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January 28, 1010 Opinions |
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—Letters To The Editor—
Save Money At The Pump
To The Record-Courier:
Consumers’ chronic pain at the pump is returning with gas prices 67 percent higher than a year ago and probably heading back toward $3 a gallon soon. While you can’t control the price of gas, you can control how much gas you burn by performing proper maintenance and how you drive. Performing simple and inexpensive maintenance can save as much as $1,200 per year in gas costs.
The Car Care Council offers these gas-saving maintenance and driving tips:
Keep your car properly tuned to improve gas mileage by an average of 4 percent.
Keep tires properly inflated and improve gas mileage by 3 percent.
Replace dirty or clogged air filters and improve gas mileage by as much as 10 percent.
Replace dirty spark plugs, which can reduce mileage by two miles per gallon.
Change oil regularly and gain another mile per gallon.
Observe the speed limit. Gas mileage decreases rapidly above 60 mph.
Avoid excessive idling. Idling gets zero miles per gallon. Warming up the vehicle for one or two minutes is sufficient.
Avoid quick starts and stops. Aggressive driving can lower gas mileage by 33 percent on the highway and 5 percent in the city.
Consolidate trips. Several short trips taken from a cold start can use twice as much gas as one longer multi-purpose trip.
Don’t haul unneeded items in the trunk. An extra 100 pounds in the trunk reduces fuel economy by 1 to 2 percent.
To help you drive smart and save money, visit www.carcare.org and check out the free digital Car Care Guide.
Rich White
Executive Director
Car Care Council
Bethesda, MD
Less Safe On Obama’s Watch
To The Record-Courier:
As a former naval intelligence officer on a high level staff (Top Secret Cryptographic clearance), I agree with President Obama that the breach of security associated with the Detroit-bound airliner is “totally unacceptable.” The warning signs were there, but the intelligence community failed to recognize, analyze and disseminate the information. This is the same type of failure that led to the 9/11 attacks and the Ft. Hood massacre.
Although only a small percentage of Middle East inhabitants are terrorists, almost all of the terrorists emanate from Middle East countries. We have to pay much more attention to travelers to this country from the Middle East and a few other countries, and our Department of Homeland Security has to work with foreign airports to beef up their security operations. We need many more intelligence officials who are proficient in Arabic and who can penetrate al Qaida networks in various countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.
Unfortunately, the Bush Administration transferred a number of Yemini terrorists from Guantanamo Bay back to Yemen, and at least one of them was involved in the planning for the attack on the Detroit-bound airliner. President Obama wants to close down Guantanamo and transfer the terrorists to the U.S. mainland for prosecution. Will these terrorists be convicted of their crimes? Will they be executed? If not, how long will they stay in prison? Will they be eligible for parole? Will they spread their hate for the U.S. to other inmates? Why take a chance with these hardcore terrorists? Keep them in Guantanamo.
We need President Obama to stop appeasing the leaders of countries that sponsor terrorism including Iran, Syria, and Somalia; and he has to cease bowing to leaders of the world, and appearing subservient to them. These actions are construed by terrorists as signs of weakness, which give the terrorists inspiration to attack us.
President Obama weakened the CIA operations, and the intelligence agencies in general, when he criticized the CIA for its interrogation techniques. Although some of these techniques might be unacceptable to the world community, we have to be able to somehow access information from captured terrorists. I believe the recent failures of our intelligence agencies to provide warnings of potential terrorist activities can be partially attributable to some apathy and lack of initiative within the intelligence community, and President Obama bears some responsibility for the climate of distrust among intelligence officials.
Janet Napolitano is not qualified to fill the position of Secretary of Homeland Security. We need a professional intelligence/security person in this critical position. Unfortunately most high level federal positions, including cabinet positions, go to unqualified politicians for payback for supporting the President during the campaign.
Note: The President was deeply involved and approved the people for these positions.
The U.S. is less safe on Obama’s watch, and we could be susceptible to on-going terrorist attacks due to an appeasing and apologetic President, incompetent Secretary of Homeland Security, and weakened intelligence agencies.
P.S. Bring on the body scanners. At my age it could be exciting.
