Talk to Rehberg about impeachment
Rep. Denny Rehberg voted against “investigating” the articles of impeachment against George Bush.
His only explanation to me was that President Bush was elected in 2004 and impeaching him would be divisive to our country. After I heard the 35 articles of impeachment, it made the reasons for past impeachments sound petty!
Do you think Rehberg was representing Montanans when he voted against impeachment? You can still contact Rehberg if you disagree with his vote. The articles will be reintroduced in 30 days. It is not too late.
Tom Welch, Lolo
Open up land, water to drilling
The average wage in Montana appears to be less than $20,000 a year. The cheapest fuel is near $4 a gallon and true inflation is about 12 percent.
Montanans, and people across the country, are being hurt. Our economy is sinking further into a recession that is spreading to the Western world. All to the benefit of OPEC and our terrorist enemies.
Congress has just finished debating ideas for an energy policy - such as suing the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, levying a carbon tax on industry and people, placing a windfall profits tax on oil companies that they can pass on in higher fuel prices to taxpayers, to new laws against price gouging - and has ended doing nothing, thank heavens. They have covered everything except freeing our companies to expand our domestic energy supplies in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and our coastal waters.
Let’s use a 4 foot by 6 foot table to represent ANWR’s total area. Then put one dime on the edge of it. That dime would represent more area than what our companies need to drill known reserves of oil there. Experts estimate that, once in production, that little patch could provide about the same amount of oil yearly for the next 25 years as we now import from Saudi Arabia.
China is drilling to capacity and buying up long-term contracts. Venezuela is using oil profits to fund South American terrorists. Cuba, supported by many countries, is drilling off Florida in waters that we won’t.
Other countries must think we have gone insane. Even passing the bill to open our waters can be expected to lower world prices. This insistence in our Congress that absolutely every square foot of ANWR and our coastal waters cannot be opened could well appear to the world as nothing other than blind political extremism or widespread political corruption.
J. Notti, Stevensville
GOP won’t save you from high gas prices
Patti Kanduch makes it clear (letters, June 19) that the lies and half-truths of big oil robber barons and their GOP enablers have gone to her head, as she’s now repeating them.
Kanduch claims that “liberal Democrats want to blame the oil companies for the high price of oil,” and while that’s partially correct, it should also be noted that many prominent Democrats such as Sen. Carl Levin have also been calling for curbing rampant speculation in oil futures for several years.
Some studies suggest that hedge funds and financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs might be contributing as much as a $25 to $60 per-barrel surcharge on crude prices by taking advantage of oil future price changes or using them as a hedge. What’s more, these companies often avoid oversight via unregulated “ICE futures” on the London futures exchange. Didn’t Enron teach us what happens when we don’t allow for any oversight of energy traders?
She also cites the world market straw man commonly evoked by the GOP, as well as the Exxons and Morgan Stanleys of the world. This argument falls on its face when one considers that the last time oil inventories were as high as they are right now, the year was 1998 and crude was trading at $15 per barrel.
Kanduch then plays the tired cards of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the GOP lie of China drilling off of Cuba (even Florida Republican Sen. Mel Martinez called this an “urban myth”). This being despite the fact that the U.S. Energy Information Administration recently released a study showing that even the most generous projections for ANWR and all offshore drilling would likely only translate to savings of 3.5 and 3 to 4 cents respectively by 2027. That’s still $4 gasoline. So much for “conservative leadership” as a savior.
Nick Domitrovich, Missoula
Candidate viewed as a stereotype
As Barack Obama runs for president, race is brandished by the media and his opponents.
Obama’s mother was white of Irish descent and his father was from Kenya. Raised by his maternal grandparents and his mom, who divorced Barack’s dad when the boy was 2, Obama’s upbringing was by whites. Early on in the campaign, some African-Americans said he wasn’t “black” enough because his lineage doesn’t include slave history. Why is Obama regarded as African-American? The simple answer is that his skin color is black. In America, those who look like that are classified as African-American, no matter their background.
