Most of the conversation about Democrats’ budget bill focuses on its $3.5 trillion in (gross) costs and whether that number should be lower or higher. Relatively little discussion addresses what we get for the money.
Not your imagination
“I dreamed of being a PI as a kid,” private investigator Joshua Gray told me over the phone. Now he is living the dream. At 44, Gray is a licensed private investigator (PI) in Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Tennessee. He has built a business that investigates workers’ compensation…
President Biden’s first speech as commander-in-chief to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday was full of the high-minded internationalist sentiment that defines his rhetoric. If only those words reflected the reality of the world he and America will have to navigate over the next four years.
Iron Dome money
There’s a piece of history and Black culture in the Pittsburgh area that’s worth saving, a project that has already garnered some national support and initial grant money, but now needs the backing of the community to preserve a significant structure.
The adjective “milling” is described as moving around in a confused mass. It certainly sounds like what is taking place daily throughout the Biden administration from COVID, Afghanistan, to the southern border.
Julie, a high school student, whose parents have just been laid off, has unprotected sex with her boyfriend (also a minor) and becomes pregnant.
Donald Trump’s profile may have receded, but Democrats have found another bogeyman to unite against. This time, it’s someone from their own party: Sen. Joe Manchin III, W.Va.
In a few weeks, Virginia will hold an election, and I will have to make a decision. In the past, it would have been no contest. I’d have voted Republican. But now, though Terry McAuliffe leaves me cold, I will vote for him. I guess that makes me a single-issue voter.
Harrisburg bound
Pennsylvania, Penn’s Woods, still is among the most forested of all states. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about 58% of the state’s land is wooded.
I was going to call this new column, “Sheptock In Shamokin.” My grandfather, John Sheptock, was born in Mount Carmel in 1900, and was raised in Marion Heights. Like so many others who called this area home, he spent years coal mining in Shamokin. I didn’t know my grandfather very well as I w…
This week, President Joe Biden attempted to inject life into his ailing presidency by dragging out of the closet the hoariest of political cliches: “fairness” in taxation. Touting his new $3.5 trillion tax and spending bill, which would radically increase corporate taxes, personal income tax…
Not a victory
Probably no one with any real understanding or logical suppositions surrounding the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s switch to all-electronic tolling subscribed to the shortsighted notion that the travel entity would not experience serious challenges in ensuring that a superior toll-collection record…
Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas is indisputably good at one part of his job — always referring to the migrant surge at the border as a “challenge” and never a “crisis.”
To the editor: The exit of American soldiers from the “forever war” in Afghanistan has been chaotic and messy. There has been plenty of criticism regarding President Biden and this administration on how they finally ended this conflict. However, we must recognize the Biden team had only a fe…
I figured it out
You’ve likely seen the headlines about COVID-19 killing radio hosts and activists who opposed vaccines and masks. Several of those headlines were about Caleb Wallace, a Texan who helped organize a “freedom rally” this summer to protest mask-wearing. Some corners of the internet reacted with …
Since the early 20th Century, progressives have attacked the American Founding as obsolete. Progressives argued that the Constitution could not solve modern policy problems and in response, they called for a vast expansion of federal power. Since the 1930s, the federal government has expande…
During the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan late last month, the Biden administration had a tragic humiliation on its hands: 13 U.S. servicemen and -women killed, along with nearly 200 Afghans, as well as a large number wounded. All were victims of a suicide bomber sent by an organization…
Make it louder
President Joe Biden is taking heat from Democrats, not for his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan — that’s popular — but for his haphazard pullout that, self-serving Rumsfeldian “stuff happens,” “wars end messily” platitudes aside, could have been executed more efficiently. They blame Geo…
A new Treasury Department report finds that the United States is losing $163 billion per year because of tax evasion by the top 1% of earners. The story is mind-numbingly familiar: phenomenally rich people finding new and creative ways to boost their wealth even more by cheating the rest of …
The nation’s largest state has just voted in an election triggered by one of the nation’s weirdest recall processes, and the results have come out just about where they’ve been before.
In a nation founded upon freedom and liberty, it seems the current administration has very little concern or care to uphold it. Forcing citizens, law-abiding, tax-paying, hard-working men and women to inject themselves with a vaccine that is barely a year old, and still under a emergency aut…
The ongoing opioid addiction crisis began with excessive distribution of a new generation of effective opioid painkillers, such as OxyContin.
‘Equitable’ distribution
The executive director of JPMorgan Chase admitted that the stock market’s “biggest nightmare periods have tended to be October. You go back to obviously the crash in 1929, but the 1987 crash, and in 1989 ... was in October. You tend to have these October moments.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just told us we need to reduce our carbon emissions as quickly as possible to forestall the worst of climate change. So what could be wrong with a technology that promises to capture carbon dioxide as a way to bring those emissions under control?
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was so worried then-President Donald Trump might launch a surprise attack against China that he reached out to his Chinese counterpart and assured General Li Zuocheng that Milley would preemptively warn China. That, at least, is th…
True science
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is a woman of the people. So much so that she walked past a Black Lives Matter protest outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and joined the starry Met Gala inside as a guest earlier this week.
Not exactly a triumph, when you come right down to it. The bluest state in the nation, facing the “sage from South Central,” stays white.
Call Geisinger
Fourteen Republican members of the state House have filed a legal challenge to the law that allowed no-excuse mail-in voting — a law that 11 of those esteemed legislators supported two years ago.
In Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, former President George W. Bush’s theme was national unity — and how it has been lost over these past 20 years.
Mind-control cults
The Supreme Court’s decision to let a draconian Texas law banning most abortions go into effect before the litigation over it plays out is a clear signal of what’s coming: This court is poised to eviscerate a fundamental right of women that a strong majority of the nation supports. House Spe…
Let’s be clear. No one has to get the vaccine. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states: “The federal government does not mandate (require) vaccination for people.”
By the time the sun set on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, a wounded, grieving nation wept. The full magnitude of the loss of life wasn’t yet known, but this much was certain: The United States had suffered an unprecedented attack on our own soil, with civilians, service members, and politica…
Are we witnessing the feminization of America? And if so, is that a good or bad thing, or is it, like so many quiet but ineluctable trends, a combination of the two?
Is America safer after its 20-year war on terrorism in Afghanistan has resulted in the Taliban’s victory? The answer, like the war itself, is muddled. The lack of resolution should cause considerable discomfort to Americans who lived through the trauma of 9/11 and cheered the U.S. military’s…
Twenty years is a long time, but the past 18 months almost feel just as drawn out.
WASHINGTON — How much does President Joe Biden’s proposed agenda cost?
To the editor: “Stop The World, I Want to Get Off” is the title of a 1961 Broadway musical. This cute title has become a modern mantra. Like a malevolent potion, media of all kinds, but especially electronic, have poisoned our brains and souls.
Presidential bluster
This week, the City of Shamokin announced it would be holding its workshop meeting closed to the public in lieu of a rising number of COVID-19 cases across the state.
It was theatrical in its design and a Shakespearean tragedy in its unfolding. As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approached, President Biden desperately desired a historical and symbolic end to the nation’s longest war.
If you don’t like “structural racism,” try “the dice are still loaded.”
Kulpmont priorities
As soon as Pennsylvania’s Independent Regulatory Review Commission voted 3-2 on Wednesday to approve the state’s participation in a market-based carbon-reduction project, a House committee adopted a resolution opposing it.
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