Donald A. Moskowitz
Londonderry, NH
City Council Members Need To Be On Same Page
To The Record-Courier:
The papers are full of complaints about our City Council. But hey, look at what a good distribution of people are willing to serve! We have two who own businesses. We have, I think, a retired BLMer, retired judge, which makes two retired public servants, two what you might call long-time local citizens and one entrepreneur turned public servant. They each seem to think they have the only way to run the City. It would be great if they all tried to be on the same page.
I suggest, as a group, they purchase, "Leadership and Self Deception," a book from The Arbinger Institute that teaches you how to think outside of your box of self deception. It can be purchased locally.
Since it is our understanding the new City Manager is not coming, and under the current shortfall of money nationwide, it would appear that our City Council should not waste our tax dollars by hiring an Interim Manager. Since Ms. Watkins has the title of Assistant City Manager, and had a pay raise, let her perform the job. I'm sure she is capable of keeping things under control until a new one is chosen. If the Council doesn't think she's qualified, take away her raise in pay, and then hire someone else.
George Wilder
Baker City
Stop This Nonsense!
To The Record-Courier:
After reading your Jan. 14 article on the appalling conduct of the City Council, I sent them the following letter. Baker City is well on its way to becoming the focal point of Oregon Tourism. Let’s not retreat to a ghost town. Has no one there, the intestinal fortitude to tell the emperors that “They have no clothes?”
To the Baker City Council:
You are fools, all seven of you. You were elected to make Baker City a successful city, providing services for your constituents and inviting business and tourists to your community to assure that success. Instead you choose to circumvent the law and act like small children who do not get their way. You were elected to work as a team, whether you personally like it or not. The people of Baker City deserve better.
Now you are falling off a precipice again. If you wait for a man who cannot give you a time or reason for when he will arrive, in your city, you will only exacerbate the problem. No candidate can be successful on a 4 to 3 vote, let alone put up with your infighting.
Stop this nonsense, get your act together and accept your responsibilities to work together and make your city successful, or all of you resign and let people who care about the city take over the council.
I am a part time resident of Baker County and you are an embarrassment to us all.
Patsy Wiemken
Baker City
Measures Take Wealth From Main Street, Not Wall Street
To The Record-Courier:
About Measures 66 and 67, it’s more about redistribution of wealth, to take the wealth from Main Street (not Wall Street) and redistribute to political empires via unions, Sierra Cub, etc., for leftist organizations (NGOs).
It was just a few years ago these same “principals” of radical far leftist activists were advocates to mandate via governor’s office and its enforcement (executive orders) etc. to place black boxes in all citizen’s cars of Global Positioning system devices (GPS monitoring) that would be compatible to the “cap and trade” or soot taxes. The governor’s office was jumping the gun in a manner of speech. Another tax scheme?
Now with the layoffs at Durkee lime pit mine and the county loss of revenues due to a Main Street layoff there, the county has to look for another source of revenue. These are union members of a “private” entity (corporate status) that can outsource this work to foreign entities in global markets.
What’s “bizzare” is their “union,” unlike the political unions of government employees unions, in that unions mandate their members to vote Democrat or else (coercion and duress?). Now we all know who controls the executive branch and the State’s legislative body of politics don’t we? Demos, just like the White House. The radical eco squads, via union mandate to get its members to shoot themselves in the foot to this bizarre practice and egress to citizen’s taxes (Measures 66 and 67).
We know that the arm of government and entities that depend on handouts from the public till get their financial resources right off the taxing (top) chain, where as the private sector that relies as to profits they are taxed on their profits that would be unsustainable climax of a system that feeds on itself would collapse under its own weight (Democracy at work?).
We would ask them what could drive them even further into deficit and debt than a staggering increase in the imposition of new and massive bureaucracies, new laws and regulations, new and complex taxation (advocates of the devil?).
If small businesses function less profitable, they will hire fewer taxpaying workers and pay fewer taxes themselves. At the same time, if government is forced to hire great numbers of new beurocrats, set up multitude of new regulator bodies and arrange for new implementation of these laws, then their costs must rise and the combo of rising expenditures and lessening taxes (revenue) would only add to the array of difficulties already inherent. Would outsourcing jobs to China be the answer? What goes around, comes around.
Bruce Parke
Sumpter, Ore.
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