Editorials from around Pennsylvania

Editorials from around Pennsylvania

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TOWNS WITHOUT A POLICE FORCE SHOULD PAY FOR STATE TROOPERS, Feb. 21

By choice, more than half of Pennsylvania’s 2,562 municipalities have no local police department. By law, the State Police must provide full-time coverage at no cost to these towns. But that means taxpayers in the remaining 1,275 municipalities not only must pay local taxes for their own police but also state taxes to fund the troopers who cover the towns without their own cops.

In his current budget proposal, Gov. Wolf seeks to mitigate this imbalance. His plan deserves better treatment than earlier initiatives. The still-to-be-written legislation would impose the equivalent of a $25-per-person tax on those municipalities now exclusively covered by the State Police.

Among these towns are 24 in Chester County, 11 in Montgomery County, eight in Bucks County, and seven in Delaware County. Their residents are likely to argue, correctly, that they pay state taxes, which fund the State Police, and that they are not freeloaders. But a closer look at the numbers shows the stark inequity between those towns with local police and those covered only by the State Police.

Consider the per capita contributions of the four largest municipalities in the four-county suburban Philadelphia region - each town having a local police department. Using the most recent available census estimates and budget figures: Bensalem Township, Bucks County, pays about $426 per person for its police; Lower Merion Township, Montgomery County, about $359; Upper Darby Township, Delaware County, about $335, and Tredyffrin Township, Chester County, about $314. (Philadelphia spends about $403 per person.) By comparison, Wolf’s proposed $25 per person fee is small change.

The looming problem for the fee’s proponents lies in the details. As Wolf spokesman J.J. Abbott explains, the tax “is going to have to be defined in legislation when it’s put together. It would be a fee charged to a municipality based on its population. It would be up to the municipality to decide the fairest way to raise the money.”

Such unfunded state mandates are anathema to the affected towns, but the numbers seem to lean toward proponents of Wolf’s idea. While there are slightly more municipalities without local police (1,287 vs. 1,275), most are rural and exurban, whereas the state’s population centers are predominantly covered by local police.

Another potential sweetener is Wolf’s proposal to take the $63 million that is projected to be saved as a result from the state’s Motor Vehicle License Fund and spend it on transportation projects throughout the state, according to Abbott.

Getting towns to pay a modest amount for State Police coverage is a good idea. But the hard part is for the governor to transform it into legislation that the General Assembly will find palatable.

- The Philadelphia Inquirer

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ANOTHER KIND OF RESISTANCE, Feb. 21

There is no way to prove this, but see if you agree with me: The average American parent would be glad to see his public high school celebrate Martin Luther King Day with tributes to the Civil Rights movement, lectures on the history of slavery and Jim Crow and discussions of the challenges faced by blacks and other minorities in America today. Actually, it’s not really a guess, because curricula like that are found throughout the nation.

The program that is being imposed on Winnetka, Illinois, by contrast, is a hard-left indoctrination that could have come straight from the pages of Howard Zinn. Held on MLK Day itself in 2016, this year’s seminar day on race, “Understanding Today’s Struggle for Racial Civil Rights,” is scheduled for Tuesday, Feb. 28.

The school-wide program will feature a full day of lectures and seminars, and as the title betrays, the slant is built in. As one of the parents who has protested the content noted, civil rights are for everyone, aren’t they? There are no “racial” rights. That was Martin Luther King Jr.’s point, or one of them.

New Trier High School has scheduled two keynote speakers and dozens of seminars for its 4,000 students to choose from among. One or two are unobjectionable, like “Black Gospel Music: Make a Joyful Noise!” or “Rap With a Social Conscience” (though much would depend upon which rap was discussed). But the rest of the offerings are thoroughly turgid agitprop. Students can attend a session titled “Seeing the Unseen: The Bias All Around You” or learn to “recognize our own implicit biases.” They can attend seminars about “cultural appropriation,” ’’trans people of color navigating the U.S.,” ’’race, class, and police interactions,” ’’systemic racism in housing,” ’’myths” about affirmative action in college admissions, and “21st century voter suppression.”

High school students range in age from 14 to 18, so you might imagine that some care would be taken to avoid speakers whose social media are rife with profanity, racial epithets and sexual content. No. Political radicalism means all is permitted.

One might have hoped, in a program dedicated to civil rights and mutual understanding, that the guests might steer clear of racism and anti-Semitism themselves. Kevin Coval’s poem “Occupation” says this about Israel: “Fascist ones believe in one monotheism, a walled prison/ Israelis sleep through the night.” Monica Trinidad will conduct a talk titled “We Charge Genocide: An Emergence of a Continued Movement.” Her Twitter feed encourages people to boycott an Israeli dance troupe (“Don’t dance with Israeli apartheid!”) with a link to the BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) hashtag. She tweeted a picture of mounted police officers with the comment: “Get them animals off those horses.”

So, one might suppose that New Trier parents would be enraged. Yet the pushback has been about as polite, substantive and reasonable as you could possibly wish (especially in our bitter era). On their website, they suggest adding other speakers to achieve - wait for it - intellectual diversity. They note that, in contrast to what the seminars hammer home, people of the same race do not necessarily think alike. Among the speakers the parents group recommends: Shelby Steele, Jason Riley, John McWhorter and Star Parker.

Rather than marinate in doctrinaire leftism heavily inflected with a Black Lives Matter sensibility, the parents object, why not have students volunteer for the day (Chicago is 16 miles south)? The website offers other volunteering suggestions: “Good News Partners (Rogers Park), Connections for the Homeless (Evanston), Pastor Corey Brooks from New Beginnings Church in Woodlawn and ’ProjectHood.org.’”

