Opinion category, Page 657
Editorial: The $100,000 paycheck club
The state of Pennsylvania employs more than 117,000 people. On a 2019 list of the state’s top employers, “Pennsylvania” doesn’t appear, but four individual state agencies do, making it pretty clear that if you piled the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, PennDOT, the Department of Corrections and the Department...
Sounding off: Think, verify before you post
With the rise of Facebook and Twitter, we have all become media outlets. With the click of a mouse we can share news links with our family and friends. When we share a story, we are applying our personal stamp of approval. Sometimes, we are saying we think something is...
Letter to the editor: Saving lives via organ donation
Many area hospitals participate in campaigns from Jan. 1 to April 30 to raise awareness of cornea, tissue and organ donation. Part of my hospital’s mission in this challenge is to dispel myths that prevent people from registering for organ donation. While 95% of us say we support organ donation,...
Letter to the editor: Immigrants and coronavirus
While President Trump visited India last month, mobs attacked Muslims in several locations. Over 30 people were killed, including an elderly woman burned to death in her home. A writer for Atlantic Monthly notes that “pogrom” is the correct term for such attacks. As in czarist Russia and Nazi Germany,...
Letter to the editor: Anger, resentment as old as time
If you check most any news source, whether local, national or world, you will see a preponderance of it concerning factionalism, nationalism, partisanism, tribalism, separatism, angry divisiveness between political parties, religions, races, genders and niche identities. We choose our exclusive groups to bond with, then point the finger at outsiders...
Walter Williams: We have no ‘right’ to health care
Sen. Bernie Sanders said: “I believe that health care is a right of all people.” He’s not alone in that contention. That claim comes from Democrats and Republicans and liberals and conservatives. It is not just a health care right that people claim. There are “rights” to decent housing, decent...
John Stossel: Freelance workers hurt by new law
Freelance jobs are “feudalism,” says California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez. She persuaded California’s legislature to pass a new law reclassifying freelance workers as employees. That means many people who hire them must now give them benefits like overtime, unemployment insurance, etc. Politicians said it would help freelancers a lot. Of course,...
Editorial: Honest info builds trust in a pandemic
Transparency is one of those buzzy kind of words that seem to cluster like flies around government and other like organizations. What is so great about transparency? Maybe we should just call it what it is. Honesty. Transparency is a lack of secrecy. It is opening the door and inviting...
Letter to the editor: Bezos’ wealth could cover a lot
Let’s imagine that Jeff Bezos, who accumulates almost $9 million an hour, lived in a world with Bernie Sanders’ 8% “extreme wealth” tax (on fortunes over $10 billion). A single year would see $9 billion flow into government coffers from Bezos’s $115 billion treasure trove, more than enough to cover...
Letter to the editor: Methodist Church & LGBT people
Western Pennsylvania will soon welcome spring with colorful blooms and sweet aromas. On this Sunday, there’s a sky as blue as popsicles from my childhood. My girlfriend “KB” and I walk hand in hand looking for a church. We walk up to a stately stone United Methodist Church surrounded by...
Letter to the editor: Tale of 2 Americas
Reading recent letters, you’d think there are two Americas. One is certain righteousness, President Trump’s logic and reason, spouting claims that “He has arrived,” supporting a chosen son who’d make Geppetto’s head explode. The other squandered all political capital promoting morally offensive “progressive” social reforms while abiding archaic bureaucratic mores...
Paul Kengor: Eerie echoes of influenza epidemic
Exhibit 1: Elizabeth Sovel Flinn. Born in 1891, she died about this time 100 years ago, age 29, a victim of the catastrophic influenza epidemic of 1919-20, also known as the Spanish flu. She was my grandmother’s mother (my dad’s side). My grandmother wasn’t even 3 years old at the...
Lori Falce: Antidote to panic is information
My son is at home today, no doubt ignoring his vocabulary and the math homework he should be getting done in favor of battling zombies on his PlayStation. I did not keep him home because of coronavirus. Well, not because I am afraid of coronavirus. No, he is home because...
Laurels & lances: Seizing, teaching, tasting and hoarding
Laurel: To doing the right thing — eventually. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has returned $82,373 to an Allegheny County man after confiscating it from his daughter. Rebecca Brown boarded a plane with the cash that had been saved for years in her father Terry Rolin’s South Fayette home. She...
Letter to the editor: Reasons for Trump support
Four possible reasons why certain voters rabidly support the impeached B-actor President Donald John Trump: Either they’re deaf, intellectually disabled and blind, or they are of his ilk. Anthony Cortazzo Jr. Penn Township, Westmoreland County...
Letter to the editor: Paying on both ends with MAWC
On Feb. 11 at 4:15 a.m., we awoke to our water pipes banging. Then we had brown, muddy water in our house. On Water Street in West Newton at 7:40 a.m., the fire hydrants were open full onto the streets, and water crews were working on several streets. We pay...
Letter to the editor: Stop importing from China
The recent outbreak of covid-19 from the coronavirus originating in China should force us to reexamine the wisdom of importing so many of our products from China. I believe it is high time to consider ways of manufacturing more of our products in the U.S. Many products shipped from China...
Letter to the editor: ‘Mediacrats’ & mind control
The Democratic Party and the great majority of the news media have a symbiotic relationship. They support and live off of each other. It’s the height of collusion and greatly influences elections. The Republicans in Congress have historically been the designated losers, like the Washington Generals to the Harlem Globetrotters....
Steve Hvozdovich: We need candidates who support blue-collar jobs & environment
Philip Ameris’ perspective on the types of elected officials, projects and policies we need in order to ensure we uplift Pennsylvanians (“Don’t expect labor’s endorsement after opposing blue-collar jobs,” Feb. 29, TribLIVE) only gets it partially right. As someone who came from a union household, I couldn’t agree more that...
Editorial: Being proactive with coronavirus
This is not about panic. It’s about recognizing reality. The World Health Organization officially designated the novel coronavirus outbreak as a pandemic Wednesday. At that moment, 121 countries were affected, with 124,830 patients diagnosed and 4,585 deaths. Of those diagnosed, 67,050 have already recovered. That is good news and shows...
Letter to the editor: President Trump & coronavirus battle
It’s not very reassuring that the man on the front line protecting us from the coronavirus is the same person who had (allegedly) unprotected sex with a porn star. Joe Lucas South Side...
Letter to the editor: Dead people voting is easy to prove, disprove
The issue in the letter “No excuse for not requiring ID to vote” regarding ineligible voters can be easily proved or disproved by a comparison of voter databases with Bureau of Vital Statistics’ death records. Both are considered to be public records and can be easily compared to see if...
Letter to the editor: For sake of world, Trump must be voted out
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi symbolically trashed the president’s State of the Union speech. Her actions described his three years in office. He has trashed our Constitution, the environment, our farmers by issuing tariffs on China, the children of immigrants, citizens with speech and other impediments, our relations with our friendly...
Letter to the editor: More on turnpike nightmare
In his op-ed “The truth behind the turnpike nightmare” (Feb. 22, TribLIVE), Matthew Brouillette of the Commonwealth Partners Chamber of Entrepreneurs mentions former state Senate President Pro Tempore Bob Jubelirer — the same senator who vowed that the turnpike would never connect directly to Interstate 70 at Breezewood without passing...
Letter to the editor: Why Democrats hate Trump
You’re on the 50th floor of a burning building with two choices: be consumed by the fire or jump. At the last minute, a fireman appears; however, you are acquainted with him and rumors say he is a sexist, racist, homophobic womanizer. What to do? Jump into his arms, or...
