Category: default || By jt3y

Requiescat in pace to Westmoreland County Commissioner Terry Marolt, who died Sunday after a lingering illness at the age of 58. I always found Marolt to be a great interview --- cantankerous, plain-spoken, and always willing to thrust and parry with a writer. Perhaps that's because he had been a journalist himself for many years, at the weekly Laurel Group newspapers, and later at the Latrobe Bulletin and the Tribune-Review. Marolt was rarely one to brush off a reporter with "no comment," and his candor sometimes got him in trouble.

Marolt was also an oldies buff, having conducted a long-running program on WCNS (1480) in Latrobe until his health made continuing impossible.

A big man in more ways than one (he occasionally referred to himself as "Boss Hogg"), Marolt had recently dropped dozens of pounds off of his once-rotund frame as a concession to the kidney and heart ailments that were dogging him.

Pohla Smith and Rebekah Scott have a great obit in the Post-Gazette, while Pat Cloonan has the story in The Daily News. (The always-reliable Cloonan is the only one to mention the political implications, near the bottom of his story: the judges of Westmoreland County Common Pleas Court will meet to choose Marolt's successor, Cloonan writes.)

The Trib's obit is notable for its comments from publisher Richard Scaife, who rarely talks to the media (even his own paper). It says something about Marolt's appeal and personality that he was equally comfortable with internationally-famous millionaires and local officials in the Mon Valley.

Friends will be received Wednesday and Thursday at J. Paul McCracken Funeral Chapel in Ligonier. The funeral will be held Friday at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Ligonier.


Donations may be made to the Terry Marolt Education Fund, in care of National City Bank, RR 6, Box 98, Latrobe, PA 15650, which will provide scholarships for students from Laurel Valley and Ligonier Valley school districts.

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Voters in Erie tell The Washington Post that they're sick of hearing about terrorism and Iraq:

"The economy is so bad. If we are such a great country, why don't we stay and help us? ... Take care of us for a change," pleaded Cathy Filipowski, 35, a dental assistant. These swing voters understand the importance of the war on terrorism and the gravity of the bloody crisis in Iraq. But they also see every day the abandoned buildings, for-sale signs on the houses and cracked, uneven sidewalks along 12th Street and elsewhere in this predominantly Catholic working-class community. They see a crowded emergency room at St. Vincent hospital, and the three recently shuttered public health clinics in the poorest parts of town. They see a municipality increasingly strapped for cash, but they take comfort that their city, the third largest in Pennsylvania, is merely in trouble and not in crisis, as is Pittsburgh, 120 miles to the south.

Ah, finally Pittsburgh has cast aside that "steel city" image. Its new image in the eyes of the national media? "City in Crisis."

Uh, gee, great.

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John Kerry goes to Canonsburg, and while in Guntown, he inexplicably fails to visit either the statue of Perry Como eating ice cream or Sarris Candies' ice cream parlor.

Alert the Bush campaign! John Kerry hates ice cream!

More in Kathie Warco's story in the Observer-Reporter, including an interview with the family whose home was used as a backdrop: "Jody Rhome thought her husband, Dale, was joking when he asked it was OK if John Kerry stopped by their Canonsburg home for a visit Monday morning. ... 'I thought it was to give me a reason to clean,' she said, laughing.")

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Coming soon: "Ice Cream Shop Veterans For Truth" blast John Kerry! Someone tell Matt Drudge.

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Why does Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times hate America? Is it because he hates freedom and our way of life? Writes Scheer:

(Can) any reasonable person really disagree with Kerry's call for a "more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side"? The fact is, the money hustlers and Beltway power brokers know in their gut that Bush is in way over his head and Cheney is a loose cannon --- and that together they have alienated U.S. allies and enflamed the Islamic world while making only marginal gains against Al Qaeda. ...

Bush's convention acceptance speech was a clear ideological endorsement of the neoconservative vision that America can and should dominate the world with military force.

Yeah? If you don't like it, then go back to Canada, hippie!

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Finally, when I was in school, all we had were crappy filmstrips on topics like "Old Hickory: Andrew Jackson's Wooden Underpants" and "J&L Steel Presents How Iron Ore is Turned Into Pellets In 45 Boring Steps." Boy, how times have changed, as Liz Zemba reports in the Trib:

An investigation continues into how a pornographic image found its way into a slide-and-video presentation shown to teachers, administrators and a small group of students during a Hempfield Area in-service day last week.

It was the best ... school assembly ... EVER.