Despite multiple requests, school officials have refused every appeal from dismayed parents. No to additional speakers. No to adding another seminar at a later date for different viewpoints. No to requiring that parents sign off on their children’s seminar panel choices. No to postponing the program until parental input could be considered.

New Trier has very few black students, but the father of one wrote this: “This group (the small group of faculty and students who developed the program) does NOT represent the best of black Americans and does not advocate anything that has a track record of making black lives better.”

These “check your privilege” brainwashing sessions have become commonplace at colleges. Parents don’t seem to know or care enough to protest. The New Trier parents group is a sign that resistance to deadening propaganda is alive and well - and polite.

- The (Williamsport) Sun-Gazette

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UNANTICIPATED CONSEQUENCE, Feb. 21

Pennsylvanians need not shake in their boots over a finding by state environmental regulators that there is a likely correlation between a gas fracking operation in western Pennsylvania and a series of small earthquakes in that region.

The earthquakes last April in Lawrence County were too weak to be felt by people in the area and they did not cause any damage.

Seth Pelepko of the state Department of Environmental Protection told the Associated Press that the state’s geology across the areas being drilled for natural gas generally does not lend itself to the more intense earthquakes that have affected other drilling regions, including Ohio and Oklahoma.

The correlation between a particular fracking site and minor earthquakes is illustrative, though, in that earthquakes were not among the advertised potential environmental issues when the debate over drilling and levels of state regulation began more than a decade ago.

Most of that discussion has been relative to water and air quality, which are more immediate concerns.

Earthquakes are an unanticipated consequence of drilling and fracking that has emerged over time. The discovery raises questions about other unforeseen consequences that might arise over time, and the degree to which the industry and the state government are prepared to deal with them.

In the earthquake case, driller Hillcorp Energy Co. stopped fracking the well in question and decided not to use a particular technique at other wells that it had employed at the suspect well. The DEP also required it to place seismic monitors in the host township.

That’s a sensible resolution for the case. But the discovery also should remind regulators and lawmakers that not everything about the fracking enterprise is fully understood.

- The (Scranton) Times-Tribune

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SORRY SWEDEN: ANOTHER U.S. ALLY GETS PRESIDENTIAL DISAPPROVAL, Feb. 21

On Saturday President Donald J. Trump added Sweden to a list of allies that he had insulted publicly.

Mexico was the first. Mr. Trump pounded so hard on his campaign point that the United States was going to build a wall across its southern border and make Mexico pay for it that Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto canceled his scheduled visit to the United States. Next was Australia. Mr. Trump found his telephone conversation with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull so unsatisfying - presumably discussion of an exchange of refugees President Barack Obama had agreed upon with Australia - that he let an account of his annoyance go public, in the process insulting the Australians, one of America’s closest allies.

It was Sweden’s turn Saturday, at a political rally Mr. Trump held at Melbourne, Fla. The reason for the event, presumably to cover its financing, was an early opening to Mr. Trump’s campaign for re-election as president in 2020. In making his familiar point that migrants were bad for a country, he cited Sweden’s relatively high rate of acceptance of migrants and attributed to it as a result a terrorist attack there the night before.

The unfortunate part, for Mr. Trump and for America, was that there was no such attack, which the Swedes hastened to verify and then affirm. When called on his mistake, Mr. Trump said he had seen a story on Fox News about immigrants and Sweden. That network had broadcast one of its habitual reports hammering immigration, focusing on a documentary asserting a wave of violence by refugees in Sweden, but nothing about an attack the night before.

In the meantime, Vice President Mike Pence was in Europe busily trying to calm European fears that America is about to abandon Europe, in security terms in NATO, and in its previous support of fruitful relations with a strong European Union. Mr. Trump’s Sweden miscue did nothing to enhance Mr. Pence’s claims of continued firm U.S. attachment to its traditional economic, political and security alliance with Europe. Continued disarray within Mr. Trump’s administration centering, in part, on communications and ties with Russia, featured by the sacking of Michael T. Flynn as national security adviser, hasn’t reassured the Europeans either.

Mr. Trump’s addition of Sweden, a NATO partner and EU member, to his list of disrespected countries just makes things worse. How is Mr. Pence to assure Europe that America seeks continued good relations without telling its leaders simply to ignore what Mr. Trump says?

- The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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ANOTHER YEAR, ANOTHER AWE-INSPIRING JOB DONE AT THON, Feb. 21

It never ceases to amaze us each year when we see the Penn State IFC/Panhellenic Dance Marathon, more commonly known as THON.

The annual event, which raises money for the pediatric cancer fighting Four Diamonds, is amazing in two ways.

It’s amazing that this fundraiser comes through with millions of dollars to help those stricken with cancer at a young age.

It’s also incredible that raising this money is not just a one-time thing. Each and every year THON puts up staggering amounts of money and each year THON seems poised to outdo the one just prior.

This past weekend, at the university’s largest indoor arena, the Bryce Jordan Center, the largest student-run philanthropy in the world revealed its years’ worth of hard work has brought in another sum in excess of $10 million. That pushes the total money raised in the history of this event north of $147 million.

Those proceeds go toward helping families pay for treatment for their sick children or to funding research that will hopefully one day yield a cure.

It is truly one of the most awe-inspiring events there are to see, especially when you see and hear “FTK” everywhere, which stands for “For The Kids,” the unmistakable slogan of THON.

So let us take the opportunity to congratulate everyone involved - from the dancers who endured a 46-hour marathon of no sitting or sleeping to raise money, to the organizers who work tirelessly to ensure THON continues to fulfill its mission, to anyone who contributed money to the cause and most especially to the families who, with this donation, will now be able to focus solely on the health of their kids instead of worrying about how to pay the bill when it comes due.

THON is amazing. We hope the only reason it ever stops is because a cure for cancer is someday found.

- The (Lewistown) Sentinel

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