Several Obama criticisms

I resent the fact that the president of the United States panders to Europeans by saying we are an arrogant nation. If there is any arrogance, it comes from Barack Obama. Also, in his press conference over there, he used the phrase "wheeling and dealing." That's Illinois politics. It would have been better to have said, "give and take." But he has made so many gaffes, it's to be expected. Even the 12 TeleprompTers he took with him can't protect him.

What madness to release some of those prisoners from Gitmo into the United States â€"â€" when even their own countries don't want them â€"â€" and then give them money. How dare those people be shown preference over our safety.

Oh my, what a corrupt cabinet. Tax dodgers. You or I would be in jail. But not Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Maxine Waters or Charlie Rangel. Too many people had blinders on when they voted. Many have regrets.

For those of you who love this country and want to preserve it for your children and grandchildren, fight for it. Join the Tea Parties. Speak out and vote. There's 2010.

Jean Carroll

Carlsbad

People must keep power to dissent

The power syndrome is considered one of the most potent and destructive syndromes to afflict humanity. The power syndrome touches all classes and races without discrimination. It works efficiently in high places as well as lowly occupations.

This syndrome has a simple explanation â€"â€" the prime lack of handling power. It includes an individual who holds another person in bondage to further his own ambition, or a person who threatens another with loss of security if his subordinate should venture into his own creative opinion or action on pain of dismissal.

If we, the people, have no power of dissent and are prevented from voicing our opinions or ideas, then we have truly lost our dignity and identity as citizens of a free society.

We are citizens of freedom instituted by our founding fathers through our Constitution and its laws. We are sentinels at the gate to ensure the continuity of this great nation through these perilous times.

God bless America!

Jean Doktor

Oceanside

Help preserve small, local farms

Bill H.R. 875 will further bankrupt the Southern California fruit farmers. This is a last-ditch effort to stop people's efforts to develop and expand farmers markets. Large corporate farming is losing the American people because they are bringing uninspected foreign food and genetically engineered food to Americans. None of the safety problems in our food has been a problem at the local small farms.

We, as American fruit farmers, want to be free to grow healthy and fresh fruit and vegetables and make sure we can market them to our community. The people of San Diego deserve to have fresh, local organic food to eat. They will not have healthy food available to them if large corporations like Monsanto can influence our government to make so many regulations that small farmers cannot get natural seed, or end up with such high expenses that farming is no longer financially feasible.

Judith Shadzi

Valley Center

Children's future depends on safe food

Keep Monsanto and other big agribusiness out of our food supply! No more genetically modified organisms. We want whole foods grown locally and organically. Our children's future depends on a safe food supply, free from genetic engineering. The American people are not guinea pigs for big agribusiness!

Kathy McFarlane

Solana Beach

Editorial should have dug deeper

Your editorial on Sunday was something like threading a wet noodle through the eye of a sewing needle (" 'Slush fund' ought to go for fire planes," April 5). You must have been eating your pablum through a straw the day you wrote that editorial. The way you danced with the County Board of Supervisors was embarrassing.

Your premise was great about how the county has no money for fire planes, yet of the $10 million surplus fund, there is $5.5 million unspent and serious consideration should be forthcoming.

Now when you had them on the ropes, you stopped! Why? Everybody knows the cozy game the supervisors play with the surplus fund. That money, intended to stimulate businesses in the county, is annually awarded to businesses … Why desert your killer instincts? You were on the right path but failed to take them down for the count!

Supervisors take trips while county burns! Supervisors' personal trips abroad before county fire protection! Fire planes secondary to supervisors' personal trip! Pleasure before fire protection, quote supervisors! This is the kind of corruption that should be exposed! Come on, if you're gonna write an editorial, put a horseshoe in your glove before you start!

Dick Smith

San Marcos

Where did you get this guy?

Is Thomas D. Elias a Mexican or an American ("Immigrant bashing's rising crescendo," April 7)? Or one of these ancestor-worshiping "wish I could've been there with Villa" wannabees? Whatever he is, he certainly, like most illegal defenders, is a misguided racist enabler.

The disgrace of the American government is not scapegoating Mexican illegals, it is allowing anyone (yes, anyone!) to enter this country illegally when we have the capacity to stop them.

Any one of the thousands of American victims of an illegal attack by an illegal alien should pick up their weapons just as Villa and Zapata did and overthrow this corrupt and traitorous government.

Or we could do what makes sense and allow Mexican workers to come here legally with a "mica" and legal proof of employment. But to have to listen to the tripe that Mr. Elias spews is insulting and intellectually disingenuous when he knows he's defending criminals.

The biggest problem with all this is that if you can break one law, there is no law, because if you justify one criminal you justify them all.

Richard Cole

Encinitas

GOP has no basis for budget opposition

Re: "GOP predicts doomsday if Obama budget passed," March 23: Congressional Republicans who are criticizing President Obama's budget have no credible basis for waging war against it.

The overwhelming problems that have almost destroyed the U.S. economy were wrought by Republican misrule for the past eight years.

Unless congressional Republicans can produce a budget that would be in the best interests of our country, especially working families, their criticism should be ignored.

Bunny Landis

Oceanside

Neighbors ignored by Commission

I was extremely disappointed in the Planning Commission's response to the community over the Scripps expansion. From the beginning, the neighborhood has stated they are not against the expansion, but wanted their concerns listened to. They have been working with the hospital and city staff on this for four years. At every turn, the neighborhood has been accused of trying to stop the hospital's plans, which is just not true.

