Email letters, Aug. 9, 2012

By Staff
Thursday, August 9, 2012

Constitution has no specific promises on women’s health care rights

I regularly read Bill Grant’s work, though I typically don’t agree with his positions, as I am a Libertarian. I therefore believe that everyone has the same rights and freedoms as everyone else, as long as they don’t use the force of government or powers of confiscation in the pursuit of the same.

In Grant’s most recent piece he called women out to stand together in protection of their health care rights. I checked the Constitution and didn’t see anything specific about women’s health care rights, so one must assume that these rights have been manufactured in some fashion or form superior to the normally constitutionally protected rights the rest of us have, e.g. life, liberty, pursuit and so on.

He then went on to deride the Koch brothers, apparently the Republican version of George Soros, Bill Maher and Hollywood in general, and how they are imposing their views on the rest of the world, which any reasonable, lucid thinker would find difficult to believe.

The real issue is, and always has been, that the U.S. government, via Obamacare, will force employers and insurance companies to provide services that they believe run counter to their policies, beliefs and standards. If an employer or provider doesn’t want to provide these services, that doesn’t deny any individual a perceived “right.” It just means that the individual must provide for himself or herself, just and millions of others and I do daily.

His last three paragraphs on “personal decisions,”  “individual values” and issues between “women and their doctors” beg the obvious question:  Why is it that the more personal the right or freedom supposedly is, the more the Left demands that the public be involved and pay for it?

Individual rights and freedoms require a majority effort in the form of personal responsibility and minimal interference from any and all outside parties.

STEPHEN FULLERTON
Grand Junction

Doonesbury appropriately highlights voting barriers

The editorial cartoon in Wednesday’s paper is clearly uninformed and, frankly, silly.

There have been zero cases of voter identity fraud in Colorado, indeed the country. The most recent voter fraud incidents were of Republican office holders. The Indiana secretary of state was convicted (for trying to illegally elect Republican candidates) and Congressman Thaddeus McCotter, R-Mich. (who forged names on the petition to get him on the ballot for re-election) was forced to resign.

A prior letter to the editor indicated that it shouldn’t be hard for people to show picture ID since you do so “to cash a check.” Not everybody has a checking account or needs to cash a check. Having a bank account isn’t a prerequisite for voting.

That is why the Doonesbury cartoons likening the current Republican voter suppression laws to Jim Crow is exactly on point. Any barrier to legitimate voters’ casting a ballot is not only wrong, it is un-American.

DIANE WOLFE
Hotchkiss

It’ll take mind-boggling stacks of money to eliminate deficit

One day I heard a TV campaign ad with Obama preaching to us and promising a balanced budget “by paying our fair share,” blah blah blah. I assumed that meant raising taxes on people, especially millionaires, and I had to laugh.

Considering the federal deficit is around $16 trillion now, or an amount larger than every dollar raised in America for one entire year, even every millionaire paying in 100 percent couldn’t balance a number that big in a lifetime, let alone one more term.

I think one reason people don’t flinch anymore at the mention of the deficit is because they can’t fathom just how enormous $1 trillion is.

This illustration was explained to me. It helped me visualize. A packet of 100 $100 bills ($10,000) is about a half-inch thick. They’ll fit in your pocket. A million dollars would take 100 packets. Again, a size that would fit in a grocery bag.

One hundred million dollars is a little bigger, requiring 10,000 of the half-inch-thick packets, but they would fit if stacked (single layer) on a 4 by 4 feet pallet. A billion dollars would be 10 pallets like that.

But now we come to the BIG one … one trillion, a million million, 1,000 billion or a one followed by 12 zeros. That would take 10,000 pallets (5,000 double-stacked this time would take a floor space approximately 300 by 600 feet). That’s only one trillion. Imagine 16.

And they want us to believe raising taxes on a few thousand people will shrink that. Bull feathers!

AL CARLEY
Grand Junction

Dems mishandle distribution of tickets for president’s speech

Last week I was an undecided voter. To become a better-informed citizen, I decided to attend President Obama’s speech. I waited in line in the midday heat for several hours to get a ticket, and Wednesday I went to hear the speech.

As expected, the nearest parking entailed a half-mile walk, but I would still arrive an hour early. As I approached Grand Junction High School, I saw many people walking away. A police cordon had been set up around the school, and a sheriff’s deputy explained to me that capacity had been reached and nobody else could enter. Even watching from a block away from the school was prohibited. I, with scores of other people, left disappointed and angry.

Is this the way the Democrats run their affairs – long on promise and short on delivery? I would have blamed myself if I had been too late to get a ticket, but I have to blame the organizers if there is no room for the tickets they distributed. Indeed, there was no reason to stand in line for hours waiting for a ticket; they could have collected the information sheets they had us fill out and then typed in the info into their database at their convenience without making us wait as they typed us in, one by one.

I did not see the president Wednesday, but I did see how the Democrats function. I am not inclined to vote for any Democrat at this time.

