Joseph Sabino Mistick Columns category, Page 7
Joseph Sabino Mistick: We could use a little of Jack Bogut’s storytelling these days
When Jack Bogut was the king of morning radio in Pittsburgh, waking up to your favorite station was not as scary as it is these days. We always seem to be on the brink of something terrible or faced with something terrible that happened overnight — political violence, mass shootings,...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: Pair’s industrial art a love letter to steelworkers
An accidental discovery on social media led to a partnership between New Castle businessman Chip Barletto and Pittsburgh industrial artist Cory Bonnet, and, because of that, our community will always have permanent reminders of why we celebrate Labor Day. Barletto has been visiting old steel mills for 50 years, starting...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: Pa. voters deserve to see debates
As the shortest kid in my fourth grade class, I played the 5-foot-4 Stephen Douglas in our school production of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, and my tallest classmate played the 6-foot-4 Abraham Lincoln. It was the 100th anniversary of the 1858 debates. Our school had no auditions for these nonspeaking roles,...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: We need leaders who support our laws
For most of my life, politicians in both parties have stood for law and order, and Republicans have been traditionally strong in their support. But while my Republican friends quickly denounced the Jan. 6 violence by the far right, a large group of Republicans chose safe reelection over their party’s...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: The rule of law or a banana republic
After the legal search of Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago last week, his supporters howled that the actions of the FBI were just what would take place in a banana republic. Author O. Henry first used the term banana republic to describe Central American countries that were exploited by American...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: The human toll of homicide
Jim Morton knows a lot about homicide — maybe too much. Morton retired three years ago after 46 years with the Allegheny County Police Department. For 28 of those years, he worked homicides, rising to head the division and finally serving as assistant superintendent of detectives. Even as a supervisor...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: Sen. Josh Hawley no profile in courage
In the “Hall of Fame of Political Ignominy,” there is now a special place for Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley. He is the politician who strode confidently into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, while showing a raised fist to the crowd of gathered demonstrators, urging them on, showing them his...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: A history of presidential cover-ups
Whether you were born during the day or during the night, you weren’t born yesterday or last night, and the Secret Service claims that agents’ text messages before and during the attempted coup of Jan. 6 were inadvertently erased just don’t hold water. The Secret Service told its agents to preserve...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: Facts on a lost, not stolen, election
If you are one of those Trump supporters who believes what you believe, no matter what, reading “Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election” is not for you. But if you are on the fence looking for facts from an honest...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: Guns blocking our pursuit of happiness
Is this the end of happiness? It feels like it more and more after every new mass shooting and the slaughter of innocents. Each shooting steals another safe place from all of us, and, last week, when a domestic terrorist with a military-style weapon randomly killed seven and wounded dozens...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: The politics of the Supreme Court
In the 1970 movie “Tora! Tora! Tora!” about the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the actor who played Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, the leader of the attack, said, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” Throughout our history,...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: American common ground found in Jan. 6 hearings
Just when we thought Democrats and Republicans had nothing in common, last Tuesday’s Jan. 6 congressional hearing showed there are leaders in both parties who still believe in the rule of law, faithfulness to our Constitution and respect for their oaths of office. We learned it was good solid Republicans...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: A son’s promise spans generations
Bill Mistick never forgot the day his father, Andy, came home from the mill and unfolded a large sheet of paper after the supper table was cleared. It was a drawing of something, but nothing that anyone recognized. Andy paused while the kids puzzled over it. Decades before, Andy had...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: It’s possible to combine fighting crime, reforming system
When San Francisco’s reform- minded District Attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled by the voters in an election last week, he lost more than his job. He lost the chance to carry forward his reform agenda. It turns out, the people will give you room to be a reformer, but you better...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: A second chance to save our children
After Sandy Hook, many people thought that surely Congress would act. The slaughter of 20 6- and 7-year-olds at their school by a 20-year-old mentally disturbed male was impossible to comprehend. The killer used a military-style weapon and high-capacity magazines to kill innocent babies. In an address to the nation...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: The honor of playing taps
Ralph Dudgeon has played taps hundreds of times during his 73 years. Starting when he was 11 years old, he would climb onto the East McKeesport borough firetruck at the end of the Memorial Day parade for the ride to the cemetery where he and his father — Ralph the...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: Reject racial hatred with your vote
Where I grew up, Election Day was a holiday, a twice-yearly chance to celebrate American freedom. In neighborhoods with families from all over Europe, voting was a sacred moment, a reminder of a right they never had, a ritual that marked the blessings of the New World. After our grandparents...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: Opening Pa.’s primary election
As Democrats and Republicans go to the polls this Tuesday to select their party’s candidates for the November election, over 1 million Pennsylvanians who are registered independent will sit it out. As a closed primary state, Pennsylvania does not permit independent voters to cast ballots in either party’s primary. This...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: Opposition picks matter in Pa. races
Primary elections are rarely real barnburners. Candidates in each party are solely focused on becoming their party’s nominee for the fall election. After the primary, they would normally all unite behind the victor and then turn their fire on the other party’s nominee. But this year is different. This year,...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: Could we get back to friendship in politics?
When 19th-century journalist Charles Dudley Warner wrote, “True it is that politics makes strange bedfellows,” he was talking about political opponents who were forced by circumstances to work together. Either for common interest or for the common good, they got past their differences. It’s not like that anymore. Cultural warriors...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: Stopping the shootings
In a scene that is far too familiar, over 100 citizens and community leaders gathered at Allegheny Center Alliance Church last week to pray for an end to the gun violence that is robbing us of our youth and putting our community in peril. Three days earlier, two 17-year-old boys,...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: Kindness at times of war
Edin Mesic is a Pittsburgher now. But he will never forget the Austrian grandmother who shared a train compartment with him and his brother, Mick, on the night train from Vienna to Munich three decades ago. The brothers were running for their lives from genocide in Bosnia and the “liquidation”...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: We can’t afford to look away from Putin’s carnage
Do not look away. The evening newscasters warned us that we may not want to see the images of Vladimir Putin’s slaughter of citizens in Ukraine. But we learned a long time ago that we cannot afford to look away from crimes like these. On Tuesday, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: Troubles on the Supreme Court
When it was disclosed that Ginni Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, had been communicating with Trump White House officials and advising them to overturn the lawful election of Joe Biden in the run-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection, the Supreme Court’s impartiality took another hit. Ginni Thomas is not...
Joseph Sabino Mistick: Putin reminds us of how we fight evil
It is a question as old as time, one for which there is no universally acceptable answer. Because of Vladimir Putin and his savage invasion of Ukraine, it is a question that is front and center again: How could there be such evil in this world? “Evil” is the only...
