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Opinion Letters Letters and comments for the week ending June 14, 2008
Letters and comments for the week ending June 14, 2008
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Berry, Richter, Ambert, Morehead The Union County commissioners will be making a mistake in hiring another deputy district attorney. In my opinion, they should hire an investigator to investigate crimes and present them to the DA for prosectution. The DA does not now have one. He relies on the La Grande police, sheriff’s office and state police to investigate crimes in our county. The sheriff does not have a trained or experienced criminal investigator. The people on the north end of the county have to rely on the untrained, inexperienced deputies to investigate crimes.
Union County does not need another deputy DA. We need a professional criminal investigator. Imbler I agree wholeheartedly with the concerns of Steve Clements and Mary Cooke regarding the controlling of mosquitoes and harmful chemicals. When are we going to come to the realization of the harm that continual dumping of chemicals does to not only wildlife, but to humans and this beautiful earth? DDT almost eradicated the bird population and was detected in all animal flesh. I did not know of any young people with cancer during the 1930s and ’40s. It seems when the chemicals appeared, so did cancer. We encountered countless mosquitoes in my youth and kept them in control by constructing swallow bird houses. My job was to clean them out every fall. One swallow will eat approximately 1,000 or more mosquitoes a day. It is amazing how scare tactics will cause most people to vote for something that may have long-term effects. Common sense should tell us that anything foreign to our bodies is unhealthy. In Minnesota, where I was raised, I watched beautifully clear, clean lakes change color to a sloppy green from algae caused by chemicals. You can send the mosquitoes to my place as the swallows and fish in the pond are running out of food. I.E. Richter Elgin The article in the newspaper last month about two La Grande police officers’ conduct was very interesting. I wonder how deep the alleged bad conduct goes. Who knew about the allegations but did nothing about it, and why? I remember in 2006 Thomas Blackman and Gary Welberg were standing before the city’s Ad Hoc Drug Task Force and said that at the time there were 900 medical marijuana patients in Union County. This number was put on reports that were sent to Salem for funding purposes without anyone questioning the number. The number was so far off that the funding revised and documents altered to reflect no numbers at all in regard to medical marijuana. Did anyone think to ask the two drug task force officers how they came up with this number, or did we blindly take the word of others without any facts or proof? The fact is that at the time they said there were 900 medical marijuana patients in Union County, there were only 69. The State of Oregon has a website you can go to and check the numbers for each county in the state. This whole episode brings up a lot of questions. Did Police Chief John Courtney not ask where his officers got this number? The number the officers used would have meant that one out of every 28 citizens in Union County would have had a medical marijuana card. We all know that this is and was not true. What would this misinformation have accomplished? Job perpetuation?
And what other incorrect information did these officers provide, and about whom? La Grande The Glen Beck Show on CNN reports our oil reserves are three times that of Saudi Arabia just in the shale oil reserve here in the West. The Democratic party insists that we not develop these reserves or drill offshore or in ANWAR per instruction from the huge environmental lobby. This country has been hamstrung in a multiplicity of environmental laws that often conflict with each other and result in the destruction of what they were intended to protect. As a result of this maze of environmental laws, our country has been rendered ineffective. At the same time, we are at war with a vicious enemy: who is he and where is this enemy? Is he in Iraq, Iran or Syria, or is he here in our midst preventing us from becoming energy independent by blocking all efforts in that direction?
This country and its people’s situation reminds me of an Ernest Hemingway novel, “The Fifth Column.” There were four columns approaching the city, but the fifth column was already in the city. Think about it. Joseph |