RICHARD A. JANSON
Grand Junction

Voting incidents in Ohio demonstrate Republican suppression of Democrats’ votes

Juanita R. Williams’ misinformed letter (“Military deserves its voting rights protected,” Aug. 9) epitomizes the extent to which President Obama’s Republican critics routinely rely on gross falsehoods – rather than facts – to mislead gullible local voters.

Thus, while “on July 17, the Obama for America Campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the Ohio Democratic Party filed suit in Ohio to strike down part of that state’s law” abbreviating early voting by Ohio residents, that lawsuit in no way affected or threatened “voting by members of the military” serving overseas.

Rather, the lawsuit seeks to restore three days of early voting which Ohioans enjoyed in 2010, but which the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature eliminated in a transparent effort to suppress the Democratic vote.

In 2004 and 2008, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state deployed far too few voting machines in populous urban areas, resulting in discouragingly long lines that prevented many from voting. Under threat of action by the Justice Department, Ohio expanded the early voting window to avoid future problems and to equal the time frame afforded overseas military.

In 2010, more than 20 percent of Ohioans voted during those three days, such that – in November 2012 – more than 900,000 veterans and active duty military personnel residing in Ohio will find their access to the polls “arbitrarily” truncated by their Republican legislature, with “no discernible rational basis” other than voter suppression. In addition, early voting times have been expanded in Republican counties, but –  by action of the Republican secretary of state—not in Democratic counties.

Thus, Williams’ “disgust” is based on a manifestly false premise – and she should not be “the only one disgusted with how” the Romney campaign’s advertising “is constantly” presenting false information to mislead the electorate, and with how Republicans are cynically and systematically attempting to suppress the Democratic vote.

BILL HUGENBERG
Grand Junction

‘People of Gomorrah choose to follow the rulers of Sodom’

I came no closer to attending the “event” at Grand Junction High School than the perimeter—out by where the Grand Junction police were directing traffic—and the stuffed suit asked if I were going in. And the lady promoting “Everybody must get stoned” was passing out her slick voter appeal cards.

I told the stuffed suit, “I have no intention of being the same room as that individual.” I spent eight years training to “oppose all enemies, foreign or domestic, especially the Soviet Communists. Now we got one in the White House. And I did promise my wife I would not “get in any trouble.”

What I can’t understand is why anybody trained as we were would be in there supporting the Obamanation. I could care less that the beguiled chose to adore their idol. That the people of Gomorrah choose to follow the rulers of Sodom.

They have as much right to their enslavement as those of the Tea Party have to be free. I have no desire to be a ringleader, converting the lost sheep of the Democratic Party plantation.

Oh, what does bother me is that the local television news is so open about which side of the divide it is on. So much for unbiased news coverage, eh? “We had a very successful event,” they gushed.

Well, I do not identify with their side—nor their politics. I will oppose the enemy so long as I have the means to resist. I will NEVER surrender my own free will. I will defend our Declaration of Independence and our written Constitution/and Bill of Rights and other amendments the “progressive” Democratic Party and useful idiots of the other side hold in such utter contempt.

I admit I posed for the cameras on that bird that made several passes over our flags. I intended to present them their notion of the Tea Party Patriot, for I am proud to be numbered among those who resist and oppose the Communist.

ROBERT JAMES BURKHOLDER
Fruita

Article on president’s speech was misleading

Having been at the president’s speech Wednesday, nowhere did I hear him say what Charles Ashby wrote in today’s front-page article. Instead of what Ashby said, Obama reminded all that Romney will continue the tax cuts for the very rich, and he noted that the money thus lost will then be switched to the middle class to pay for that void.

I know it is difficult to get the truth in light of all the Republican control in our valley, but surely a journalist should tell the truth. I found it also interesting to see the sign “Save the coal, fire the president,” when, in fact, it is the gas industry (supported very well by our own Josh Penry in his push to use gas instead of coal, telling all that gas is cleaner)  that spent many dollars advertising such.

When you all make mistakes on the front page, do you correct them on the front page?

VERA MULDER
Fruita

Better economy will enable women to afford own birth control

The theme of the President’ Obama’s campaign stop yesterday in Denver was that Mitt Romney, if elected, would take women back to the 50s. This is nothing more than fear mongering to distract voters from the real issue which is that under his big-government, spend and tax policies we’re ALL stuck in an economy akin to the 30s. This is the slowest and least robust economic recovery (if indeed we are recovering) since the Great Depression.

The struggle we should ALL be concerned about is getting our economy back on track. Only then will the millions of unemployed or underemployed women have an opportunity to forge their own destinies (and pay for their own birth control, for that matter).

Really, if there is any debate at all, other than the one made up to distract voters from the economy, it is not about anyone’s right TO anything. It is about who pays for it, government’s role in providing it, and a religious institution’s right to not have to fund policies that it disagrees with. These are very different questions than a woman’s right to anything.

RUSTY STAFF
Longmont