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Keep politicians, lobbyists out of organized collegiate athletics

Nearly everyone who is a college sports fan, myself included, knows the state of affairs in the NCAA is one fine mess. Especially regarding football and men’s basketball, the two major money-making sports. Elite and even above-average athletes have effectively become free agents selling their services each year to the highest bidders. Every year the school rosters are different, so there’s almost no team or university loyalty. It’s rent-a-player, and the big college teams are now effectively professionals playing in professional leagues. In some cases, players can be paid ...

DC today breaks my heart

Change is not my best friend. Not since the day my family moved from Wisconsin to California when I was 8. Leaving the land of my grandmother, the skating rink and snowballs in winter, Lake Mendota and the tennis courts in summer, the community garden and all that seemed unfair. The Fourth of July parade for kids was pure Americana. I dressed as the Statue of Liberty. Ice cream never tasted better than it did then and there. Los Angeles seemed like paradise lost, with a smoggy sky in a child’s eyes. Grown-ups talked about the Manson murders. Take me back, please! That ...

The rise of trust-fund commies

The Democratic Socialists of America has a class problem that its own rhetoric is designed to obscure. Its rising stars — Zohran Mamdani, son of a Columbia professor and an acclaimed filmmaker; the Ivy-credentialed activists staffing progressive nonprofits; the heirs animating the movement’s core — reveal a pattern the movement cannot honestly explain. The face of American socialism is increasingly young, college-credentialed, and conspicuously well-bred. This is not coincidence. It is structure. The pattern is older than the DSA. Engels co-authored the Communist Manifesto while ...

Do your part to fight abuse of our seniors

Outgoing Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost sounded the alarm loudly and clearly earlier this year on the pervasive scope of pernicious abuse against senior citizens in our state and in our community. In remarks to the state’s Elder Abuse Commission, he reported that in the past seven years, Ohio has recorded a 400% increase in cases of reported elder abuse, which includes neglect as well as physical, emotional and sexual abuse, and financial exploitation. Even more astounding: In the vast majority of cases, the abuser knows the victim well. But here’s the rub: Only 1 in 5 cases of ...

Letters to the editor

We are not united enough in Ohio DEAR EDITOR: I am writing to you today because as you are aware we just had the primary elections and soon November will be here, and we will be voting again on different issues that concern us Ohioans. Well, I have a big issue with how corporate America won’t allow citizens of the voting class to stand outside their business and collect signatures for a potential levy that I am working on. The levy is Protecting Ohioans Constitutional Rights and currently we have a big problem in the state of Ohio with our legislators all the way down to police ...

A nation full of suspects

Some of the recent legal challenges to the use of surveillance by the Department of Homeland Security upon Americans have resulted in the revelation of truly terrifying behavior by the government, in direct defiance of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. We now know that the federal government spies on innocent Americans without suspicion and without warrants. The spying seems to fall into several categories. The National Security Agency, which is in the Department of Defense, employs about 60,000 domestic spies. These are the folks who want us to believe that they go through the ...