A fuller answer reveals extraordinary fixations of American society. Color and other surface features classify humans into one of several distinct “races,” despite the fact that the idea of race is false scientifically and that the stress on race in the U.S. is not shared worldwide. Biologists and anthropologists have long denounced the idea of biological race as nonsense and meaningless in true human terms. Even the Census Bureau disclaims any racial overtones, but continues to enumerate race demographics because of old laws, which the government has yet to review.
Because attitudes surrounding race have cemented divisive biases, especially among the less-educated, and hardened social customs and ethnic identities, the myth and consequences of race are perpetuated. Although Americans know of South Africa’s apartheid racism from 1948 to 1990, few realize that Dutch Boers who first settled in South Africa in 1652 married African women and their offspring were accepted as Cape Colored and treated without prejudice even when they looked like Obama.
America’s mind-set on race may improve for the better as Barack Obama is viewed as a whole person instead of a stereotype.
Al Yee, Missoula
Reporter’s assumption unfair
How unfair of Michael Moore to make the assumption that we, as a board, do not like card players at the Senior Center, as stated in his article in the June 18 Missoulian.
I, as well as many of the other board members, play cards on a regular basis and have many friends in that group.
Any organization successfully operates, not only out of excellent leadership, but also out of mutual respect for each other, compassion and care of its patrons and a code of conduct that is unspoken but mutually understood by all. These are the goals that need to be achieved at the center to make it a less threatening and welcoming place to be.
Dorothy Heitzman, Missoula
Is it right to give nation so much?
Although Israel has one of the strongest economies in the Middle East and a per capita income equal to some European countries, the United States sends Israel an average of more than $3 billion annually, or about $8 million each day, or $500 per Israeli citizen.
Moreover, Israel provides health care for each of its citizens. Yet in America, at least 22,000 adults died in 2006 for the lack of health insurance - 22,000 out of more than 47 million Americans who had no heath care of any kind!
Israel also has the fourth-strongest military in the world; therefore, there is no existential reason (whatever the occasional overblown rhetoric of an Arab or Muslim nation’s threat to “push Israel into the sea”) for Israel’s receiving more U.S. aid than any country in the world. If there ever was such a threat to Israel, the United States would come its aid at the very first hint of trouble.
In their recent book, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” an expansion of their earlier article on the lobby, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt maintained that the explanation for America’s perhaps excessive support of Israel lay in the power of the Israel lobby, a “loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.” They wrote their book not only to show the power of the lobby but to encourage “a candid discussion of the Lobby’s influence and a more open debate about U.S. interests” in Israel and the Middle East.
In view of the outpouring of critical comments on their article, and now their book, they have succeeded in their goal of an open debate. And certainly the question of Israel’s need for U.S. largess should now be debated openly in Congress.
Merrel Clubb, Missoula
Obama will bring all sides together
For the first time in my life I got out and banged on doors for a political candidate: Barack Obama.
The choice was easy, due to the facts of the condition of this country - wars, runaway greed on Wall Street, the economy.
However, I’m not too encouraged on exchanging one group of religious zealots for a religious cult. I don’t use these words lightly. I use Webster’s Dictionary. I also use what a friend, a Jesuit priest, said to me when I was going through a difficult time in my life: “Whatever you spend the majority of your time in pursuit of is your god.” Enlightenment, service to others, play, money, power - the list can be quite long.
Recently I heard an advertisement from the Sierra Club asking people to support candidates of their choosing. I find this as disturbing as the Werner-Lieberman bill in the Senate, which creates a bureaucracy as big as Homeland Security and amasses mountains of money in Washington - $10 trillion to $20 trillion. If we do have a 10- to 20-year cool-down, as some credible climatologist predict, the American people will be so disillusioned with the Democratic Party, as they are with the Republicans right now.
I believe Obama is the only candidate who can or will bring all sides of this debate together so all research can be laid in front of the American people, without changing or suppressing the science, as the global warming advocates claim the present administration has done.
This mad rush to turn the control of my government over to the environmental religion is as unsettling as turning it over to a king, or any religion, and is in violation to the separation of church and state clause of the Constitution I spent 20 years in the military defending.
Harry Turnland, Libby
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