Readers
Don’t mess with our initiative process
Four years ago, I moved to Arizona and discovered something unique to this state: Government allows us to create initiatives that address what we consider an unmet need and to vote them into place or not.
While it is cumbersome to understand all those propositions on the ballot, one thing is certain – Arizonans can approve or disapprove of an initiative.
Now state government wants to tamper with our right to use the initiative process. Gov. Jan Brewer announced Saturday that she plans to hold a special election (another cost to taxpayers) to raise taxes and give the Legislature special authority to take voter-approved funds to close the deficit.
What the governor suggests would strip the power of voters to create initiatives that bring about actual change in our state.
They cannot mess with our initiatives. I cherish my freedom to create and vote in initiatives, and I refuse to let government take this away.
If the Legislature takes a single penny from any initiative to assist them with the budget this year, there will be no stopping them every year thereafter.
We must uphold the rights of voters – the people who decided to have a new vision for Arizona, whether for early childhood education or prisons or repairing roads!
I refuse to have this right and freedom taken from me as a citizen.
Diane Umstead
Banks are the ones writing hot checks now
To my bank:
Dear sirs,
In view of what seems to be happening internationally with banks at the moment, I was wondering if you could advise me.
If one of my checks is returned marked “insufficient funds,” how do I know whether that refers to me or to you?
D. J. Sobey
Oro Valley
For McCain, it’s power, not country, first
I thought my days of being disgusted with John McCain were over.
With the end of the presidential election, I thought he really would put country first, work to moderate the ideological and power-driven members of his party and help Obama change the partisanship and gridlock in Washington.
Obama showed incredible respect and deference to McCain, seeking him out and honoring him on several occasions after the election.
Unfortunately McCain has chosen to embrace the obstructionism and failed policies of his fellow Republicans. He has gone on every media venue that will have him to trash Obama for his supposed unwillingness to reach out and to repeat the GOP mantra of tax cuts for the rich.
He is bashing stimulus spending as pork, citing projects that have been taken out of the bill or never existed. But when has reality ever interfered with Republican talking points?
According to McCain, tax breaks are good. Building schools, weatherizing homes and government buildings, helping cash-strapped states, funding education, and helping the middle class with tax cuts are bad.
Mc Cain is following Rush Limbaugh and fellow Republicans who, for the sake of their own power, want Obama to fail. Amazingly, they want more Americans to lose their jobs and homes, more businesses to fail, more Americans to experience hunger and despair.
So much for McCain’s campaign pledge of “country first.” It looks like party and power trumps everything else.
Joan Safier
retired teacher
Shame on those who supported stimulus bill
It was hard to believe the largest government spending bill in history was passed in such short order.
But it was even harder to believe that it was done before anyone could have read and digested the contents of the bill, which was more than 1,000 pages long.
Then I realized it was done by Democrats with the help of only three Republicans, who are Republicans in name only. The remainder of our legislators had better sense than to sign on to a blank check.
I am ashamed of all elected officials who voted for this bill without having read it and believe that we citizens, and our children and grandchildren, who will be paying for this for years to come, have been given the royal shaft.
John L. Perry
Stimulus slammer blinded by the right
Re: the Feb. 14 letter “Stimulus bill includes rationing of health care”:
Next time the writer wants to call out an elected official, he should fact-check so as not to embarrass himself again.
His feigned outrage about what he cites as a “new bureaucracy” is probably something he heard from Rush or Fox News.
Had he taken just a few minutes to do a little research, instead of parroting what he heard, he would have learned that the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology was an office created on April 27, 2004, by an executive order from President Bush, and the following month a national coordinator was appointed.
Barbara Dralnick