Featured Commentary category, Page 110

More than 40 years ago I ran a rock radio station, Starview 92.7-FM, in central Pennsylvania. We offered special midnight movies, including “Reefer Madness,” which warned of a decent into madness for those lured into trying marijuana. This 1930s propaganda film was quite campy and funny, especially in the culture...

Google Assistant records conversations, and now those recordings have been leaked to the public. Is anyone really surprised? Judging by Google’s stock price, the answer is a resounding “no.” Consumers introduced listening devices into their homes, and they seem relatively blasé now that humans on the other ends of those...

While Democrats wade through a marathon of intra-party debates, the national punditocracy is increasingly asking two urgent questions about the impending 2020 presidential contest: Can President Trump win Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin again? And can he win a second term without those three states? Both questions reflect a stark reality...

Here’s a suggestion. How about setting up some high school rifle clubs? Students would bring their own rifles to school, store them with the team coach and, after classes, collect them for practice. You say: “Williams, you must be crazy! To prevent gun violence, we must do all we can...

Recording events from public land shouldn’t be a crime. Yet when a woman in Utah, standing by a public road, filmed farmworkers pushing a cow with a bulldozer, the farmer told her, “You cannot videotape my property.” Soon the police came and local prosecutors charged her with “agricultural operation interference.”...

Among the most politically potent arguments for President Trump’s punitive tariffs on your, my and other Americans’ purchases of imports from China is the claim that these tariffs are a tool for reducing Chinese theft of Americans’ intellectual property (IP). While IP theft in China does occur, as my Mercatus...

Principal William Latson of Spanish River Community High School in Palm Beach County, Fla. was removed from his position and reassigned to a different position in the Palm Beach County school district after refusing to admit that the Holocaust was a “factual, historical event.” It is not that he personally...

After four years of serving our country in the Air Force, I began a career as an educator in Pennsylvania. For 4½ decades, I have worked with students and employers all across Pennsylvania to give students in-demand skills and give employers career-ready graduates. At Triangle Tech, we have had the...

When Sir Kim Darroch’s secret cable to London was leaked to the Daily Mail, wherein he called the Trump administration “dysfunctional … unpredictable … faction-riven … diplomatically clumsy and inept,” the odds on his survival as U.K. ambassador plummeted. When President Trump’s tweeted retort called Darroch “wacky,” a “stupid guy”...

WASHINGTON — Robert S. Mueller III isn’t expected to roll out any bombshells when he testifies before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees on July 24. “The report is my testimony,” he said in May, the first time he had spoken in public in nearly two years. But that’s OK....

Well, well, well. “Follow the facts,” Democratic strategist Christine Pelosi advises fellow liberals in the wake of billionaire and high-flying political financier Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking indictment . Some of “our faves” could be implicated in the long-festering scandal, she warned, so it’s time to “let the chips fall...

Among recent actions by the U.S. Supreme Court, a four-sentence order may set the stage for the court to eventually address the collision between free speech and religious freedom on one hand and gay rights on the other. The order voided a judgment by the state of Oregon that had...

Increasingly, the intellectual consensus seems to be that our political leanings are hardwired in our genes. There is some excellent research behind this thinking, and I’ve come around to believing that DNA plays a bigger role in our political worldviews than many on the right or left are willing to...

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 5 Americans will experience mental health issues in any given year. But imagine living in a rural community, where the nearest doctors are located an hour’s drive away, or worse, there aren’t specialized health care professionals in the area...

The First Amendment to our Constitution was proposed by the 1788 Virginia ratification convention during its narrow 89-79 vote to ratify the Constitution. Virginia’s resolution held that the free exercise of religion, right to assembly and free speech could not be canceled, abridged or restrained. These Madisonian principles were eventually...

The city of Dunedin, Fla., wants Jim Ficken’s home. Ficken’s mom died, so he went to South Carolina to take care of her estate. He asked a friend to look after his house. But then the friend died, and no one cut Ficken’s grass. When it grew to 10 inches,...

Rep. Justin Amash has left the Republican Party and will now represent Michigan’s third congressional district as an independent. In a Washington Post op-ed, he wrote: “I’ve become disenchanted with party politics and frightened by what I see from it. The two-party system has evolved into an existential threat to...

President Trump’s continued focus on immigration may play well to his base, but to win the swing voters and cobble together a majority of electoral votes, he must address our broken health care system — it ranks first among issues with voters. Affordability is key — Americans pay 75% more...

“The liberal idea has become obsolete. … (Liberals) cannot simply dictate anything to anyone as they have been attempting to do over the recent decades.” Such was the confident claim of Vladimir Putin to the Financial Times on the eve of a G-20 gathering that appeared to validate his thesis....

The notion of history repeating itself is usually viewed as a negative statement, but some history is worth repeating because we might learn and be guided by it. In last month’s 5-4 ruling by the Supreme Court rejecting the Trump administration’s claim that adding a question about whether a person...

Nike is doing it wrong. I don’t mean the shoemaking, though that thing with Zion Williamson was pretty bad, I have to say. No, Nike is doing it wrong because it managed to do something that all the neo-Nazis, Klansmen, alt-righters and other denizens of the lowest coprophagic phylum of...

It was great to learn in early June that Pennsylvania took in much more revenue than expected a month before the end of the June 30 fiscal year, gathering a surplus of over $900 million. There were concerns during budget negotiations that the state surplus would burn a hole in the pockets...

Pennsylvania’s infrastructure woes are impossible to ignore. From structurally deficient bridges to mounting debt to rising turnpike tolls that chase away motorists, residents would be forgiven for wondering what they are getting in return for paying the highest gas tax in the nation. Auditor General Eugene DePasquale has been one...

Two out of five workers who care for people with an intellectual disability or autism (called direct support professionals, or DSPs) leave their jobs every year, largely due to the cripplingly low wages they are paid through government funding. Recently, the 2019 version of the Fix the DSP Crisis video...

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that public sector employees like me, who are not union members, don’t have to pay union fees as a condition of employment. For decades, teacher contracts have included union fee provisions that force even nonmember employees to fund a union or lose our jobs...