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Columns/Opinion

Who’s suppressing your right to protest?

By Jim Hightower As British playwright and political rabble-rouser George Bernard Shaw noted, “You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.” That certainly has been true of progressives in our country. We’ve never been able to advance our people’s little-D democratic goals by idly hoping the established powers will do it for us; they’re the ones doing it to us. Rather, it has been audacious American rebels who’ve incrementally advanced our democratic possibilities by defying the repressive laws ...

Right way to craft red-flag laws

By Amy Swearer Tribune News Service (TNS) Recent polls show that most Americans support the basic premise of disarming dangerous people through the use of so-called “red-flag laws.” This instinct is a sound one, but Americans should not overlook the very real hazards of poorly crafted red-flag laws, which can easily turn the Constitution on its head. To be sure, the general idea behind red-flag laws is good — to better identify objectively dangerous individuals and allow court-ordered, narrow interventions to disarm these specific individuals before they can commit violent ...

Oakdale market revives ‘America’s Hometown’

OAKDALE, Pennsylvania – Some towns die hard. This one nearly did. The Aetna Chemical Corp. plant exploded 101 years ago, leveling most of the town, killing nearly 200 people, maiming hundreds more. Some body parts landed nearly a mile away. The horrifying news ran across the front page of every newspaper in the country, with reports of carnage and photos of a demolished landscape in which buildings and trees were leveled. That’s the most notable thing to ever happen in Oakdale, which since its inception has been fondly called “America’s hometown.” It was a quaint ...

Ukraine mess shows Trump colors

What offends me most about the whistleblower-Ukraine-Biden story isn’t the obvious corruption of it all. It’s the way members of Team Trump assume we’re all idiots who won’t notice they’ve abruptly shifted their narrative. At first, it seemed like a familiar scenario of allegations met with denials. Trump’s denials came swiftly. In a tweet, he called the allegations “Another Fake News story,” adding, “is anybody dumb enough to believe that I would say something inappropriate with a foreign leader while on such a potentially ‘heavily populated’ call.” Right, ...

Trump’s need to destroy meets environment

One word best describes Donald Trump’s environmental policy: sick. The president has an obsessive urge to ravage nature just for the heck of it. Exhibit A is his crusade to weaken environmental regulations against the very wishes of those being regulated. Trump seems bent on destruction as an end in itself. He has worked to destroy America’s ties with its traditional allies. He’s striving to destroy the Affordable Care Act — and, with it, health coverage for millions of Americans. Now it’s the environment’s turn. Trump tries to hide hostility toward environmental ...

Trump China policy working

By Greg Autry Los Angeles Times (TNS) On the morning after the 2016 presidential election, CNBC interviewed Peter Navarro, who had been an economic advisor to the Trump campaign and would soon join the administration to advise the president on trade and manufacturing policy. Navarro outlined President Trump’s economic plans: cutting taxes, reducing regulation, cutting energy costs and reforming trade. He predicted strong growth and a Dow moving past 25,000 based on these pro-growth policies. The Trump administration has delivered on every one of those things, but you’d never know ...