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Paul Kengor Columns category, Page 4

Paul Kengor: Another year without baseball
An astute reader with a keen memory recently emailed to ask if I had carried on my boycott of Major League Baseball from 2021 into 2022. Readers will recall that what set me off was the egregious politicization of baseball by an ideological MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred. Manfred had shamelessly...
Paul Kengor: Tearing down Columbus — and Western civilization
I have fond memories of my first days at Pitt. I began attending in the summer semester of 1987 as a transfer student. I remember sunny afternoons sitting under the giant statue of Christopher Columbus at Schenley Park reading my various books for my first-semester course on Western civilization. That...
Paul Kengor: Truly a cancel culture
“My favorite radio station recently picked up some right-wing drivel weekly radio show which I listen to in order to punish myself. Anyhoo, I listened to your whiny crying … I wish cancel culture was a real thing which actually existed so I could cancel you for all time.” So...
Paul Kengor: Student loan stories enlightening
The Biden plan to cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan payments has upset people on both sides of the political aisle, for reasons both political and personal. Politically, the plan is an outrageous irony coming from President Joe Biden and “progressive” supporters like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and...
Paul Kengor: Telling stories, David McCullough’s enduring recipe for success
I just turned in a book manuscript. My editor gave me the publisher’s standard questionnaire for authors. Among the questions was if I preferred my acknowledgments section at the start or end of the book. I was aghast. I told my editor that the very notion of opening a book...
Paul Kengor: Remembering a historic Pa. mayor — and the importance of preserving memories
Pennsylvania has lost a remarkable public servant. His name was Bruno Carnovale, and he died June 3 at age 95. In 2017, he was honored as Pennsylvania’s Mayor of the Year. To say it was well-earned is an understatement. Bruno had been mayor of the town of Emporium, located in...
Paul Kengor: Signs of the economic times
Last week I rented a car, a standard SUV. I do that often, but this time was very different. The price was shocking. It was $650 to rent from 4:30 p.m. on Friday until 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, before insurance and other costs. I actually didn’t need the car until...
Paul Kengor: Casey doesn’t support Casey
For a while now, I’ve been planning to write a column on whether Pennsylvania Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. would support his father’s position in the 1992 landmark abortion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. That case enshrined Roe v. Wade. Of course, Pennsylvania Gov. Robert P. Casey Sr. was the...
Paul Kengor: Cheaper and saner times, when gas was 33 cents per gallon
My father-in-law (his name is Al) recently handed me something he came across in a box of old stuff. It was a receipt from Wilson’s Pleasant Valley Station, in McMurray dated June 13, 1958. The receipt was signed by Al, a hustling teenage boy working at the gas station. What...
Paul Kengor: Yes, your vote really does count
I remember a column years ago by a writer arguing that your vote doesn’t count. A curmudgeon who enjoyed tweaking readers, he took on the sacred civics aphorism: “Your vote counts.” He insisted that, in fact, your single vote really doesn’t count, except for the rarest occasions where a one-vote...
Paul Kengor: From GOAT to Groat
A strange confluence of my two recent Trib articles inspires a novel follow up. I first wrote on goats versus GOATs — i.e., athletes known for choking (i.e., goats) vs. athletes hailed by the weird acronym GOAT, meaning Greatest Of All Time. Next I wrote on Orrin Hatch, the longest...
Paul Kengor: Remembering Orrin Hatch, a Pittsburgh native son
Orrin Hatch died last week at age 88. In the political world, Hatch was a big deal. He became the longest-serving Republican senator ever, representing Utah from 1977 until 2019. Hatch was a prominent longtime member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In sensational hearings for Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork,...
Paul Kengor: Since when are GOATS the greatest?
One of the weirdest things to hit the sports and pop-culture lexicon is this strange acronym GOAT. It’s a real headscratcher. Frankly, it’s dumb, and it needs to go away. You probably know what I’m talking about, given the sad saturation of social media. This GOAT thing stands for Greatest...
Paul Kengor: Putin, a cornered rat
Rebekah Koffler, a Russian-born U.S. intelligence expert who worked for the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, and author of “Putin’s Playbook,” speaks of an episode in the life of Vladimir Putin growing up in the 1960s in a communal apartment in Leningrad. “To get to his apartment on the fifth...
Paul Kengor: Why didn’t Putin do this under Trump?
Trump supporters are pounding their chests over what they believe is a rhetorical question: Why didn’t Vladimir Putin do what he’s doing in Ukraine when Donald Trump was president? It’s a fair question that fair-minded liberals ought to ask. In fact, one of them, Bill Maher, raised it: “If Putin...
Paul Kengor: How much does Putin want?
“The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” So declared Russian President Vladimir Putin in April 2005 in his annual state of the nation address to the Russian parliament, broadcast live on Russian television. That bombshell was dropped without any elaboration. “Putin deplores collapse...

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