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U.S. Education Department Provides Valuable Service

To The Reader’s Forum: I am writing in response to a recent column by Star Parker on April 3, 2025. Titled, “Shut Down the Department of Education ASAP”. This article has a number of fallacies. Star refers to the NEA (National Education Association) as controlling education, along with the Department of Education. This is not true. The NEA does not aspire to control education, and the Education Department is not responsible for curriculum, as she infers with, “Today the massive teacher’s unions – the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers ...

Change Of Life Prompts A Counseling Visit

I received a call from a man named Leo. He was referred by his neighbor friends. He stated that he was retired and anytime would work for an appointment. We agreed to a mutually agreeable time in two days. Mornings worked for him, he was “an early bird.” Included in phone calls about counseling and therapy ordinarily are inquiries about my fee. No such subject was discussed. We met at 9:00 a.m. two days later. He was watching at the door. The weather was cold and Leo didn’t appear affected. I greeted Leo, opened the main office door and together, we entered my office. He ...

Rhubarb Is Up!

Yesterday when I looked out my back door, I could see that my rhubarb plants were up and growing. Today, unfortunately they are under a layer of snow. That is Spring! Several years ago, an employee who worked for my son wanted to get rid of some rhubarb plants. She dug them up and brought them down. I had room for two plants. I planted them in a small bed by the windmill derrick. For the past few years those plants have yielded enough to freeze and make pies and sauce for me. In years past, I depended on the rhubarb that grew at my daughter’s home for my supply. When my children ...

Keeping Up With The Day

Where to start? Where to start? Tariffs, the assault on free speech, the indiscriminate firing of thousands of federal workers, the elimination of inspectors general at federal agencies, the retributive targeting of perceived enemies of the president, the threats to major law firms having the temerity to represent critics of the administration, the replacement of the Kennedy Center Board with Trump sycophants united by Trump himself, the intended scrubbing of the Smithsonian Institution of any reference to historically accurate information that documents the darker side of American ...

The Home Of State Champions

This has been quite a year for sports in our county. Several schools won at the sectional level, we have had state championships in wrestling and swimming, and recently the Frewsburg Girls Basketball team and the Panama Boys Basketball team brought home state championships. Sometimes we get overly obsessed with our smallness and remoteness as a community. When we are out-of-town and asked about where we live we often say: “Oh, a few miles south of Buffalo...” thinking that the inquirer may assume that we are from New York City and that Buffalo is the only upstate place that anybody ...

Hands Off Of My Pork

Political corruption is everywhere present – apparently a consequence of human nature we must constantly guard against. Nowhere is humanity free from corrupt politicians or people who believe it is their privilege to use the power of the Government to forcibly take from those who created the wealth, and give it to themselves and their supporters. Such corruption can take many forms, including US agencies that used taxpayer funded infrastructure to deliberately threaten those who challenged the Government’s phony COVID narrative. These agencies enriched themselves and Pfizer to the ...