide. But despite their lack of...

Steelers Nation has been rattled by the death of Sam Davis, a former offensive lineman for the team and four-time Super Bowl champion. After a 13-season career in the National Football League, Davis, who had been suffering from dementia and was legally blind, was recently in the care of a...

Job growth has slowed significantly in Greater Pittsburgh over the last few months. And while there typically are myriad factors in the job-creation equation, the proverbial “usual suspects” can continue to be tagged for the region’s anemic employment performance, an analysis by the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy finds. “(T)he...

I rarely watch cable news anymore. It’s all hysteria, all the time. CNN: “We are destroying the planet.” MSNBC: “The middle class is disappearing!” I’m glad my favorite magazine, Reason, cuts through the gloom and tells us the truth: There is less war and more food. We live healthier and...

The U.S. Department of Justice recently sued the Baltimore County government, alleging that its written test for police officer recruits is unfairly biased against black applicants. It turns out that black applicants failed the written test at a rate much greater than white applicants. That results in fewer blacks being...