Publius Awakened

Next week’s mayoral election will have far-reaching effects on University of Pittsburgh students but the Pitt College Republicans and College Democrats have done little to engage the mayoral candidates and involve students in the electoral process.
The election is our chance to hold the mayor’s office accountable for the city’s handling of the G-20, it’s an [...]

2 Political Junkies might be on to something. They published a message to the editorial board of the Post-Gazette on Sunday: “Please! Put down the crack pipe.” And although I don’t share their suspicion that crack is the root of the PG’s problem, I have been awfully puzzled by some of the PG’s recent endorsements [...]

Mayor Luke Ravenstahl was scheduled to speak to Pitt students at a Sunday night forum sponsored by SGB but cancelled Sunday morning, PittBriefly reported. Ravenstahl’s campaign dithered for days over whether he would attend and his campaign manager denied that the mayor had ever agreed to attend in the first place according to The Pitt [...]

After reading through documents disclosed by the Acklin campaign, it is clear that Verbanac wielded undue influence over the mayor to the point where he wrote press releases for the mayor, influenced countless city policies and spearheaded a purge of employees that he did not consider loyal.

The following column was recently published in The Pitt News. 
 

Mayor Luke Ravenstahl’s proposal to tax students and hospital patients as a partial fix to the city’s pension crisis lacks specifics. But one thing is clear: Another Ravenstahl administration will cost students hundreds of dollars.
The proposed tax has escalated in recent weeks from a flat $100-per-year [...]

 
The Pitt News just published this piece on the recent controversy among libertarians, objectivists and conservatives over Columbus Day:
Scattered across the country in small towns and large cities are countless statues of Christopher Columbus.Once an Italian-American icon and renowned explorer, Columbus’s power over the American consciousness has waned in the past decades. But this year’s Columbus [...]

Displaying a profound disrespect for the educational process, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) joined local anarchists in calling for students to “disrupt schools” in response to the G-20 Summit and now they’re asking SGB for $4,077.51 to fund an anti-Israel conference at Pitt.
            
Scheduled to begin October 23rd, the “BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) conference” is [...]

The column below was recently published by The Pitt News.

Eschewing the typical ideological identity and principled policy positions that identify a politician as either a Democrat or a Republican, Mayor Luke Ravenstahl is running for reelection as both a Republican and Democrat.
            
Ravenstahl, a life-long Democrat, finagled this by defeating a challenger in the Democratic primary [...]