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Featured Commentary category, Page 123

Pope Francis, first Latin American pontiff, dies at 88
John Stossel: Ag-gag laws hurt search for truth in farming
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.”...
Donald Boudreaux: Chinese IP ‘theft’ doesn’t justify Trump’s tariffs
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...
Ira Bedzow & Stacy Gallin: Truth about Holocaust, Holocaust education
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...
Timothy McMahon: Veterans’ GI Bill choices should not be limited
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...
Pat Buchanan: Are Yanks, Brits going their separate ways?
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”...
Doyle McManus: Coming soon: Impeachment for dummies
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....
Michelle Malkin: Democratic donors’ sex-creep club
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...
John Sparks: Religious liberty, freedom of speech & gay rights
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...
Jonah Goldberg: Political leanings can’t be reduced to genetic programming
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...
Jennifer Christman: Technology & mental health in rural America
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...
Walter Williams: Our free-speech crisis
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...
John Stossel: Government bullies try to mow down homeowner
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,...
Cal Thomas: Justin Amash not a ‘total loser’
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...
Peter Morici: Trump must have health-care solutions to win again
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...
Pat Buchanan: Is Putin right? Has liberalism lost the world?
“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....
Cal Thomas: Censoring the census
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...
Jonah Goldberg: Nike fans flames of culture war
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...
Gordon Denlinger: Pa. must stop letting surpluses disappear
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...
Nathan Benefield: Infrastructure fix requires break from past
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...
Mark Davis: Direct support professionals Pa.’s largest workforce crisis
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...
Greg Hartnett: One year after Janus, Pa. laws behind times
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...
Walter Williams: Assault on Western civilization
Western civilization was founded on a set of philosophies that focus strongly on the sanctity of individuals and their power of logic and reason. This belief led to a desire to trust things that could be proven to be true or legitimate, from government to science. Judeo-Christian morality has formed...
Donald Boudreaux: Protection for national defense?
Pleas for tariffs and other trade restrictions are made overwhelmingly for economic reasons. The claim is that such restrictions will create jobs, raise wages and otherwise improve our economy. But it is quite common for those who seek protection from foreign competition also to insist that the requested trade restrictions...
Editorial: Let us resolve …
Happy 243rd birthday, America! As has become a Trib custom on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we once again commend for your thoughtful review this nation’s founding pronouncement, reprinted in its entirety in the adjacent columns. And, as also has become an Independence Day tradition at the Trib,...
John Stossel: Freedom, not force, makes our nation great
Happy Fourth of July! We have reason to celebrate. The Fourth honors the founding of America. It’s the anniversary of the day in 1776 that the Declaration of Independence was approved. The Declaration was important. It didn’t say that America would be the best country because it would have the...


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