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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 12, 2016)
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, AUGUST 12, 2016 FRIDAY EXCHANGE A job well done S teve Forrester’s editorial on Aug. 3 brought many mem- ories of friends and ine peo- ple to my mind (“Of Cabbages and Kings: 28 years inside a gathering of eccentrics,” The Daily Astorian). Thank you so much, Steve, for so many years on the job. What a nice farewell. What a credit to his profession! MICHAEL MANION Seaside No Trump don’t go for most “patri- ots,” especially the self-pro- claimed and self-decorated variety. But Donald Trump is a real and present danger to our country. The nation he represents is not the U.S., but someplace more resembling Deadwood, on that TV program, where it was dog-eat-dog and the only enforcement of rules was to occasionally shoot or hang somebody. That didn’t work out well even for people as tal- ented as Wild Bill Cody and Calamity Jane. And they were the good guys. The country he envisions is not this country, which he doesn’t even understand. It is our no-joke patriotic duty to reject this dangerous, deranged demagogue. Soundly. We need to chew him up and spit him out. Meanwhile there’s the Olympics, where our boys and girls might whip everybody else’s boys and girls at difi- cult, painful and dangerous tasks. Plus, this one’s got Zika and a polluted bay for comic relief. If Godzilla comes up out of that bay and starts eat- ing people, I’ll pay closer attention. And I’ll prefer that to Trump. JOSEPH WEBB Astoria I Fund library T o see a town’s library is to see its soul. Asto- ria deserves a bigger, newer library that relects its position as the seat of Clatsop County. Do you not see that “… it isn’t just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Uni- verse, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you — and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life.” (Isaac Asimov, 1971) Let’s get down to business and fund a new library to be built on Heritage Square. PATTI JONES Astoria I’ll sign second T hank you to Mayor LaMear for the letter to the governor (“LaMear calls for action on guns,” The Daily Astorian, July 19). We, as a society, need to recognize the direction we are headed even though there will never be 100 percent agreement on every- thing proposed. Sensibility has to prevail, and we must begin some- where. I’ll gladly sign sec- ond (or wherever) below your name on the letter, but my pen- manship is nothing like “John Hancock.” PAT WILSON Astoria Can’t see the forest ud Henderson’s recent let- ter “Forest facts” (The Daily Astorian, Aug. 5) misses the mark in some important areas. His supposition that Gwendolyn Endicott (“Clear- cut question,” The Daily Asto- rian, July 29) is “anti-logging” fosters the kind of “us ver- sus them” mentality that only serves the timber industry. The industry thrives on creating the divisiveness to scare timber industry workers into thinking someone wants to take away their jobs. Ms. Endicott, and people like myself, are not opposed to logging if it’s done in an ecologically sound way. Cut- ting down all but two trees B Respect our law enforcement A while back, a longtime friend sent me a letter titled “Support Police” from the July 20 edition of the Yakima Herald, written by Alan Jones. The piece was, to me, a welcome respite of common sense. Meanwhile, the mood of the nation and our press evidently has moved on to greener pastures, like the everdevelop- ing contentiousness of high-proile pol- itics. Still, the fact remains that the pri- mary barrier between chaos and the vast majority of us is, as ever, the Thin Blue Line. Period. And it is a responsibility of our national, state and local leaders to focus on the overwhelming positive contributions law enforcement makes to our nation at all levels. But, not all of our citizens choose to cooperate in good faith with our law enforcement oficers. As Jones states, “Some citizens … have moved toward per acre, repeatedly spraying the broken soil with pesticides and replanting ir saplings that grow into tight, uniform stands more prone to ire is not eco- logically sound. It is inaccu- rate to suggest that those tree farms equate with a native for- est. A native forest is a much more complex, life sustain- ing system that is irreparably harmed by clearcutting. The numbers Henderson cites to demonstrate the impor- tance of timber-related jobs are relatively insigniicant when looking at the whole state where lumber, wood prod- ucts and paper account for only 5 percent of total employ- ment. Statistics from the Ore- gon Employment Division also show that increased tim- ber harvest doesn’t equate with more forest industry jobs. That’s because of the mas- sive exporting of logs, which minimizes the number of mill jobs at home. Do the timber barons care? Did they care about job loss when they auto- mated, introducing machines like the feller buncher that can