Speak up

I encourage all members of Idaho’s Public Employee Retirement System to contact the PERSI board to express disappointment with the recent suggestion from legislators, including Reps. Mike Kingsley and Aaron von Ehlinger, both R-Lewiston.

Asking PERSI to forgo investment in specific tech companies is purely playing to these legislators’ political base. The PERSI board’s guidance on investment has not failed us. This partisan request is based solely on the legislators’ lack of understanding of the rights of private companies. Claims of censorship are wholly without merit. The request should be discounted and the PERSI board should continue on the course maintaining PERSI as one of the best retirement systems in our nation.

Members, contact the PERSI board today.

Mary Ann Funk

Lewiston

Bearing witness

Thank you, Idaho National Guard members, including our locals, all volunteers, for helping secure our presidential inauguration, and the days before and after, in our nation’s hardened, battened-down capital.

Your sacrifice and service to help enable this never-more important peaceful transition of power and all that it means and symbolizes to your fellow Americans, as well as to the world, is as noble a duty and responsibility as you will ever have.

This is all part of a Herculean security effort that sadly includes extraordinary heavy temporary fencing topped by razor wire as well as, unprecedentedly, some 25,000 fellow citizen soldiers from all other 49 states.

Thank you as well to all our nation’s intelligence and security professionals who work largely behind the scenes, most not in military or other uniforms, but serve proudly behind the modest shroud of quiet, dedicated, humble, selfless and true patriotism.

This includes our local and regional FBI personnel as well as those in Transportation Security Administration having to screen fellow citizens for the danger they may directly pose now, rather than as a necessary byproduct of security targeted primarily against foreign-spawned terrorist threats. We came closer to this inaugural day not happening than we could ever have imagined. But I am confident we will never repeat this again.

Please bring home and share your stories of bearing witness on this historic occasion, including the majestic, soulful pandemic deaths tribute memorial on the National Mall.

Godspeed throughout.

Dan Button

Clarkston