Firebrand discipline
At the end of my junior year in high school, a classmate got drunk, went joyriding on a motorcycle, and lost control. He hit a barbed wire fence and he and his passenger ended up in a cow pasture, fortunately without a scratch. Nevertheless, within a week my classmate was incarcerated at the McLaren School for boys in Woodburn, where he stayed until school began in the fall.
The 15-year-old smart-aleck and his friends who torched the Gorge deserve at least the same immediate discipline. Without any consequences for their actions, these reckless teenagers can easily believe that they are not subject to any discipline. Consequently, they can now do as my classmate did, get drunk and go joyriding in Vancouver or the Gorge and crash with severe consequences to other hapless citizens on the highway or more likely, to themselves. For everyone’s protection, including their own, these feckless teenagers need to be incarcerated, now.
As for these teenagers’ immigrant community who reportedly are cowering in their church, they need to step forward as the Americans they now are, and accept responsibility for their children’s actions. They need to volunteer to repair and correct the trails and bridges and other damages caused by their irresponsible children. No one is going to harm or blame them if they come forward to help rectify the damage which has been done.
Lance S. Stryker
White Salmon, Wash.
Walden called to censure Trump
I enclose a copy of a letter that I just sent to our Congressman Greg Walden. We need him to step forward and condemn hatred and bigotry.
Our Representative must champion our community’s values of equality, inclusivity, nondiscrimination. Join me!
Congressman Walden:
The President and your party leader has greatly offended me. I am the grandson of immigrants who arrived in America from “shitholes”.
My grandfather, Israel Gottlieb, arrived at Ellis Island at age 16. He went to work sewing on buttons in a garment factory in New York City.
He graduated from medical school within 10 years and cared for his fellow Americans for over 50 years. He arranged for the immigration of all of his family members from the “shithole”. This is the “chain migration” that the Republican party opposes.
My grandmother, Celia Walker, arrived at Ellis Island at age 6. She went to work as a young woman at the Triangle Shirt Waist Company. She survived the Triangle Fire and raised two children who would care for fellow Americans as health care professionals.
My grandfather, Morris Friedman, arrived at Ellis Island at age 16. He employed many of his fellow Americans in his factory on Houston Street in New York City throughout the Great Depression.
None of my grandparents immigrated from Norway or any other Aryan nation.
I am the beneficiary of the American Dream. I am proud and greatly appreciative of my grandparents. I am also grateful that my grandparents were able to immigrate from “shitholes” and contribute greatly to our great country.
I demand that you censure the President. Your constituents include African Americans, Muslims, Jews, Asian Americans, Latinos. Stand up for us and demand an end to this prejudice. Stand up as an American first.
Greg Gottlieb, MD
Hood River
Protect the vulnerable
On Jan. 23, Oregon has a special election in regard to Measure 101. I’m writing to encourage you to vote yes. A “no” vote hurts hundreds of thousands of people, including thousands in the Gorge, so we at One Community Health strongly support a yes vote on Measure 101.
In supporting this measure, we are talking about people’s access to critical preventive care and curative treatments, not some trivial matter. Opponents of Measure 101 speak of its weaknesses. There is, however, too much at stake to hope we can find a better way after yanking the rug out from under some of our most vulnerable citizens. The impact of a “no” vote on human life—and quality of life—is simply too significant.
Vote YES on Measure 101 to retain critical funding for our most vulnerable.
David Edwards, CEO
One Community Health
Nothing doing
It’s a sad story when a long time local American citizen is chosen by the electorate to serve their Community, and does so humbly with love for the betterment of his fellow citizens and our great nation; yet be subjected to rudeness and makeshift claims from a hometown group of organized negative letter writers supported by our local media. Sad, but true.
On the other hand, if our local news source’s policy was one that recognized all of our elected officials’ accomplishments and goals as newsworthy, then we wouldn’t have to depend on these letters of iffy content for information.
In other words, it’s a SAD story when“ freedom of speech and press” doesn’t mean that you have to tell the truth, the whole truth?
Then again, if the Hood River News did treat as being newsworthy, our representative’s and senators’ accomplishments, and say, if Greg’s list was greater than that of Jeff’s and Ron’s combined, would prove that what my mother had taught me as a child was right; “You can’t criticize a man who does nothing.”
That would have been a very sad democratic story!
Alan Winans
Hood River
Walden compared
There have been several letters to the editor touting Greg Walden positions and votes. Here is a comparison of how Walden votes with Oregon’s other Representatives relating what they favor. Walden favors the wealthy almost 95 percent of the time and broad civil rights only 24 percent of the time. He votes for big business, military spending 100 percent of the time and taxing the middle class 92 percent of the time. He votes 100 percent of the time against any type of gun control. He never votes for financial regulation, taxing businesses, a robust safety net, poverty amelioration or humanitarian aid.
