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VanOrman will lead
Please join me in voting for Suzanne Van Orman for our State
Representative.
Suzanne spent her career running the Head Start programs in the Gorge;
over 500 youngsters are enrolled in those programs, benefitting from
Suzanne’s strong leadership and fiscal responsibility. She has shown
us her talents leading locally and is now ready to take on the
challenges in Salem. We deserve a great leader who will address the
crises in health care access, education funding, and environmental
protection. Vote for the Oregon we want, vote for Van Orman.
Paul Blackburn
Hood River
A blunt conclusion
Proof of the obvious: U.S. involvement in Iraq has made terrorism
worse.
The war in Iraq has “made the overall terrorism problem worse.”
The terrorist threat is now more acute than it was prior to Sept.
11.
This is the blunt conclusion of the recently declassified National
Intelligence Estimate, the consensus opinion of 16 government
agencies, including the CIA, FBI, State Department and the armed
forces.
To some observers, the NIE conclusion is something of a late
confession of an obviously flawed policy. But this conclusion
never has been obvious to the Bush Administration, nor has it
seemed important enough to get treatment in the press since the
U.S. invasion of Iraq. What should be significant now to U.S.
citizens preparing to vote in the upcoming elections is that the
Bush Administration continues to deny the failure of its Iraq
policy and to discredit anyone who challenges their position.
Readers can decide for themselves the implications of the Bush
Administration’s arrogant refusal to correct the errors of its
Iraq policy. The following judgments are quoted directly from the
NIE summary:
“Although we cannot measure the extent of the spread with
precision, a large body of all-source reporting indicates that
activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although a small
percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and
geographic dispersion.”
“Four underlying factors are fueling the spread of the jihadist
movement: (1) entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice
and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation and
a sense of powerlessness; (2) the Iraq jihad; (3) the slow pace of
real and sustained economic, social and political reforms in many
Muslim majority nations; and, (4) pervasive anti-U.S. sentiment
among most Muslims — all of which Jihadists exploit.
“The Iraq conflict has become the cause celebre for jihadists,
breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim
world, and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist
movement.
“Al-Qaida is exploiting the situation in Iraq to attract new
recruits.
“If this trend continues, threats to U.S. interest at home and
abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks
worldwide.”
The NIE report may be too late for those who have lost their lives
in Iraq, but it is timely enough to challenge all voters to ask
this question: What has your candidate been saying about U.S.
involvement in Iraq? Can you find any evidence of the moral
leadership required to demand accountability to the NIE
conclusions?
Mark Flaming
Hood River
Metsger buried bill
While I serve with Sen. Rick Metsger and have every respect for
him as a colleague, I have to differ with his explanation about
the events surrounding several immigration bills sent to his
committee in 2003.
I sponsored one of those bills, SB 819, and worked with Jim
Ludwick of Oregonians for Immigration reform to schedule the bill
for a hearing in Sen. Metsger’s committee. Sen. Metsger never
scheduled either bill for a hearing or gave a friendly indication
toward the idea. We were ignored at best and sent the message that
SB 819 would never see the light of day.
Sen. Metsger is now claiming to have authored SB 586, a bill
similar to SB 819. While I felt my bill was stronger than SB 586,
I would have been glad to work for its passage as a compromise.
To my knowledge, Sen. Metsger never lobbied for either bill or
worked to bring the idea to a hearing.
I have been a committee chair in the past. It is a tough job, with
a lot of demands and decisions. It is a position of privilege and
of trust, where you are placed to show leadership on important
issues.
It is the chair’s prerogative what bills are brought forward for
public debate, and what bills are kept silently buried. Every
chair is held accountable for those decisions. Sen. Metsger should
be no different.
State Sen. Gary George
Yamhill County
Don’t blame Bush
I’m so sick and tired of the lie that the “Bush Lied” crowd keeps
perpetuating. This is the same group who calls our president an
idiot. Think about this for a minute, folks: if President Bush
truly lied, then he was a clever enough liar to fool hundreds of
members of Congress (most of whom are no dumbbells) into voting
for the Iraq invasion. I doubt that you would credit him for being
that smart.
The more accurate way of looking at this is that our president
made a poor decision based on faulty intelligence — information
from individuals who may have lied to him.
What would Al Gore have done? Use the Internet he invented to
somehow stop the UN violations, oppression and genocide Saddam
perpetrated? Come on!
James Konopasek
Mosier
Dems’ hypocrisy
Am I the only one who thinks the Democrats are hypocrites for
demanding House Speaker Dennis Hastert read private e-mails while
condemning President Bush for wiretapping?
Brian K. Steeves
Hood River
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