In giving, you’ll feel rewarded
This time of year, many homeless people can’t make it to a shelter for the night or to the many places providing hot meals. They are still God’s blessed children and need the kindness of strangers to see them through one more day.
I have had the honor of looking into the eyes and hearts of those I speak of, bringing them hot food and medical help when needed. Still it breaks my heart to hear their stories of how they feel discarded and considered “the forgotten.”
Perhaps you haven’t personally had this experience of homelessness or been broken-hearted while watching a loved one suffer. While we can’t always meet the needs of everyone at any given point in time, we can do our parts individually not only but especially this time of year when the temperatures are dropping rapidly.
One tangible way I personally help is to keep little “love bags” in my vehicle to give out, consisting of energy bars, dried fruit, nuts, beef and cheese sticks, bandages, matches, socks, gloves, caps, leaf bags, hand warmers, and ponchos. Give yourself the gift of this blessing and help others feel loved.
Anita Martin
Vancouver
Disingenuous to add so much pork
Well, the Senate has passed its “reform” bill. It remains to be seen what will come out of the conference with the House, but it is clear, given the illogical process to date, that what is needed is a reform of Congress.
Space here does not permit going through over 1,800 pages of details, but I hope they get a good airing so the voters can do some reforming next election.
If this bill was so great, why did 15 senators want exemptions or special deals for their states? While this may be normal procedure for Congress, it doesn’t make it right.
Earlier I wrote Washington state Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell and Rep. Brian Baird, first recognizing the need for changes to our health care “system,” then pleading they not rush to pass a bill loaded with pork, earmarks, unknown costs and unintended consequences.
Who will pay for this Christmas present, the giver or the recipient?
Roy Morgan
Vancouver
Response to constituents lacking
In recent letters to the editor, Robert McFarlin (Dec. 24, “Health care bill needs common sense”) and Dale Shotwell (Dec. 30, “Contact kept too distant”) are spot on in their opinion of Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray responding to key issues with an automated response. I sent them each three e-mails (from the link on their Web sites) regarding the proposed health care options being considered.
Each time I received the same response in an automated format. And most surprisingly, the issues they each identified as most critical are not addressed in the recent Senate version — yet they voted for it anyway.
I agree that our senators and most representatives are not in touch with the daily lives and challenges of their constituents. But why do they need to be? They have a separate, privileged retirement and health care system. As citizens, we can, and need to, change this in upcoming elections and return to representation that does not make a career out of politics.
Tim Hein
Camas
Train schedules are unreasonable
At 1:30 a.m. and again at 2:20 a.m. on a recent morning, two trains went through Vancouver. Now this seems questionable to me, listening to the train whistles at that time.
How people sleep down by the tracks, I don’t know. But my question is — do the railroads need to move freight at these times?
Even on Christmas Day at 2:40 a.m., I heard the train whistles. Don’t those running these operations consider quiet zones for people?
James Losey
Vancouver
Bill’s kickbacks are shameful
President Barack Hussein Obama and Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., along with their corrupt, irresponsible gang of 60, who passed their socialist/Marxist Obama Health Care Bill, should be investigated.
Legal kickbacks (aka bribes) provided to United States senators/representatives should be a crime.
Lobbyists and members of our congressional delegations who bribe or accept a bribe are punished. Case in point: Former Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., was sentenced to 13 years in prison for accepting bribes. So should the Obamacrats.
Yet, Obama and Reid have greased the palms of senators from the states listed below, with billions of taxpayer dollars to buy their “yes” vote on Obama’s bill. How disgusting.
Here are but a few who accepted legal kickbacks:
Connecticut, $100 million; Louisiana, $300 million; Vermont, $600 million; Massachusetts, $500 million, Florida, $3.5 billion; Nebraska, $100 million. In Nebraska and Michigan, Blue Cross and Blue Shield will pay no insurance tax while the other 48 states get socked with it. Longshoremen will be exempt from the 40 percent excise tax slapped on other “Cadillac plans” with high premiums.
Have Obama and his Obamacrats no shame?
If this is the change Obama promised, I want no part of it.
Larry Patella
Vancouver
Some conditions call for robotics
It’s unsettling to realize that we on the political left often commit the same grievous error we deplore in those on the extreme right: black and white thinking.
With our concern for protecting human life, we find it difficult to subject ourselves to dispassionate analysis of the world problems we care about.
Consider our country’s increasing use of military robotic devices. To escape the trap of black and white thinking, to keep in mind three things.
• First, there are nearly a hundred kinds of robotic vehicles deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of these devices are designed to target broadly and others selectively.
Some are employed under restrictive operational protocols and others without much regard for loss of human life, combatant or civilian.
• Second, conditions change on the battlefield. So the moral use of any device depends on weighing its specific advantages against its disadvantages — plus how restrictively it is used.
• Third, to take any moral position on the use of such robotic devices requires that you be clear on what “good” you have in mind.
For anyone tempted not to respect the complexity of moral judgment, or the arduous discipline entailed by factual analysis, I recommend reading P.W. Singer’s comprehensive study of military robotics, “Wired for War.”
David C. Duncombe
WHITE SALMON
