Our Readers’ Views, Jan. 1

Budget slips by without complaint

While the folks are being distracted by the saga of the Battle Ground police chief firing, the city has budgeted to spend $97,988 per day, seven days a week, and no one bats an eye on the waste that takes part each and every day. (My math used $35,765,778, which is the 2010 budget, divided by 365 days, http://www.cityofbg.org/minutes/council_091116.pdf.)

Good job — by getting everyone to watch the left hand, the city with its right hand gently removes its residents’ money from their brand new Christmas wallets and no one complains.

Philip L. Johnson

Battle Ground

Enact tough law for repeat offenders

Maurice Clemmons murdered four Washington heroes in Lakewood. It’s a travesty that this monster was walking our streets. Citizens should be outraged that he was released while facing eight felonies, including punching a deputy in the face and a child rape charge.

Washingtonians voted for “three strikes you are out” in 1993. What happened? Also Jessica’s Law would have kept him locked up for life, but was stripped down to a meaningless law by Democrats and Gov. Chris Gregoire. Republican lawmakers of Washington state voted to enact a tough Jessica’s Law in its original form. Gregoire also released another hardened criminal, three-strikes inmate Steven Dozier. Thirty-year veteran Seattle police Detective Mike Ciesynski stated he had rarely encountered a more dangerous person.

Gregoire needs to go. The Democrats who stripped Jessica’s Law need to go. The judges who released Clemmons onto the street need to go. We have had enough. Get justice for our four slain heroes and that little girl. Take back the justice system in our state. Clemmons is dead, but who will they release next to prowl the streets for their next victims?

Chuck Miller

Camas

Accurate predictions doubtful

On the afternoon of Dec. 29, everyone in the Vancouver-Portland area experienced a collective figment of our imaginations: snow.

Global-warming mongers state with absolute certitude that temperatures will be X degrees higher in Y years.

Yet as recently as midday on Dec. 29, local meteorologists, armed with data from hundreds of thermometers, pressure gauges, wind speed gauges, humidity gauges, real-time satellite images, etc., failed to forecast that snow would begin to fall a mere two hours later.

Hence, that day’s snow is merely an apparition, a manifestation of collective hysteria.

Richard Willerton

Vancouver

All voices must stand up and protest

In her Dec. 28 letter, Roberta Upson asked an interesting question, “Why seek bishops’ approval?” We are not now, nor will be a theocracy, but the National Catholic Conference of Bishops is only one voice among thousands of citizens who cannot stand by and allow pre-born infants to be aborted in the name of health care. Universal health care for the masses may be a good thing, but isn’t a fetus part of the people who are warranted health care instead of death?

Joan Oser

Vancouver

Don’t impose one belief over others

Regarding Ed Rush’s Dec. 28 letter, “Provide for the unprotected,” compulsory pregnancy is not the answer. He is suggesting that the government impose his anti-abortion fanatical religious beliefs upon the reproductive choices others are entitled to. He uses language inappropriately in order to make it appear a child is being murdered. You can’t abort a child — a child only exists outside the womb, ditto infant, ditto baby. What exists in the womb is an invisible pencil dot-size zygote maturing to a fetus. There is no such thing as an unborn child.

Millions of children die every year from starvation due to extreme poverty. When you feed those children, I’ll clap my hands and applaud.

Larry Little

Vancouver

Debt is the only thing progressive

It’s unfair to refer to the progressives in our nation’s government who squander our money as common thugs. It’s unfair to common thugs because thugs only steal our money, and then leave us alone. Progressive politicians are far worse. They not only commandeer our nation’s wealth, and demolish our economy and freedom, but then they place us and our descendants for generations to come deeply in debt.

Our national debt is $12 trillion and growing by the hour. That’s $40,000 for every American citizen. Interest on it is about equal to our national defense expenditures, over $2.5 million per minute. For those interest payments we get nothing whatsoever. It is simply subtracted from the economy, depressing it even further. And now “progressives” are compounding their criminal irresponsibility by adding a horrendously expensive, bumbling, government-run health care bureaucracy.

Robert Wassman

Vancouver

Renounce bartering of pork deals

We were robbed. Nebraska, Connecticut, Louisiana and Florida all get mega-dollars from the U.S. taxpayers as their senators sold their souls for votes on health care.

While our senators trade their votes and our money for pork, these other guys are serious. It is all based on the assumption that elected officials treat their constituents as prostitutes thinking they can be bought. To buy the votes, the officials have to prostitute themselves to get the money appropriated. If you doubt this, explain why the authors of pork projects are anonymous except to the recipients.

Washingtonians will be paying for Medicare, Medicaid, hospitals and who knows what else to other states simply because our senators vote the party line without question and don’t have alleged principles to sell. The only way out of this is for elected officials and local newspapers to renounce this practice as plunderous instead of encouraging it so people understand the cost to their kids and grandkids. Good luck!

Greg Zilker

Brush Prairie

Our senators fail to capture bounty

Which is it? Is it corruption or a lack of intelligence that Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray are missing? They voted “yes” for the health care bill but failed to join the hoard of buccaneer politicians boarding President Obama’s gravy train, “The Health Care Plan Express.”

Why didn’t they just stall a bit longer, fly the old “skull and crossbones,” and pirate a boxcar full of loot, choo-chooing it straight to Washington state? Go figure.

Louise Bailey

Brush Prairie