Correcting tea party critics
Bill Phillips and Randolf Aragon (Community Voices, April 17) have drunk the Kool-Aid being served up by the true cult in politics today, the followers of The Great and Mighty Obama-Pelosi-Reid.
Mr. Phillips says we confuse diplomacy as weakness. Where has President Obama practiced diplomacy? He bows down to foreign powers and ignores our best ally in the Middle East. Mr. Phillips has bought the line that 95 percent of working families have seen their taxes lowered. Perhaps Mr. Phillips hasn't seen the statistics that 47 percent of all Americans pay no taxes at all.
Obama-Pelosi-Reid wants to raise taxes on gasoline by 15 cents a gallon, raise capital gains taxes and add a value-added tax on everything produced in America. Who doesn't have "the slightest idea what's going on with taxes," Mr. Phillips?
Regarding Mr. Aragon's letter about threats, name-calling and racial slurs directed at President Obama and Congress: I say, produce the evidence that such threats and slurs ever occurred. Everyone carries a cell phone, yet no video of such threats or slurs has surfaced. All activist groups have a few nuts, Mr. Aragon. The Tea Party is 99.99 percent good, honest, hard-working people who are afraid of the direction Obama-Pelosi-Reid is taking us.
Len Handzlik
Aguanga
Stop the quarry before it's too late
With all the arguments going back and forth about the quarry — some true, some questionable — one fact stands alone and cannot be disputed or ignored: the water!
Avocado growers in this area have had to destroy their crops in order to conserve water, we are all being encouraged to plant drought-tolerant yards and get low-flush toilets, there is talk about rationing our water — and yet the quarry is going to use 130 million gallons of new water each year?
Where is that going to come from? What are we going to have to sacrifice so that they can have enough water to operate? Once they're approved, it will be too late. Let's stop this snowball before it becomes an avalanche.
Jack Evans
Murrieta
Editor's note:
The remaining letters that ran in today's Californian can be found under the North County Times letters section at www.nctimes.com/news/opinion/letters/.
