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Ross Gallabrese: Seasons change

Local Columns

When we last saw the Pittsburgh Steelers, they were suffering through a 30-6 loss to Houston in an NFL wild card playoff game on Jan. 12. Since that Monday night more than six months ago, the team has undergone some changes, not the least of which came when Mike Tomlin decided to step away from the head coaching spot he had held for the last 19 seasons. While we still see him as an analyst on NBC this season, the Steelers will have a new coach in Mike McCarthy. We'll find out if it's a good fit, as McCarthy, the former coach of the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys, will be ...

Ross Gallabrese: Innovation all around us

Local Columns

There was a lot of excitement this spring surrounding the Artemis II mission that successfully sent four astronauts around the moon. It helped to set the stage for the third mission, which is scheduled for next year and will test the Orion spacecraft's ability to dock with landers built by SpaceX and Blue Origin. If those tests are successful, the goal will be to send the crew of Artemis IV to land on the moon in late 2028. That would mark the first time humans have been on the moon since December 1972, when Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent three days there as part of the ...

Gary Franks: Lightning will not strike twice in Maine as Platner steps down

Editorials

Thank God lightning will not strike twice the same spot - in reference to the character issue. Maine's Graham Platner was a seriously flawed Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate despite first being the choice of many Democratic leaders in the state and in Washington. It took repeated charges of sexual abuse to get Platner to step down as the party's candidate. Yet there was a part of me that "did" want him to be the Democratic nominee. It would show once again that the obvious was, well... obvious (like former President Joe Biden's declining cognitive abilities while in office). My ...

Veronique de Rugy: What a 700-Year-Old Fresco Can Teach America

Editorials

There are moments when history reaches across the centuries with startling clarity. Standing in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, Italy, and looking at Ambrogio Lorenzetti's "Allegory of Good and Bad Government," I had one of those moments. Nearly 700 years old, the series of fresco paintings includes a depiction of a bustling city that illustrates the effects of good government, as well as representations of the decay that results from arbitrary and unjust rulers. The visual treatise on political economy holds important lessons for us today. Lorenzetti's city isn't thriving because its ...

Josh Hammer: The Return of Socialism and the GOP's Golden Opportunity

Editorials

The Democratic Party has come a long way since Bill Clinton was president -- and not in a good way. In 1993, the first year of the Clinton presidency, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) introduced legislation to end automatic birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens; today, Democrats routinely call to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement and advocate for illegal alien suffrage. Clinton famously called for abortion to be "safe and legal but rare"; today, Democrats prefer to "shout your abortion" as a perverse badge of honor. On marriage, Clinton signed the Defense of ...

Different perspectives

Editorials

It's easy to be critical about the way your community looks, or the people who have been elected to govern it or those who have been appointed to be in charge of services ranging from the streets to the water system, from the sewer system to garbage collection. If you have any doubts about that, all you have to do is visit a restaurant, a doughnut shop or any place that has more than just a couple of seats and where you can find a cup of coffee any time between 5 a.m. and about 11 a.m. There, you will likely find a group that has been meeting in the same place at the same time for a ...