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A local solution to meeting workforce needs in public safety

Across the nation, law enforcement agencies are struggling to recruit and hire police officers. Multiple social, political, and economic forces are at play simultaneously, and are shaping the current state of public safety recruitment and retention. The challenges are systemic in nature and reflect individual level considerations, making solutions to the problem complicated. As vacancies increase due to retirements and the inability to fill open positions, officers are left overworked and burned out. If law enforcement agencies continue to lose officers without bringing in qualified, ...

Future of energy for state alarming

Things are heating up in Pennsylvania, especially for our electrical grid. The Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection (PJM), the grid manager for the commonwealth plus twelve other states and the District of Columbia, is worried about our future energy needs. As existing power plants come offline and lawmakers seek to replace them with woefully inadequate alternatives, PJM estimates electricity shortages as early as 2027. The debate on Pennsylvania’s troubling energy future has two policy choices: continue with Gov. Josh Shapiro’s preference for picking winners and ...

A time for prayer, civility and respectful discourse

I consider the recent attempt on the life of former President Trump to be a tragic and saddening event. My immediate reaction to the news was to pray for him, the other victims, those close to them, and his supporters. I thank God the ex-President’s injuries were no worse than they were. The horrific incident has shaken us all. Such acts of violence have no place in a civilized society. The impact of such incidents goes far beyond the immediate victims. The attempted assassination affects the fabric of our democracy and instills fear and uncertainty in the hearts of citizens. This ...

Standing against the takeover of America

It is not unusual to hear those in the Democratic Party refer to Donald Trump as a dictator in waiting. They forget that the great democrat who gave us seemingly endless socialism, Franklin Roosevelt, was a dictator who was elected to president four times and would have been elected forever, had he lived. More importantly, we hear very little about the common “Summer of Resistance.” This will be an attempt to disrupt the Democratic Convention in Chicago to be held between August 19th and August 22nd, in a manner far in excess of the 1968 Chicago Riots which besmirched the ...

The most important 42 miles in American politics

BUTLER -- The drive between Butler, Pennsylvania, and the Ohio village of East Palestine is less than 42 miles long. In between are the villages and boroughs of Lyndora, Connoquenessing and Evans City on the Pennsylvania side before you cross the state line directly into the village of East Palestine. It is a stretch of geography that includes bucolic rolling pastures, the gentle slopes of the Appalachian Mountains, traces of what once was powerful Steel Valley between New Castle, Pennsylvania, and Youngstown, Ohio, and a mix of decay of what once was and a rebuilding of what may ...

The party of ‘falling in line’

It’s said that Democrats fall in love while Republicans fall in line. Look at what’s been happening on the Republican front. One word from Donald Trump and anyone who wants to remain in Republican politics snaps to attention and says, “Yes, sir!” Take Nikki Haley for example, a woman who was arguably the most likely of any female Republican to take a leading role. She was a successful governor of South Carolina and the former UN Ambassador from Trump’s administration. Her campaign for president in 2024 did better than most predicted and she had what appeared to be a very ...