cut down over 100 trees in an hour, work that formerly took a team of men instead of one operator? As Henderson states, the Big Creek area of Clatsop County is a good example of stewardship by a timber com- pany. Unfortunately, that stew- ardship is not the timber com- pany norm. Failure to clean up pollution from logging along the North Coast caused the loss of a $1.2 million federal grant that should have gone to coastal counties for water quality improvement proj- ects. If the timber companies care so much, Mr. Henderson, maybe they could pony up the $1.2 million to get those proj- ects started. ROGER DORBAND Astoria Disappointed hile I appreciate the work and effort the people on the Astoria Library board put forth on all of our behalf, I am a little disap- pointed that they decided to W The most valuable and respected source of local news, advertising and information for our communities. www.eomediagroup.com not obeying laws and defying authority in recent years. Examples of this lawless- ness can be seen every day with people texting, running red lights and speeding in their cars. More importantly, peaceful protests frequently become riots.” Worse, some of our citizens have begun assassinating our police oficers — on and off duty. Where is the outrage directed at this level of lawlessness by our citizenry? Jones again: “National leaders, including our president, have called for an end to ‘police brutality.’ These people want to end police shooting citizens, as does everyone else in the country. Vid- eos show citizens being shot by police. If one watches closely they will see that these ‘victims’ of police brutality brandished a weapon, strongly resisted arrest and/or did not follow the direc- tions given.” look so far aield for a new head librarian. I cannot believe they could not ind a satisfactory replace- ment from among the many capable folks presently work- ing and doing a ine job at Alan Jones clearly gets it; common sense, competing with seemingly inexo- rable emotional contagion, occasionally slipping toward hysteria, must prevail. He ends his letter as follows: “If peo- ple stopped by police simply followed directions, shootings would not be nec- essary. Our national leaders, especially our president, should be telling peo- ple to follow police directions irst to avoid trouble. These leaders should not blindly suggest every police shoot- ing was unjustiied before it is even reviewed. Lack of strong guidance from our national leaders is fueling a ire of anarchism in this country not seen since the 1960s. This country needs new com- mon sense leadership at the highest lev- els, and police support, not unsupported criticism.” MAURIE HENDRICKSON Astoria the library. This phenomenon of hiring from afar is, in my opinion, ill advised and has the potential for deteriorating moral. SAM DEVEREAUX Astoria Trump and Russia V ladimir Putin gave Don- ald Trump a nice pres- ent when he released Krem- lin-hacked internal Democratic National Committee emails, 5A apparently biased against Ber- nie Sanders, just at the begin- ning of the Democratic con- vention. The result was exactly as intended — disruption and discord among the Democratic delegates at the convention, ending in the resignation of the DNC chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. During The Donald’s next speech he thanked Mr. Putin profusely for his assistance, asserting that this new infor- mation from Russia will turn the tide and help him get elected president of the US. Unfortunately, The Donald’s propensity toward speaking before thinking took over at that point, and he then invited his buddy Putin to hack into U.S. State Department com- puters and locate some other emails that he thought would help with his campaign. Forethought is deinitely not one of Mr. Trump’s long suits, or he would have real- ized that inviting a foreign power, particularly a more or less unfriendly one, to hack into our government’s com- puters is very close to treason. When asked early in the pri- mary campaign about Vlad- imir P., The Donald said that they “have a close relation- ship.” After this little “error” of judgment in his speech, in a later interview, he asserted that he had “never met the man.” And, he does this with a straight face. Would Russia like to see Trump as president of this country? You bet. Vladimir is a product of the Soviet Union, and he yearns to make Rus- sia great again (sound famil- iar?) in that image, lording the power of his huge country over his small neighbors. Trump would gut NATO, leaving the Baltic states wide open to Rus- sian invasion without any real resistance, just like in Ukraine. If you would like our coun- try to be a mirror image of Rus- sia, where there is no free press, no freedom of speech, no free- dom of assemblage, no right to address grievances against the government, where the work- ing classes live in extreme pov- erty and those in power become extremely rich, then Donald Trump is your man. ROD DAWSON Seaside