Letters to the editor for Sunday, Dec. 11, 2016

Recount doesn’t go far enough

I think it’s great that Green Party candidate Jill Stein is demanding a recount in certain states. But that doesn’t go far enough. Let’s just have a do-over.

Maybe all those deplorable, racist Trump supporters won’t show this time. Maybe all the Hillary backers who sat the last one out will get to the polls and vote.

Better yet, let’s go two out of three. Yeah, that’s the ticket!

It will be costly. But, when you’re $19.5 trillion in the hole, what’s another $40 billion or $50 billion?

Bob Burchfield

Wellington

To protest honestly, visit the voting booth

When a faction loses an election it cries “change the system.” In the 1950s, when I was at Sparks High, we debated popular vote vs. electoral college.

The idea of representative voting goes back to at least the 18th century. Popular vote gives cities with huge populations an advantage in outcomes. And where do large groups of minorities, unemployed, and undereducated and uninformed live? In large cities.

Turn on your TV and you can see these protestors right now. I watched paid protestors come to a rally on buses. How important would Nevada be with a popular vote system? A system that has created the greatest country in the world can hardly be “irrelevant.” Had the complainer’s candidate won, would the system be irrelevant? Does this complainer even know the meaning of irrelevant? An honest protest takes place in the voting booth. We just witnessed this.

Electoral college should be abolished “immediately?” It would take a constitutional change to do that. In 1923 Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment; 93 years later it has still not been ratified by enough states.

Gretchen Godfrey

Carson City

War on capitalism ruining economy

Regarding the recent rant in the Appeal’s letters column ripping the free market, America has been operating under a “community organizer” economy the last eight years.

The Obama command-and-control model has been to smother job creators — large and small — with regulations, exorbitant fines for imaginary infractions, and criminal charges for non-existent crimes. Federal and state governments have siphoned off billions of dollars from businesses, including every retirement plan’s investment funds, for “non-prosecution” settlements, all in service to the war on capitalism.

This “policy” has driven 95 million people out of the job market and sentenced them to long-term unemployment. Surviving, but not prospering, they were supposed to vote Democrat in exchange for Obamaphones, SNAP cards, and other government handouts. Instead they helped elect Trump.

Democrats used to know better. It was John F. Kennedy who said about the economy that a rising tide lifts all boats. Trump understands that the economy is an integrated financial system of interconnected parts that can’t be “fixed” by punishing employers while giving a few token tax cuts and handouts to everyone else. It’s like treating kidney disease by hog-tying the patient and giving him a lobotomy.

Lynn Muzzy

Minden

Trump’s style reminiscent of Churchill

Regarding Appeal columnist Ursula Carlson’s slanted comparison of President-elect Trump’s leadership style to Winston Churchill’s, here is a better one by Dr. James Dobson of “Focus on the Family:”

“(Churchill’s) life is controversial. He was not always celebrated as a great leader. He was a bombastic, cigar smoking, at times crude, even misogynistic leader. It is alleged that he told off-color stories to his children before bedtime!

A woman once told him he was disgustingly drunk. His response was, “My dear, you are disgustingly ugly, but tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be ugly!”

So ... is Donald Trump good for America? I honestly believe that he has been already. He has shaken the political system. Do his comments offend me? At times! Do I agree with all he says? Not at all! But could he be a “Cyrus” being raised up by God to preserve America? Nobody liked Gen. Patton, but he sure WAS an instrument of the United States for the right things.

Lois Bock

Minden