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Juvenile crime needs new ideas

Letters

The Williamsport Sun-Gazette’s Editorial Opinion (Monday June 22) describes a need for “multi-faceted” efforts addressing juvenile crime prevention. The opinion lauds efforts by Police to hold juveniles, parents and guardians “accountable”. Lycoming County Juvenile Probation Director Matt Minier, in an article by Pat Crossley (May 29 “We Care About Kids” Lycoming County Commissioners Host Meeting on Ways to Help Youth) explained that “evidence based probation instituted in 2009 is “time consuming, technical” and “greatly increased the workload of staff”. This ...

Not a Christian nation

Letters

I am compelled, once again, to correct to Mr. Adams’s false claims that we have been a ‘Christian’ nation since our founding. There is nowhere in our founding documents where Christianity is mentioned, let alone set above any and all other religions. In fact, many of the Founding Fathers were followers of Deism, which focused on reason and ethics rather than traditional religious dogmas. They were very clear, in the First Amendment to the Constitution, to clarify that religion and government are, and should be, separate entities and all people should be free to worship as their ...

State House Democrats vote to rip scholarships away from children

Other Commentaries

On Tuesday, Pennsylvania House Democrats on the Education Committee quietly did something extraordinary — and not in a good way. With barely a day’s notice and not even posting a public committee notice, they passed a series of bills that would decimate educational options in Pennsylvania. The first bill, House Bill (HB) 2632, would gut the state’s most successful educational choice programs, strip scholarships from low-income students, and slam the door on tens of thousands more who are desperately waiting to get in. Another bill, HB 2634, would cut funding to all charter ...

Frugality, focus on necessities needed in assistance programs

Editorials

A federal court has ruled against an initiative by the Trump administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and some supportive states to prohibit the use of federal nutrition assistance money from being spent on candy and sugary drinks. We can understand the frustrations of taxpayers, at ...

A new chair, a shorter statement

Other Commentaries

The Federal Reserve left interest rates alone last Wednesday, holding its benchmark in the 3.50%–3.75% range for a fourth straight meeting – after standing pat in January, March, and April – in a unanimous 12–0 vote. That part was expected. The news was everything around the decision, because this was Kevin Warsh’s first meeting as Fed chair, and he used it to signal that the central bank is no longer leaning toward cutting rates. If anything, it is now leaning the other way. What actually changed? Start with the statement itself, the short document the Fed releases after ...

What other newspapers are saying: Vaccine conspiracies will have consequences

Editorials

If history someday defines our current political era as one in which America inexplicably allowed preventable, once-defeated diseases to reemerge and ravage society — and that narrative is growing today with alarming clarity — the most baffling part of the story will be how we failed to see it coming. Today’s deeply misguided anti-vaccination movement didn’t start with the 2020 pandemic, but political resistance to COVID vaccination policies supercharged it. Many (including this page ) have warned in the past few years that politically driven distrust of COVID vaccines would ...