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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. ...

Cultural curators face reckoning

PITTSBURGH -- Walking out of the Allegheny County Republican election night event at a local luxury hotel, the young men waiting to valet my car got into a discussion with me about the just-announced election results. All four men were in their 30s. Two were white, one was Black and the other Hispanic. As I traditionally do, I asked them how they voted, and they all answered with President-elect Donald Trump. The conservative populist coalition was always right in front of reporters and experts in working-class neighborhoods, suburbs and cities. If only they had not treated those ...

Why Donald Trump won the presidency

If you are reading this column, you are not the audience that needs to hear this. After reading article after article and listening to countless pundits about why Trump won this election, I have come to my own conclusion: those who voted for Trump (Republicans, Independents and, yes, even Democrats) did so because they were constantly fed a diet of unvarnished lies about how bad the Biden/Harris administration was. All the ads focused on the terrible economy, illegal aliens murdering innocent Americans, etc., etc. People nowadays, even though they have access to all the knowledge in ...