Plain Dealer should be reporting on Benghazi scandal:

As I was taking out the trash, I noticed the May 3 Nation & World lead article on page A5 with the headline "GOP panel will investigate emails." This was imported from the Washington Post. I'm writing because this is exactly why I don't take the Plain Dealer. As a news organization you continue to fail to report on probably the single largest scandal in American History.

Benghazi is not a scandal because there was a fouled up to an attack on a clandestine operations center chartered to run weapons into Syria. Benghazi is a scandal because of the way Team Obama chose to address this abject failure and report it to the American public....during an election cycle.

Ask yourself, when was the last time you remember an American president, and Secretary of State, knowingly blame innocent Americans for inciting a riot abroad. If you can't remember, that's because it's never been done before . This matters because this is bad government run amok. Worse, innocent Americans were blamed and eventually sent to jail.

What disgusts me is the Plain Dealer passes through partisan denial of the worst cover-up in American history as some GOP witch hunt. If you believe its a witch hunt, then I'd like to ask you to turn in your press pass and go back to school for a refresher on the Constitution.

Shame on you Plain Dealer. Strip yourself of your partisan roots and do the job the 1st Amendment grants you. Stop coddling these corrupt thugs in Washington who cannot admit failure when their incompetence and dereliction of duty shines through. The President is not off limits, nor is Hillary Clinton. Your duty is to report the news.

Dave Van Horn,

Columbia Station

The problem with traditional job skill training in many cases is that you can walk a horse to water but you can't make it drink. Far too many workers -- employed and unemployed -- don't seem interested in finding water on their own. They want and expect someone else to find the water, make sure the journey isn't too arduous, and get someone to pay for it.

Thanks to years of economic prosperity, government entitlements, union contracts and most recently a generation of helicopter parents, many workers from aging Baby Boomers to the young adults known as Millennials don't have the motivational skills to achieve their own success, to keep themselves safe, to avoid a personal crisis, and to get themselves out of a jam.

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Many of the unemployed workers have simply lost the ability and motivation to make a better life for them and take responsibility for problems they create -- if they ever learned to do it in the first place. Picking yourself up by your bootstraps is a lost skill. When you fall, it's not your fault. It's expected that someone else come to your rescue, offer you the bootstrap, hoist you up, and nurse you back to health.

I recently mentioned to someone that "God helps those who help themselves." Their response was to tell me God never said that. That is true by the way -- it's not actually in the Bible. But they missed my point. For many generations we believed that. It was a philosophy our grandparents, our great-grandparents, and those before us lived by. People didn't look for handouts, sue someone when things didn't go right, and wallow in their own pity waiting to be rescued.

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Up until the last decade or so, it didn't take much to get a job. If you had a pulse and could fog a mirror, you had the qualifications for many low-paying, low-skill jobs. If you sought a better lifestyle, you acquired trade skills or a college degree. Once you had a job, you were pretty well set for life. At that point in your career, school was behind you and employees looked to the company for training, benefits, and even retirement. If you were unfortunate enough to be laid off, the company paid you a severance or you collected unemployment from the government. Companies as well as government and community services even provided another bootstrap -- outplacement services and job coaching to help you get back on your feet.