Publius Awakened

Some 150 students from Pittsburgh colleges and universities crowded Pittsburgh Council Chambers this morning to protest the proposed student tuition tax, the Post-Gazette reported. Student government officials from a number of schools including Pitt were in attendance and both SGB President Kevin Morrison and SGB President-elect Charlie Shull spoke before council in opposition to the [...]

Threatening the very foundation of this republic, the New York Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that the state had the right to confiscate private property and give it to a private investor in order to build the 22 acre Atlantic Yards development, The New York Times reported.          
The case was watched [...]

Pittsburgh City Council approved today a $50,000 settlement for a Butler County man who gave the middle finger to a police officer in 2006 and was cited for disorderly conduct, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported. The city eventually dropped the case and U.S. District Judge David Cercone ruled that the city violated the Butler man’s First [...]

Marred by questionable practices, significant clerical errors and an almost total lack of student interest, this year’s Student Government Board elections are more about the flaws inherent in SGB as an institution than they are about individual candidates and their platforms.
While the candidates themselves all seem relatively competent and have some decent ideas to improve [...]

College students across the city can stop tweeting their rage and venting their anger in Facebook groups now that the State is prepared to step in and bury Mayor Luke Ravenstahl’s proposed “Fair Share Tax.”
Worried that the proposed tax would not be enforceable and peeved at Ravenstahl for not pursuing cost-cutting initiatives, the Intergovernmental Cooperation [...]

Mayor Luke Ravenstahl’s proposed one percent tax on student tuition is clearly linked to our failure as a voting bloc to engage in last week’s local elections. Voter turnout was abysmal in the ward that includes Central, South and North Oakland with only 10.8 percent of registered voters casting a ballot, The Pitt News reported.
Because [...]

Mayor Luke Ravenstahl officially proposed a 1 percent tax on student tuition as part of his annual budget in a presentation before City Council today, the City Paper reported. The mayor raised the idea of just such a tax months ago and it was a high-profile aspect of the mayoral election.
In short, we were warned [...]

A version of the Senate health care bill would elevate faith healing to the level of clinical medicine, the Los Angeles Times reported. The provision, inserted by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA), is designed to reimburse individuals for Christian Science prayer [...]

I generally fall into the anyone-but-Ravenstahl camp in Pittsburgh politics but my decision to support Kevin Acklin for mayor is based not on my qualms with the current mayor but on my belief that Acklin would initiate positive change in this city.
For too long, Pittsburgh has been bound by the twisted machine politics of the [...]