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Robbing Peter to pay Paul

Back in the 1980s, the last time that Congress was able to agree on changes to Social Security, U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) coined a pivotal axiom about consensus building: You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own set of facts. That principle has long since been abandoned in the discussion about Social Security as politicians, regardless of party, are happy to lose fact check after fact check as their claims get more absurd by the day. Moynihan was right, every debate must have a framework of fact on which consensus can be built. Social Security reform ...

Understanding voters, not tone-deaf narratives

I would like to address and possibly rebut a column recently published in the Sun-Gazette. In the aftermath of a heated election, a familiar narrative, espoused even here in this very paper, has taken hold: Trump won because voters were misled, duped by a stream of misinformation about the Biden administration. This view, though comforting to those seeking justification for a surprising outcome, misses the complexity of voter motivations—particularly those of Independent voters. It’s time to look beyond these simplistic explanations and appreciate the nuanced choices that tens of ...

Gov. Shapiro’s strategy of silence

Gov. Josh Shapiro won election on a theme of “getting in the game.” But since taking office, he’s been sitting on the sidelines during game-changing plays—not simply a bench warmer but a silent one. From energy to education to elections to executive-office scandals, Shapiro, for all his talk, has embraced a strategy of silence. This silence glaringly came to the fore this week, as Democrat county election officials voted to openly violate two Supreme Court orders so they could count (and now re-count) undated mail-in ballots in the close election between Republican ...

An example of brotherhood

There was the usual camaraderie. The sharing of beers and stories that always happens when Williamsport firefighters come together once a year with retired city firefighters for a meal, for an evening of good times and fellowship. A skit, put together each year by firefighter Stephen Younkin, ...

Voters in presidential election wanted a course correction

When I took my exam to become a licensed Marriner for the United States Coast Guard, one of the most difficult topics in the multi-part exam was navigation. People do not learn about marine navigation in middle school or high school. We did not learn about it in college. It was a new subject for me, and, on my father’s boat, he did not even rely on a compass. We learned to spit on our hand and put the palm of our hand on the tip of our nose to be able to tell which way the wind was blowing. Thanks to the presidential election, we know which way the wind is blowing in the United ...

‘Who isn’t with me — must be against me’ not a good lesson

Growing up, I watched my dad and grandfather having many fierce debates over mainly poli-tical issues, and those debates left a deep imprint on me: Instead of understanding debates as an opportunity to exchange views and to learn from each other, I get overly emotional, and all I want to hear is I’m right. “Discourse vulnerability” is what German law professor Frauke Rostalski calls this unfortunate habit of mine. In her book “The Vulnerable Society,” she describes how we as a society are becoming too sensitive, thus finding it increasingly more difficult to exchange ideas. ...