EDITORIAL: Mastriano accepting defeat should end 2020 drama

For conservatives, current high rates of inflation should not be too upsetting — and not because they might help Republican candidates in the next election. Rather, there are intrinsic reasons why higher inflation, at least for a while, might not be as bad as it looks.

Countries can’t tax their way to long-term prosperity. President Joe Biden wants to try anyway.

Editor,

I managed to get some man angry enough to toss some naughty words at me and hang up last week. Like roughly 75% of my phone calls these days, this one was trying to sign me up for some sort of Medicare.

Noncompete agreements, which restrict who employees can work for after leaving a company, have become well-established in Pittsburgh. Some local hairstylists, for example, who are unhappy with their jobs must either stay with those jobs, move to another area, or change fields entirely, throw…

Hostility to the First Amendment is a bipartisan endeavor. Too many elected officials take an oath to uphold the Constitution without having bothered to read the document.

Buried deep in the newly released, 197-page filing by Dominion Voting Systems in its mammoth $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News for suggesting the 2020 presidential election was stolen with help from rigged Dominion voting machines is one very explosive sentence:

In recent weeks, Fox News has come under increased scrutiny concerning its coverage of the 2020 election because some of its hosts questioned the integrity of the voting process.

Editor,

Almost everyone hates springing forward and falling back every year. Moving clocks ahead one hour in March only to return them to their previous settings in November wastes time — literally.

Today’s daylight saving time (DST) system — spring-to-fall DST followed by winter standard time — is an excellent compromise, providing DST’s many advantages the majority of the year and yet avoiding winter standard time’s difficulties during the dark, cold months.

Even in a stridently partisan state Legislature, authorizing county Tourism Improvement Districts (TIDs) should be an easy win for both parties. And the sooner the better: County tourism agencies could use the cash to sustain an ongoing recovery from the COVID-19 travel collapse.

Nikki Haley’s bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination should evoke cheers among party leaders.

Some mysteries go unsolved, but who perpetrated the inhumane “brain attacks” in 2016 on 1,500 American diplomats stationed in Cuba and other parts of the world shouldn’t be one of them.

Some recent studies have shown that young people, particularly teenage girls, are experiencing disturbingly high levels of stress and distress.

Editor,

As opposed to a multiparty system, as exists in, say, Israel, in which voters have a number of alternatives to find candidates that are most aligned with their views, a two-party system forces voters to choose between only two ideologies.

Fentanyl has become the No. 1 cause of death for American adults under age 50. It’s an indiscriminate killer, claiming the lives of quiet teens and young parents, Wall Street traders and celebrities alike.

It’s great to make the top half of a list.

By now, you’ve probably heard about ChatGPT, the software that can write human-sounding text to order.

The Biden administration says it will crack down on the use of migrant child labor at U.S. plants and factories serving some of the nation’s biggest brand names.

If you ask the wrong question, you’re likely to get the wrong answer.If the question is, “Do masks worn outside medical settings work to protect against COVID-19 and respiratory diseases?” — or its politically charged companion, “Do you believe in masks?” — don’t be surprised if answers are …

Citing a classified intelligence report provided to members of Congress, the Wall Street Journal recently reported the U.S. Energy Department has now concluded with “low confidence” that the COVID-19 pandemic most likely began after an unintentional laboratory leak in China.

Note to politicians with presidential aspirations: Joining the Cabinet makes the path that much harder. Just ask Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

If you think it’s unfair for would-be concertgoers to have to go through services like Ticketmaster, you might be shocked to learn that the Biden administration has issued a rule to force would-be asylum-seekers who transited through more than one country without being rejected for asylum th…

The unintentional shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins in 2021 on the set of the film “Rust” in New Mexico is tragic. But not all tragedies translate to criminal behavior and being accused of a crime.

We can all agree that Alec Baldwin did not mean to kill cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, leaving her husband a widower and her then-9-year-old son motherless. He should not be, and was not, charged with murder. But, nor should this killing be brushed off as an accident, a tragedy of working …

Under the 2004 state law that authorized casino gambling, almost everything about the gambling enterprise is supposed to be subject to public disclosure. Now, it’s obvious Pennsylvania’s grossly inadequate lobbying disclosure law works against that mandated transparency.

The Republican majority in the U.S. House is about 2 months old, but it’s already clear that Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s attempt to mollify his party’s extremist faction risks hurting the country without guaranteeing the thing he wants most: to keep his job as House leader.

If there’s one issue responsible for the surprising downfall of Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot — who became the city’s first incumbent to lose reelection in four decades, after failing to advance out of a primary round — it’s public safety. Here’s hoping other big-city mayors get the message.

It is historically significant that America’s four largest cities have black mayors.

The problem of canceling people, of casting them out for beliefs or behavior that some find offensive, is not actually a new one. In earlier times, that sort of thing was considerably more brutal.

Pennsylvania voters told state representatives in November that they want positive change rather than the policy stagnation, polarization and cheap political theater to which they have been subjected for more than a decade.

Editor,

A lawsuit filed late last month by the family of Malcolm X, on the 58th anniversary of his assassination in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom, might clear up the secrecy, lies and misinformation that still shroud the historical record.

As another observance of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday passed in January and we once again celebrated Black History Month in February, I’m still haunted by Jonathan Eig’s op-ed — “We have lost sight of MLK’s radical vision” — that appeared earlier this year in the Chicago Tribune.

That the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence now believes the deadly plague we call COVID-19 escaped from a Chinese research lab in Wuhan more than three years ago only heightens the need to keep looking for the origin of the virus.

As disconcerting as the U.S. debt situation is now, the outlook is even worse.