Publius Awakened

The column below was published in The Pitt News today. Enjoy, read and comment:

Two nights of clashes between students and police have stolen the local media spotlight in the aftermath of the G-20 Summit but the major story for the international community to come out of Pittsburgh is the disclosure of Iran’s second nuclear facility.
            
Located [...]

This column was published in The Pitt News today. After considering the issues in greater depth, I’m not sure I fully stand by this published position any longer but that’s a post for another day.
 
Internships are a popular way for students to learn valuable work related skills while also getting their foot in the door [...]

WTAE aired a piece today on Students for Justice in Palestine and their involvement with the Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project. Local and national media has picked up the story since my first column was published in The Pitt News. The University must realize that no student’s activities fee should go to fund this organization.
If you enjoyed [...]

This column was just published by The Pitt News. Read it below and comment.

G-20 protesters have descended on Pittsburgh not to protest any single policy of the G-20 but to rail against capitalism as an oppressive and unjust system foisted upon billions of people by a cabal of world leaders. These protesters promise to make [...]

Students and young people from Pitt and around the country have been planning protests against the G-20 Summit and, later this week, they’ll have a chance to prove their radical credentials and rail against capitalism in a public space.
            
At permitted and unpermitted protests throughout the city, radical students will, as one proclamation endorsed by [...]

The senate voted 68 to 30 on Wednesday to require Amtrak allow passengers to transport unloaded, locked guns in their checked baggage or lose its $1.6 billion subsidy, The New York Times reported. This requirement is similar to how the airline industry handles the transportation of guns but Amtrak protested that it did not possess [...]

This column appeared in The Pitt News today.
A group of six local and national protest organizations filed a federal lawsuit on Friday against the city, the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the Secret Service, The Post-Gazette reported. The suit alleges that the three defendants have conspired to deny protesters their First Amendment [...]

Politics on a college campus are a lot like an encyclopedia printed by the Kremlin in 1960: they’re 50 years out of date, founded on a general hatred of capitalism and totally out of touch with reality.
Channeling the public theater of Soviet show trials, much of campus politics are based on appearances rather than effect. [...]

As a rhetorical concept, “The War on Terror” has always been a mixed bag. It’s a semantically flawed expression of the U.S. war effort (a war cannot be waged against a tactic) that also manages to sum up the purpose of the U.S. war effort: to eliminate the practitioners of terrorism and their threat to [...]

Christopher Hitchens published a well-argued rebuttal to critics of the Afghan War who have begun to lay the foundation for American withdrawal from Afghanistan. I won’t attempt to summarize Hitchens’ point because I highly recommend you read it for yourself but he brought up two important points.
First, we’ve given the Afghans our word that we [...]