Undermining democracy
I’m wondering about the motivation for various letter writers seeking to undermine confidence in our voting system and election results. One fellow claims “American communist Democrats are using the entire government to take away our freedoms.” So, should we seek to overthrow our own national government, defy the laws of our nation altogether or at least cherry-pick which laws and governmental entities we like and are willing to obey? Why not go the next step and dispense with elections altogether in favor of a presumably white-supremacist “Christian” form of fascism that permanently institutionalizes minority rule? Goodbye America and U.S. Constitution.
When not sitting on the floor playing with their Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn action figures, these types seem keen to reject the will of a majority of voters, particularly in places such as Virginia and Georgia where coalitions of Black, white, Hispanic, and other justice-loving voters have come together to elect Democrats and flip states that traditionally have been ruled solely by conservative white people elected by conservative white voters.
I suspect our letter writer and his friends only began to object to electoral democracy when the tide started to turn against them, toward a greater enfranchisement of American citizens who had previously been ignored, unheard and left out in the cold. That’s democracy, not communism. If you don’t like democracy when it produces results you don’t like, man up and have the decency to say so directly without a bunch of inflammatory bogus rhetoric, hot air and paranoid fear-mongering.
Chris Norden
Moscow
Rich person’s justice
So, if you’re a screwed up person and sell Oxycontin to 20 people, you go to prison. If you’re the Sackler family and sell Oxycontin to 20 million people, you get your name taken off an art museum and have to take your $10 billion and go back to your mansion.
Liberty and justice for all?
Kurt Obermayr
Winslow, Ariz.
Army Corps does not agree
In a well-written commentary opinion in the Aug. 29 Lewiston Tribune, Marvin Dugger championed the barging of salmon and steelhead as the answer for saving our fish.
He also claimed that the spilling of out migrating smolts over the dams does not work.
He finished by incorrectly stating that the Army Corps of Engineers shared his ideas.
In the recent environmental impact statement for Columbia River System Operations, the Corps of Engineers evaluated four options before arriving at a preferred alternative.
Multiple Objective Alternative 2 evaluated transportation (barging).
This alternative was rejected by the Corps as failing to achieve the goal of increasing smolt survival.
In its preferred alternative, the Corps proposed that spill of smolts over the dams be increased and concluded that this option had an improved chance of smolt survival.
The Corps acknowledged that removal of the four lower Snake River dams had the best result for survival of our fish but rejected that option for other reasons.
Keith E. Carlson
Lewiston
