Our advice: guard your Petes

Our advice: guard your Petes
EDITOR:
Last week, my husband, daughter and I came to town to visit relatives and to go to the Youngstown State football game. We stayed at the Hampton Inn on Belmont Ave, ate at Antone's on Belmont, went to the new beautiful YSU bookstore and to Penney's in Austintown. During our travels, someone had the nerve to remove the magnetic "Pete the Penguin" from our van.
Both my husband and I are alumni. We travel a great deal in this van and nobody has touched our Pete the Penguin until we visited for homecoming. Pete has been with our family for several years and has been to many away games, including Marshall and Pittsburgh and all around Columbus.
I have to say that I am ashamed at whomever would do such a thing. It shows that there are some fans out there who don't respect others and their property. My advise to all YSU fans: Watch your Petes and put your names on them. We also checked at the bookstore and, sadly, found that our magnetic Pete can't be replaced. Thanks a lot for the warm welcome home.
ANN, JIM and MARY JOHNSTON
Columbus
Management costs weren't the undoing of Delphi
EDITOR:
I find it comical listening to the Delphi employees accusing the management of bonuses and the like as the cause for the corporation filing for bankruptcy. The few million dollars given away to the management is a drop in a bucket to the legacy obligations for the rank and file. The employees will accuse everyone and his brother but themselves for the company reorganizing. It is only a matter of time until the gravy train derails and the employees and naive citizens ask, "What happened?" Ah, poor babies.
One of my employers once said, "Every once in a while you have to pull your head out of the trough and look around. The grim reaper may be standing at your side." That is surely the case with Delphi and GM shortly. The employees and the union claim they never saw it coming. Delphi and GM are paying in excess of 100K a year to read a book on the job per person in the Jobs Bank program and the employees never saw it coming? I bet they still leave cookies and milk for Santa. Folks in the general population are paying in excess of $100 a week for health care and GM and Delphi people are paying pocket change. Everyone in the private sector has a 401K of some sort for retirement. The IUE is still holding their hand out for a pension that the corporation in their wildest dreams cannot honor. All you have to do is look at the aftermath of the mills closing to figure out what will happen. This isn't rocket science, folks.
Now here is the punch line of the joke. The administrators, teachers, employees of the school districts and the county employees, city cops and firefighters and all the other government employees in the area are in for the same. They will say the government officials squandered away the money while never pulling their heads out of the public trough.
THADDEUS M. PRICE
Warren
Give a helping hand
EDITOR:
Mentally and physically challenged people are part of our society. Their lives are really not so different from the rest of our lives. The challenged child or adult needs the basics of life like food, shelter and nurturing just like the rest of us. Their medical and social needs should be addressed just like the rest of us. Those individuals who are challenged have varied social, academic and occupational needs and/or desires, just like the rest of us.
The difference between the mentally and/or physically challenged and the rest of us is that they, their guardians and their parents need assistance in many ways. Many people and many programs help challenged persons reach their individual potential. Because of a lack of funds, staff at various facilities has changed ad certain programs altered in some way. Many of these special people, including my son, do not understand why these changes have happened.
When you go to the polls on Nov. 8 and exercise your right to vote, please vote yes on Issue 8. This renewal levy is necessary for the mentally and/or physically challenged people in our area. The money from this levy will help them live a good, healthy and useful life, just like the rest of us.
KAREN CHUEY
Campbell
Hiring relatives is wrong
EDITOR:
I find it quite amazing that officials in Trumbull County government seem to think that there is nothing wrong with hiring relatives. As public officials they are expected to be fair, honest and ethical in their dealings. It seems that these standards are too much to ask of these excuses for public servants. The idea that the Ohio definition of "family" is insufficient to deter these people from exercising good judgment in the public interest seems to be too large a hurdle for them.
I find the practice of filling these positions from within particularly distasteful. When this happens, no citizen has the ability to apply and be given equal treatment for the position, nor can the public be assured that an honest attempt was made to find the best qualified employee. The excuse from Mr. Latell, Commissioner Polivka and others that their relatives are known quantities and qualified for these jobs is pathetic. Since they didn't look, they don't know. Having been a senior manager and former military officer for 30 years, I find that these practices by Trumbull County officials are unacceptable, despicable and in violation of ethical professional standards for public servants.
Unfortunately, the prosecutor's office seems to lack any degree of backbone in doing much about it and finds cover by claiming that the state doesn't define "family." Gee, how about parents, siblings, children, and their spouses working in direct lines of supervision, and being hired without advertising the jobs, or interviewing applicants?
THOMAS G. RASETA Sr.
Hubbard
All bashing isn't equal
EDITOR:
The writer of an Oct. 23 letter thinks we should respect our leaders and quit "bashing" them. To paraphrase a comment made under similar circumstances, I think we have the finest troops in the world, but the leaders are donkeys and donkeys deserve to be bashed.
My thought today is the same as it was in October 2002. In the past, our troops fought for the freedom to be able to criticize our leaders, a point worth remembering. George W. Bush sent our troops to Iraq in a childish search for cheap glory.
He and his apparatchiks are using the war on terrorism to attempt to install Soviet style constraints on the liberties our troops fought for. If anyone dares to criticize him or his policies, the Bush partisans respond in ways quite reminiscent of those Soviet party apparatchiks when someone criticized their great system.
JEROME K. STEPHENS
Warren