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Bill Steigerwald, born and raised in Pittsburgh, is a former L.A. Times copy editor and free-lancer who also worked as a docudrama researcher for CBS-TV in Hollywood before becoming a reporter for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a columnist for The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He recently retired from daily newspaper journalism.
A father of five and a long-time libertarian, Bill Steigerwald once identified himself at the end of a column as "a lapsed Catholic who believes peaceful individuals, markets and society should be as free as possible and governments should be so small, poor and weak that no one interested in money or power would want to enter politics. Bill Steigerwald is against the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty and the War on Iraq. And he tries to stay out of bars and government buildings as much as he can."
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Bill Steigerwald (Dec 14, 2009)
Of all the animals the Inuit traditionally hunted, Nanuk, the polar bear, was the most prized. Native hunters considered Nanuk to be wise, powerful, and "almost a man." Some... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Sep 21, 2009)
Dear President Obama.
We Pittsburghers sincerely hope you enjoy your visit to our beautiful city later this week, when you'll be chairing the exciting G-20 Summit that you... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Aug 17, 2009)
Environmentalists and the media have successfully bamboozled half the populace and every school child in America into believing large numbers of polar bears are starving... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Jul 27, 2009)
Like most of my draft-dodging generation, during the 1960s I heard Walter Cronkite’s authoritative voice more often than I heard the voices of my own parents.
I even ate... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Jun 22, 2009)
I've hated Social Security since 1964, when I made $547 that summer as a rookie stock boy in the warehouse of a Pittsburgh restaurant chain.
That's when the federal... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Jun 08, 2009)
I'm not sure it's politically OK to mention this, now that we've elected President Obama and we're officially in a post-racial age.
But I saw more black people in a... more
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Bill Steigerwald (May 18, 2009)
Saying that America's semi-private, semi-public health care system needs a complete overhaul, President Obama last week challenged Congress to send him a health care reform... more
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Bill Steigerwald (May 11, 2009)
Arnold Schwarzenegger proved last week (May 5) he's not a girly-man when it comes to the debate over whether marijuana should be legalized and taxed in California.... more
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Bill Steigerwald (May 05, 2009)
When it comes to fighting for free markets and railing against government intervention in the economy, no one on TV does it better or more passionately than economist... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Apr 27, 2009)
Thomas E. Woods Jr. is a successful historian who doesn't hide his libertarian views about American history, politics and economics but instead emphasizes them. Among his... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Apr 20, 2009)
Anyone who regularly tunes into WattsUpWithThat.com, the popular climate-science blog operated by Anthony Watts, will never make fun of TV weathermen again. Watts - who was a... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Apr 13, 2009)
In a previous life Jeff Jarvis was a big-city newspaper editor and TV critic who became the creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly magazine. Today Jarvis is best... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Apr 06, 2009)
President Obama has become quite the hawk when it comes to the war in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama has approved a surge of 21,000 troops that will bring U.S. military forces... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Mar 30, 2009)
You don't have to be a Harvard economics professor like Jeffrey Miron to know that America's war on drugs has been a lost cause for decades. Now a bloody war between the... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Mar 18, 2009)
Karl Rove retired in 2007 as President George W. Bush's deputy chief of staff, ace political strategist and mastermind of public policy. But Rove -- aka "Satan" to liberals... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Mar 16, 2009)
No one sane ever went into journalism for the money, and neither did I -- which was a good thing. I've made my first million as a professional newspaper writer/editor but it... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Mar 09, 2009)
After George F. Will wrote a column last month questioning the faulty premises and apocalyptic predictions of global-warming alarmists, he caught holy heck from America's... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Mar 06, 2009)
Since Mike Huckabee finished third in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries, the former governor of Arkansas, author and ordained Southern Baptist minister seems to have... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Mar 02, 2009)
No matter what party partisans say, no American president is perfect -- to say the least. But when historians get around to ranking our greatest presidents, the top spots... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Feb 23, 2009)
Baker Spring, a national security research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, specializes in assessing the threat of ballistic missile strikes from Third-World countries and... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Feb 16, 2009)
It's hard to find anyone who likes America's health care system, including John Goodman, president and founder of the National Center for Policy Analysis. But you'll never... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Feb 12, 2009)
Teresa Heinz Kerry, the Heinz ketchup heiress and Pittsburgh 's most generous left-wing philanthropist, is very hands-on when it comes to deciding who gets a slice of the... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Feb 09, 2009)
Perhaps there is hope for America after all.
Despite the incessant hysteria about how mankind's irresponsible use of fossil fuels has put our whole planet in imminent... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Feb 02, 2009)
Cody Willard, 36, has been causing a stir on and off the Fox Business Network, the upstart business channel that’s piped via cable and satellite into about 45 million... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Jan 26, 2009)
Award-winning network TV reporter Bernard Goldberg first hit pay dirt in the book world with "Bias," his 2001 best-seller exposing how the news we saw was distorted by the... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Jan 22, 2009)
California has apparently turned itself into Pennsylvania.
It's still our biggest, wealthiest state with 38 million people -- one in eight Americans.
It still has the... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Jan 19, 2009)
Ted Sorensen will be paying special attention to Barack Obama's inaugural address on Tuesday. One of the last surviving insiders from John F. Kennedy's administration,... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Jan 15, 2009)
A national crisis -- the bigger and scarier the better -- always provides a good excuse for a leader to grab more power for himself and his political gang or, in the case of... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Jan 12, 2009)
Barack Obama's inaugural address on Jan. 20 is awaited with great anticipation by his millions of fans in and out of the media. Will it be as short as Lincoln's 1865... more
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Bill Steigerwald (Jan 05, 2009)
If anyone can explain the worst flare up of Israeli-Palestinian violence in the Gaza Strip in four decades, it's Aaron David Miller. For 20 years, until he became a public... more