Missing phone logs, national security
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump used their positions as senior White House advisors to find debt loaners and acquire over 40 Chinese trademarks for products including coffins and voting machines. Together they made up to $640 million while working for the Trump administration. Hunter Biden has never worked in the White House. He also never made 100s of millions of dollars while working with a security clearance that gave him access to classified intelligence. I think whatever is in Hunter Biden’s laptop is irrelevant and not a matter of national security. The resurrection of the laptop story is a distraction from the former president’s involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Whatever was in the missing phone logs from Jan. 6, 2021, are a national security matter and a crucial story that needs to be uncovered and reported.
Linda Stanley
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Northeast side
No one left out
Shortly before his inauguration in 1933, our physically disabled president, Franklin Roosevelt, wrote to his intended Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in a president's cabinet: "We are going to make a country in which no one is left out." Their administration accomplished much toward realizing that goal. But it took Harry Truman to integrate our armed forces, the Supreme Court to outlaw 'separate but equal' and the civil rights and voting rights legislation of the 1960s to enable full participation in our government by all. And now we're working to accept and include our transgender sisters and brothers, with President Joe Biden declaring on Transgender Day of Visibility: “I want you to know that your president sees you. Our entire administration sees you for who you are — made in the image of God, deserving of dignity, respect and support.” But we aren't all willing to include them as they are, as our Republican legislative majorities and Gov. Doug Ducey demonstrate. What gives them the right to exclude anyone?
Frank Bergen
Northeast side
Empathy is a dirty word
Empathy is a dirty word to Republicans. Obviously, Sens. Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, Marsha Blackburn and Lindsey Graham not only lack empathy, but lack respect for our democracy and for another human being. I think their vitriolic treatment of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson showed not only their ignorance of the Constitution, law and judicial system, but also their disrespect for an eminently qualified, honorable, outstanding woman and the American people. To display such histrionics to further their own far-right agendas and counting on their deplorable base to applaud them is the very definition of deplorable.
A physician must be knowledgeable about scientific facts, research and statistics. But to be a good physician, she must have compassion and empathy. Law is the same. A judge must know the law. But besides a set of rules and statutes, there are human beings involved. To be a good judge requires both knowledge and empathy. Otherwise, law and medicine could be done by a computer — facts only, ignore the human component.
S.B. Katz, M.D., J.D.
Foothills
Men and birth control
Re: the April 2 article "Women shouldn't be only ones responsible for birth control."
Florynce Kennedy expressed it best: "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."
Patricia Dow
Midtown
2016 presidential campaign revisited
During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate and former President Donald Trump continually stated the election "was rigged." He was elected "fair and square" as we all know. Can someone please enlighten us as to why he did not step up to the plate and resign as the election "was rigged?"
Bill Riordan
Sierra Vista
A question for the senators
A question for Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Sen. Ted Cruz, and the others of their ilk: What is a moron? If these shameful excuses for senators are struggling for an answer, they need only to look in a mirror.
Deb Klumpp
Oro Valley
Ukraine war crimes
I saw a picture from Ukraine that tells a vast story. A man lies on the ground. He seems to be wearing clothes of an older man, with a dark overcoat. No uniform, no weapon, nothing threatening. His dead legs are wrapped around a bicycle. An ordinary man wearing ordinary clothes riding an ordinary bicycle on an ordinary road in what most likely must have been his own town, where he belonged. And where the Russians did not belong. What are these people, these Russian soldiers, who would do this? And what are those Americans who rise up in self-righteous anger to cheer them on TV? How could this be?
George Yost
Vail
What made us great
Americans like to call this the greatest nation the world has ever known. I think America became great because she granted land to most of her early citizens.
With land, individuals and families were assured of never, or rarely, staying in debt. Being credit-worthy meant being free. The land contained resources — water, minerals, timber, transit rights and sub-parcels — that could be sold when needed to cover debts. In time, land became available to all to a degree.
I think our ancestors were animated by a code of ethics that inspired them to endless economic inventiveness, regular civic participation, family solidarity, educational ambition and spiritual backbone.
They believed they had to honor their economic contracts, their political promises, their vows to spouses, their commitments to justice and to heaven, and the study of law and democracy. All these things were nonnegotiable. Doing them made them unstoppable.
Who does not follow, support and lay down his life for one who keeps promises?
Kimball Shinkoskey
Downtown
Education and teachers' union
Sadly, the state of education in Arizona has nothing to do with the teachers' unions. Teachers’ unions do the following:
They negotiate: wages, benefits, length of working day, maximum class size, number of in-service training days, teacher discipline and firing procedures and retirement benefits.
What is taught in our schools is determined by: federal mandates, the State Board of Education, the local school boards and the school system administrations.
Maybe the core of the issue with our Arizona schools is that we have gotten what we paid for.
Gregory Tanko
Green Valley
