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100% of property tax stays in your community to pay for the services you take for granted. Very little sales tax or income tax is returned to your town. Most of it goes to Columbus, Cincinnati and Cleveland. Police, fire, 911 dispatch, senior services, road maintenance, libraries and local health departments all depend on property tax. Townships do not have income taxes and would have no way to make up the loss of revenue. — Hubbard The 9/29 televised investigation of Jack Smith’s report on Trump’s big lie was a witch hunt. The GOP hacks mischaracterized, misrepresented, ...

Orchids & onions

ORCHID: To sexagenarian Dan Gallagher of Boardman for his resilience, perseverance and endurance as he plans to compete in and complete a 24-hour , 62-mile run in Cape Fear, North Carolina, next weekend. Talk about prepared; Gallagher has logged more than 1,400 miles of running and biking just since April. It was not until about eight years ago that Gallagher, then about 40 pounds heavier and not in top form, caught the running bug and hasn’t let loose of it since. Today, his now long-running passion for long-distance races serves as an excellent model for middle-aged and older men and ...

A rebuttal to Juan Williams on Justice Clarence Thomas

Juan Williams calls Justice Clarence Thomas’ place in history tragic. His argument rests on two sweeping claims: that Thomas is at the heart of a historic decline in public trust in the Supreme Court, and that he has damaged trust in black conservatives as a source of ideas about race. Those are serious accusations. They deserve more than confident assertion. They deserve evidence, careful reasoning and the same respect for individual judgment that Williams should expect for himself. Thomas is one of the most respected, trusted and consistent members of the court. His majority ...

Remove the label of shame from schools in Youngstown

For 16 years now, the Youngstown City School District has stood as a distant relative of Hester Prynne, the adulteress protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic 1850 novel, “The Scarlet Letter.” Like Prynne, who was forever branded with a scarlet single-letter A for her transgressions, the urban school system has been forced by state decree to suffer the stigma and endure the public humiliation of its previous shortcomings, namely through branding it with a big, bad, bold AD for the entire state to see. That AD, signifying its status as the sole Academically Distressed ...

The perfect metaphor at the UN

The perfect metaphor to characterize the U.N. General Assembly delegates who walked out before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke is this: “There are none so blind as those who will not see.” You can’t make people understand the truth if they choose to ignore it. The problem with the Middle East is that both sides have their own “truth,” which is contradictory because the only alternative to truth is falsehood. Prime Minister Netanyahu, as he has done in previous U.N. appearances, laid out the truth which dozens of delegates didn’t want to hear. “Moral ...

Stop buying votes, everybody!

It would be hard to find a more insulting offer than to exchange money for your vote. That’s exactly what President Donald Trump did in announcing that if voters keep Republicans in power come the midterms, he’ll send every adult citizen a $5,000 check. Now, one would not put money on that promise. Even if Republicans do retain control of both the House and the Senate, the promise will surely be thrown in the same manila folder as the vow to release the Epstein files, all of them. Of course, Trump would not be paying us five grand — the federal government would. That would ...