Happy that it’s football season
The sports world is buzzing with electricity regarding the recent acquisition of LeBron James to the Philadelphia 76ers squad.
While it seems like yesterday the New York Knicks triumphed to victory in what mirrored a Cinderella ending to a more-than-mediocre season, basketball season is slowly approaching and showcasing a plethora of spectacular trades. So much so that it appears to have overshadowed the advent of the 2026-27 football season.
No doubt we football fans are eager to see our favorite team take the field, after what seems to be the longest hiatus in professional sports. It is a conundrum that although time is a continuum that’s scientifically speeding up at an alarming rate, football season continues to keep their fans waiting with bated breath for what seems like a lifetime. Am I ready for some football? Hell yeah.
Felecia Colquitt
Lawncrest
The dreaded property tax
Many cities and states are rethinking the dreaded property tax, and Georgia, Florida and Texas intend to end or reduce it.
Philadelphia and suburbs continue to punish our citizens with this regressive tax. How is it that you work 40 years and pay off your home only to find you need government permission through a yearly tax to continue to live in it?
If you don’t pay this tax, the government can boot you out of a home you have owned for 50 years and confiscate your property rights. Sounds like communism to me.
We had an obscene 31% tax increase in 2023. Did your income go up 31%? Well, fasten your seat belts. Another reassessment is coming in 2027.
Everyone knows this tax rate is an “unrealized gain.” You don’t benefit from having a higher paper value on your home until you sell it. (Then you have to pay an inflated price for some other housing. So, it’s no windfall.)
If this isn’t bad enough, it appears to me our tax board is incapable of a timely, fair and competent review of a homeowner’s property value and taxes.
For about 40 years I have been appealing the tax rate on my unimproved home. The square footage on record appears wrong and my tax may be higher than it should be.
My appeals have gone nowhere — the issue was never even recognized.
After a chance encounter with a city official, I finally got someone to come out and measure the square footage of my home. I was never told the result. Gee, I wonder why.
I told the employee the houses on the next street were built at the same time, by the same builder and are bigger — easy to see with the naked eye. Yet they are listed at the same square footage as my home (can’t be) and in some cases, taxed even lower.
I was told they can’t measure (outside) other homes without permission. Why? You are either under-taxing them — or over-taxing me. Fair assessment is your responsibility.
I suspect I have been overtaxed for more than 40 years – and the city will not recognize it, and has no intention of correcting it and rebating the tax overcharges to me.
If the city tax authority cannot do its job properly, then it has no business in raising anyone’s taxes until appeals are respected, and data errors are corrected.
How is this any different than some robber waving a gun at you and taking your wallet? At least the wallet isn’t the roof over your head.
Richard Iaconelli
Rhawnhurst
Toxic ideology
America, sadly, just celebrated the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attack, and people still don’t get it.
A total of 4 commercial airplanes was hijacked by so-called “Islamic terrorists,” vowing “death to Americans,” as 2 planes plowed into both towers of the World Trade Center, a third into the Pentagon and the fourth, known as Flight 93, nose-diving into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Passengers on Flight 93 took it upon themselves to sacrifice themselves to fight against terrorism and heroically downed the plane.
For a man of the cloth, Pope Leo wants Iran to have a nuclear bomb, which Trump strongly disagrees with the pope’s logic, and it has nothing to do with Trump’s disrespect to the pope.
The pope, who preaches the peace of the Gospel, could even imagine or consider giving a nuclear bomb into the hands of regime that shouts “Allah Akbar” and “Death to the Infidels,” just as those jihad hijackers did, when we had 40 brave souls on Flight 93, who unequivocally gave their lives to stop terrorism.
Meanwhile, we have antisemitism running rampant on college campuses, while Trump supporters are falsely being labeled and accused as “KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists,” while nothing is being said about the extreme attacks of violence on Jews and swastika graffiti on synagogues.
Let us not forget the 2,977 American lives obliterated from the 9/11 attack who died for no reason at all, other than from hate from a terrorist ideology.
Al Ulus
Somerton
