From the dark center of the Eagle newsroom, greetings. I'm Gary Catt, executive editor of Eagle Newspapers. I've come to this calling after a career that's swerved through a half-dozen daily newspapers and an ad agency that was once the world's largest. Along the way I've written or edited most everything and an I've guided successful strategies around times of difficulty for Fortune 50 companies. My job here is to make sure that when you pick up your Eagle community newspaper it's a like a walk down main street, spotting faces you know; discovering news you need to know.
It's 2 a.m. and 15-year-old Jason Crump is not home in bed where you'd expect a teen to be. He's prowling the streets of Syracuse with a friend -- a couple predators in the dark slipping through the shadows of Gannett Avenue. The teens are looking for unlocked cars to ransack for money or valuables. They had just started going through a parked Malibu when a nearby porch light flicked on. They fled into the darkness. You can imagine the thieves were probably chortling about the close call as they walked at Seventh North and LeMoyne. That's about the time the Malibu pulled up and out of it leaped a very angry man, Montell Gregory. In his hand was a golf club. It was the second time his car was robbed and he was having none of it. He teed off on Crump...
Well, it's done. The IRS has extracted its due. For a full 24 hours or so each year I'm held hostage while the government exercises its power to rifle through the filing cabinets of my life, forcing me to answer personal questions and confessing things that I feel, frankly, are none of the government's business. The IRS wants to know the date I bought stuff. How much I paid for the stuff. Intrusive, annoying questions. Questions about health. Questions about decisions that should be private and certainly not the government's business. The IRS then sniffs through my personal material looking for suggestions that I didn't tell the truth. The agency compares data from past years using high-tech and high-end logic to tip its BS meter...