After very carefully and eloquently explaining their well-thought-out and easy solutions to the traffic problems created by the expansion, they were pretty much ignored, not only by the hospital, but also city staff and now our Planning Commission. The community should always be protected, especially when there are easy solutions to the traffic problems caused by the expansion.

The meeting should have been continued and a subcommittee formed to work things out. Instead, once again the new development is given permission to destroy the neighborhood ambience.

Yes, we most certainly need the hospital expansion, but not at the cost of an old, beautiful Encinitas neighborhood and our entire community.

Rachelle Collier

Encinitas

Desperate conservative propagandists

Fred Schnaubelt (Letters, March 31) is so determined to link Obama's capitalist reforms to socialism that, instead of using standard definitions of socialism from Karl Marx (its author), he uses variations from Ludwig von Mises, a deregulatory ideologue with a small, enthusiastic cult following. Schnaubelt cannot distinguish between political and economic systems. There are democratic socialist states (Europe) and totalitarian socialist states (Cuba, China). Obama seeks regulated market capitalism.

Frank Thurlow (Letters, April 1) shows the dangers of uneducated amateurs thinking they know more than real scientists. The guy watches a TV documentary, misinterprets a few facts and overrules (and misstates) scientific consensus on climate change. His reference to other causes of global warming implies that climate scientists suggest human activity as its sole cause. No one has said that. Human activity is one significant factor among various others, but the only one humans can control (or are responsible for).

And over the past week, we have been deluged by the name-calling lemmings â€"â€" who followed silently as their deregulatory policies led us over the economic cliff â€"â€" now calling Obama's moderate, pragmatic efforts to save capitalism "socialist" and "Marxist." They should not be surprised as others ignore their noisy rants.

Douglas Dunn

Escondido

Americans use English

Concerning the article in the North County Times on April 6 titled "Student group offers support for undocumented students": I have some advice for the young lady who didn't want her name published because she is an illegal immigrant who helped found the group called Espiritu de Nuestro Futuro. She said, "I want to say I'm an American because I feel like I'm an American." She's been in the U.S.A. since she was 4 years old.

My advice is this: If you want to be convincing, you'd be better off using an English name for your group. You lost me straightaway with the name in Spanish. Americans use English. You can't have it both ways. Either you're an American and you use English, or you're Mexican and you use Spanish.

Yvonne Anderson

San Marcos

Why citizens have no respect for government

I can tell you from personal experience that the taxpayers would be far better off if they would furlough the entire real property division.

After dealing with these people in an eminent domain case, their level of incompetence is astounding. They caused me to spend well over $10,000 in attorney fees, plus untold amounts in the three outside law firms they have retained â€"â€" all, by the way, Orange County firms.

These people are useless to the greatest degree. They are a perfect example of why the majority of citizens have no confidence in or respect for government at any level.

Aaron Nelson

Fallbrook

America's founding steeped in religion

Joseph Kraatz (Letters, March 24) and Douglas Dunn (Letters, March 26) reveal their ignorance of American history with their denials of their indebtedness to our country's Judeo-Christian heritage. Readers should go to the Library of Congress' Internet exhibit "Religion and the Founding of the American Republic" (www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/).

The introduction includes: "This exhibition demonstrates that many of the colonies that in 1776 became the United States were settled by men and women of deep religious convictions … New waves of 18th-century immigrants brought their own religious fervor across the Atlantic, and the nation's first major religious revival (the Great Awakening) in the middle of the 18th century injected new vigor into American religion. The result was that a religious people rose in rebellion against Great Britain in 1776, and that most American statesmen, when they began to form new governments at the state and national levels, shared the convictions of most of their constituents that religion was, to quote Alexis de Tocqueville's observation, indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions."

As evidence, the exhibit shows documents by many American leaders, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. My next letter will address specific Kraatz/Dunn errors.

Howard Killion

Oceanside

Why are we still listening to Cheney?

Enough, please, already. Why are we still listening to this liar, torturer and shredder of our Constitution, Mr. Cheney? Didn't we get enough of him for eight years? His contempt for President Obama knows no bounds, Obama keeps us less safe, Obama is pro-Palestinian, etc.

Did you see his wheelchair gimmick when Mr. Obama was sworn in? Pretending he hurt his back and couldn't stand. No, he just couldn't stomach or stand the idea of a black man beating his (candidate) to the presidency.

John O'Dwyer and Genevieve Mibeck

Oceanside

Energy farm protection question

Solar and wind farms to be functional must be exposed. Generally, both types of farms cover larger expanses of land than other types of energy producers (a half-million Mojave Desert acres is proposed by 19 different agencies). The wind turbines that some would like to see erected on the East Coast may take up many acres or even miles of coast. The commercial solar collectors require vast acreage to be cost- and energy-effective.

The energy farms' exposure and size makes them vulnerable to outside disruption. Unlike conventional energy-producing facilities, they cannot be protected by domes or housed underground. I have yet to read how these exposed energy farms are to be protected from disgruntled persons, domestic or foreign. One small plane plowing through a field of solar panels will disrupt all or part of a power grid. Protection for the wind turbines offshore is just as problematic, perhaps more so.

If proponents of wind and solar energy want these as primary power sources, what reasonable protections do they propose? Five hundred thousand acres is no small target.

David Lumpkin

Vista