Earl Blumenauer (District 3) votes almost exactly the opposite as does Suzanne Bonamici (District 1) for the middle class and broad civil rights. They both vote for gun control legislation. Peter DeFazio (District 4) favors the middle class 84 percent of time and civil rights 100 percent percent of the time. On gun control he votes in favor 25 percent of the time. Kurt Schrader (District 5) votes for the middle class 68 percent of the time, broad civil rights 97 percent of the time and for gun control 16 percent of the time. All of this compiled information is from the Politics That Work web site.
Why would anyone not a millionaire or a big business owner ever want a portraitist millionaire like Walden representing them in Washington, D.C.? I’m neither and I sure don’t.
Gary Fields
Hood River
Let’s be rational
If you agree “this culture is a plane crash and we’re still sitting in the wreckage waiting for the movie” (Steighner), AND are ardent to make things genuinely better without future swings backwards:
Going back to before Trump is what gave us Trump. It was too precarious and is a frightening thought.
The only way to put things right permanently is to vote, and keep, veto proof majorities everywhere possible.
Good news: Good sensible people outnumber the greedy and their mis-informed.
Bad: “Bad politicians are elected by good people who don’t vote.” (Artifacts sticker), and our side shows up only on whim and wind.
Solution: Start today for the country we want and make voting a badge of honor, a social bond, a festive celebration of a decisively crippling defeat for evil at this time on Earth.
Everywhere possible.
As any moronic pinhead might say, “Simple — so simple.” But it really is.
Planning this is the least strategic of efforts. It does, however, require the many of us, who are desperate to find a solution we can be part of, to match our chatter and bring others along with self-feeding energy.
How can we start? Hood River could lead by sending new “Lincoln Brigades” where they need help registering people. Texas has 600,000 without even proper ID; Mississippi is 37 percent black, many unregistered.
(Others thought Hillary was better for them than Bernie!) “Wisconsins” are ripe for trash canning “Paul Ryans”.
Let’s ask City Council and various county organizations. When others join a growing list in rolling wider awareness and action, rich people who don’t want to waste their money will help us rent registration vans, put up the new state “voter suppression taxes” for IDs, and promote the entertainment benefits and other actions to make this a growing social bond among the presently discouraged or even demoralized.
Remember the excitement that swept in Obama? This time more massively, with undeniably non-corporate candidates.
And irony for rich liberals: Spend your unwanted tax heist buying IDs in Carolinas, on reservations in Dakota … everywhere possible.
Bob Williams
Hood River
No on
Measure 101
This is a “No” on Measure 101. People, wake up! This government is taxing you more and more. This is so much like in Europe that our forefathers left behind. My folks made it, so can others. I remember picking cotton and that was when I was a little 3-5 year-old. It did not hurt me!
Our government needs to start using our taxes in a tight budget and go by it. They have wasted trillions of dollars and do not know where it has gone.
Please wake up and vote no on all taxes.
Bobbi Reisner
Hood River
Wealthfare
tax scam
The recent passage of the Wealthfare Tax Scam, heralded by our own Congressman Greg Walden, is really a plan to appease corporate and filthy rich donors even though it is reported to increase the deficit by $1,460,000,000,000 (trillion) and throw millions off health insurance.
With the puppet strings attached to those donors for their financial support, we cannot believe that Greg Walden is really concerned about the middle class or his Oregon constituents. It appears that our Congressman, Greg Walden, has become so comfortable selling out to the Washington special interest lobbyists that he has accepted his role of being one of the major puppets in this wealthfare tax scam tragedy of epic proportions.
The wealthfare tax scam tragedy isn’t really about ‘tax relief” with a purported benefit of saving $1300 a year ($108 per month) for a family of four, it is a tragedy about a tax scam that is designed to destroy our health care, our education system, the middle class, and our democracy as we know it.
To top it all, the wealthfare tax scam tragedy is also tied to a means to profit off destroying our planet. Allowing “an environmentally responsible oil and gas program” in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and “boosting American energy production” is all tied to the constant rollback of regulations that were designed to protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the lands we love.
To pay for this tragedy, the selling out to the filthy rich and corporations, with a debunked trickledown economics theory is not new.
It has been tried before. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now no matter how good the actors, Greg Walden and all the other Greedy Old Puppets (GOP), are at playing their roles.
Greg Walden and the rest of the puppets in this tragedy shoved the Welfare Tax Scam through Congress with the long term results that every one of us will be paying the price for this tragic scheme. The short term “advantages” will cost the middle class the most, but because Greg Walden has sold his vote, he will pay when he is voted out in November, 2018.
Beverly Sherrill
The Dalles
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