Featured Commentary category, Page 138
Colin McNickle: Pittsburgh’s anemic labor market
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...
John Stossel: Despite cable’s perspective, there’s good news
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...
Walter Williams: Racist exam questions?
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...
Donald Boudreaux: In defense of so-called ‘price gouging’
It never fails. Every natural disaster brings in its wake higher prices for goods such as plywood and propane, and for services such as plumbing repair and carpentry. Just as surely, politicians and pundits and the general public — as they did in response to Hurricane Dorian — blame these...
Jonah Goldberg: White liberals have moved to left of black voters
“No Democrat is going to win the nomination for president of the United States without African-American support. Nor should they,” Kate Bedingfield, Joe Biden’s deputy campaign manager, told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Bedingfield was pushing back on a single bad poll for Biden (from Monmouth University) that had the media and...
Pat Buchanan: After John Bolton, Trump goals remain unrealized
The sudden and bitter departure of John Bolton from the White House was baked in the cake from the day he arrived there. For Bolton’s worldview, formed and fixed in a Cold War that ended in 1991, was irreconcilable with the policies Donald Trump promised in his 2016 campaign. Indeed,...
Jonah Goldberg: A theory on Trump’s GOP approval rating
Early one recent morning, Donald Trump tweeted: “94% Approval Rating in the Republican Party, a record. Thank you!” Where the president got this specific number remains a mystery. Recent polls by YouGov put his GOP approval roughly 10 points lower, and Gallup, which has tracked Trump’s popularity since he took...
S.E. Cupp: Attorney’s stunning plan to discredit Harvey Weinstein accusers
The right of every citizen to an attorney during a criminal prosecution is one of America’s most important democratic tenets, protected by the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution. This holds for even the worst among us. Serial killers Ted Bundy and Charles Manson had attorneys. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh...
Peter Morici: How to win trade war with China
According to the Trump administration, America is winning the trade war with China. The Middle Kingdom’s economic machine may be slowing, but President Xi Jinping is unlikely to sue for peace anytime soon — at least not on terms acceptable to American interests. China’s economic system is antithetical to American...
Joseph Rogan: College admissions scandal hurts students with disabilities
The national college admissions scandal creates many problems, but it especially harms students with real disabilities. That parents paid a corrupt private counselor tens of thousands of dollars to fudge their children’s college applications raises concerns about their ethics, but also about the admission standards and processes of the institutions...
Cal Thomas: Dealing with the Taliban devil
PARIS — President Trump was right to cancel a “secret” meeting with leaders of the Taliban and the Afghan government following two bomb attacks by the terrorist group that killed 10 civilians, an American soldier and a Romanian service member in heavily fortified Kabul. The president is eager to fulfill...
Sen. Vincent Hughes: PA Forward gives students chance at better future
When the school year begins, I am always encouraged to see so many students from across the nation pouring into our state, where higher education is an important industry. Colleges, universities and trade schools employ tens of thousands of people and breathe life into so many of our communities. For...
John Stossel: Charter schools, better schools
With most services, you get to shop around, but rarely can you do that with government-run schools. Philadelphia mom Elaine Wells was upset to learn that there were fights every day in the school her son attended. So she walked him over to another school. “We went to go enroll...
Jonah Goldberg: Biden’s best bet is front-porch campaign
Here’s an idea: Joe Biden should run a front-porch campaign. Front-porch campaigns were once a common feature of American presidential politics, though the term wasn’t always applied to the practice. The most famous front-porch campaigns were in the 1880s and 1890s, culminating in William McKinley’s successful bid in 1896. While...
Doyle McManus: Trump’s foreign policy has produced a string of failures
WASHINGTON — The strangest thing about President Trump’s aborted plan to fly the Taliban to Camp David wasn’t the terrible symbolism of hosting terrorists three days before the anniversary of 9/11 — although that was bad enough. Even crazier was Trump’s underlying premise: that he could sweet-talk Taliban leaders to...
Pat Buchanan: Why is there apprehension about Joe Biden?
Thursday, Sept. 14, looks to be a fateful day in the half-century-long political career of Joe Biden. That night, a three-hour debate will be held, a marathon in politics. Biden will be on stage, taking incoming missiles for 180 minutes from nine rivals, each of whom is hungry for the...
Colin McNickle: An early look at Pa.’s public pension reform
Public employee pension reform now is in full bloom in Pennsylvania. But if the limited data available from the first of two groups is any indication, there hasn’t been any rush by employees — new or old — to embrace defined-contribution plans, suggests an analysis by a researcher at the...
Stephen J. Lyons: ‘Who won the week?’ Me, because I stopped watching cable news
I was slogging through my Saturday workout at the gym trying to balance and read a book on the elliptical while ignoring the three muted television sets on the wall. The gym’s owner usually starts the day with Fox News on the right, MSNBC on the left and HGTV in...
S.E. Cupp: Trump wants to look tough on mass shootings, while doing little
In the span of just over a month, four mass shootings — in Gilroy, Calif.; Dayton, Ohio; and El Paso, and Odessa, Texas — have provoked varying words of comfort, condemnation and promised action from President Trump. After the Gilroy shooting, he offered, “While families were spending time together at...
Michelle Malkin: Stop mental health data mining of our kids
No, no, no. Hell, no! That’s my response to the latest trial balloon floated by the White House to join with Silicon Valley on a creepy program monitoring Americans’ “neurobehavioral signs” to (purportedly) prevent gun violence. President Trump’s old friend, former NBC head Bob Wright, has been pushing an Orwellian...
Dani Ritchie: Raise the Wage Act will hurt tipped workers
I’m worried that some Pennsylvania representatives want to reduce my ability to earn a living. When House Democrats voted in July to pass House Resolution 582, the Raise the Wage Act — a bill that would not only raise the federal minimum wage to $15 but would also eliminate the...
Bill Godsey: From Pennsylvania to Texas, energy fuels economic growth
President Trump’s visit last month to an ethane cracker plant in Western Pennsylvania underscored a key fact that both political parties should be able to agree on: America’s remarkable shale renaissance is securing our country’s energy independence and bolstering industries throughout the economy. It’s hard to argue that Royal Dutch...
Bob Cranmer: For Catholics’ sake, Vatican must institute serious reforms
Although I was raised in the Catholic Church, for the majority of my adult life I was a conservative evangelical Christian. In 2005, after a 25-year absence, I returned to the Catholic Church during a time of crisis. I came to better understand and appreciate the historic position of the...
Sister Sharon Costello: On immigrants, hateful rhetoric must stop
Inside a converted former nightclub steps away from the bus station in the border town of McAllen, Texas, Sister Janice Vanderneck touches the scarred, small hand of a 6-year-old Guatemalan boy who explains he was with his father that frightening day when someone burned down the family’s store. She listens...
Walter Williams: Biased liberal criminologists mislead us
John Paul Wright, professor at University of Cincinnati, and Matthew DeLisi professor at Iowa State University, penned a powerful article titled “What Criminologists Don’t Say, and Why,” in the summer 2017 edition of City Journal. There is significant bias among criminologists. The reason for that bias is that political leanings...
