Diebolt coverage was unbalanced
The Daily Star’s pre-election article against Mark Diebolt, who lost to Laura Conover, was patently unfair. For decades, Mark has been one of the premier prosecutors of the County Attorney’s Office. He’s successfully prosecuted more first-degree murder cases than almost anyone else in the history of that office.
Handling as many high-profile cases as he has, mistakes are inevitable. The fact that he was reprimanded four times in 23 years only means he’s human. One reprimand every 5.75 years is not a bad record. Hardly newsworthy.
But it’s not the reporting or even the timing of the piece that’s unfair, it’s the fact that lawyers and judges in the community weren’t asked to comment on Mark’s reputation. Over the decades, his reputation is that his word can be trusted. You don’t need to put things in writing when he gives you his word.
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He has the reputation of being a fair, reasonable, honest and excellent prosecutor. Before besmirching one’s reputation, investigate what that reputation is.
Louis Hollingsworth, attorney
East side
Response to COVID
has been robust
Joe Biden’s “new” plan to fight COVID-19 is laughable. More testing, wearing masks, listening to experts, manufacturing more PPEs, etc. Wow, how brilliant!
Sorry Joe, but Donald Trump has been doing that for months! COVID-19 case numbers and deaths are dropping across most of the country. Trump partnered the government with private industry to manufacture and acquire millions of masks, gloves, gowns, face shields and thousands of ventilators. He successfully got big health-care insurers to waive COVID-19 care copays, obtained over $2 trillion in COVID-19 relief from Congress for small businesses, the unemployed and individual cash payments of $1,200.
His executive orders offered further relief when Democrats in Congress refused to cooperate. Trump enacted travel bans and the Warp Speed project with vaccines coming soon. The FDA has fast-tracked new tests and therapeutics. America has tested more people than any other country. The economy is improving. And it was not only Trump, but also Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci who early on downplayed the severity of the virus!
Janice Newman
Foothills
Mail-in ballots safe under F. Ann’s watch
Relax, Pima County! We have the best early voting system in the country, thanks to F. Ann Rodriguez, our Pima County recorder. She has done an excellent job to ensure our votes are protected and accurately counted. We will be lucky if the next county recorder is even half as good as her.
Phyllis Peto
Northeast side
Political operatives
write for the AP
The Arizona Daily Star, along with local papers and online news outlets across the country, routinely publish stories from the Associated Press. The AP is Democratically biased and dislikes Donald Trump. It consists of freelance writers, who also write for liberal outlets like Politico, the Huffington Post, MSN, Yahoo news, etc.
Google the writers names to confirm this. The Star uses the AP almost exclusively as their “news feed.” The AP’s recent articles on the improving economy always contained some qualifier to minimize it. They pooh-poohed the powerful and exhilarating first night of the Republican Convention but wrote an empathetic article about Biden after he received the Democrat Party’s nomination.
The AP recently decided to capitalize the word “Black” in their articles, but not “white,” saying, “We agree that white people’s skin color plays into systemic inequalities and injustices, and we want our journalism to robustly explore these problems, but capitalizing the term white, as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs.”
Cherry Thompson
North side
Bring farmers, foresters
into the climate fight
I recently learned about Senate Bill 3894, the Growing Climate Solutions Act, which has bipartisan sponsors and diverse support from both industry and environmental groups. It would promote increased farmer and forester participation in carbon credit markets by creating a USDA certification program that would break down barriers that currently exist. This program has the potential to incentivize farmers and foresters to implement climate-smart practices by easing their access to needed capital via carbon credit markets.
Expansion of sustainable/regenerative agricultural practices has cost-effective potential to sequester significant amounts of atmospheric carbon and thereby aiding in the drawdown of greenhouse gases/mitigation of the ever-worsening effects of the climate crisis. As a retiree committed to climate advocacy, I have contacted our senators to solicit their support and encourage you to do the same.
Kurt Reuter
Southeast side
Trump can’t be
trusted in a crisis
Donald Trump failed in responding to crises.
Hurricanes devastated Puerto Rico in 2017. To date Puerto Rican Americans suffer from his inaction. Thousands of COVID-19 deaths could’ve been saved if swift action based on medical advice was taken. Instead Trump denied, lied, deflected.
He made mask-wearing a political statement. Many refuse to wear masks, taking their marching orders from the man who declared the pandemic a war. Trump never coordinated national responses to COVID-19. He threw it on governors.
Some leader! Today, 185,000 have died; more than any American war besides World War II and the Civil War. This wartime president failed as commander in chief.
He cannot understand our economy isn’t going to recover until COVID-19 is controlled. Instead of marshaling billions into research, he left it to private researchers to compete for solutions.
The racial divide is another crisis where Trump’s failed. He’s inflamed tensions with words and by supporting various groups, not deflating tensions by advocating empathy and urging unity.
George Francuski
East side
This voter wants
some assurances, Joe
Tell me: You are not going to raise my taxes. You are not going to destroy capitalism and promote socialism. You are not going to open our borders again to undocumented immigrants and give them free health care and education.
You believe that Black lives matter but support the abortion of tens of thousands of unborn children each year. You won’t support defunding the police and will condemn the riots and killings in our streets and will protect my city from the fear of antifa and its funded destruction of our American way of life.
You will support the Second Amendment and will fight to allow law-abiding U.S. citizens to keep and bear arms. That you won’t fill the swamp again in D.C. with the likes of AOC, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Beto O’Rourke.
Why you spent eight years in a stagnant administration and 36 years in Congress and didn’t solve any of the issues you now find so important.
Can’t say these ain’t so, Joe.
Robert Guth
North side
Navajo relief package originated in House
Myron Lizer, a Navajo leader, stated at the GOP convention Aug. 25 that President Trump gave them $8 billion. No, he didn’t! We the people gave the Navajo Nation the money. Lizer made it sound like Donald Trump gave them a personal check. What garbage.
Spending is authorized by the U.S. House of Representatives, headed up by the Democrats. It was Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats who created the relief funds, not Trump, and stipulated how they were spent.
As a matter of fact, the Trump administration held up the disbursement of the funds to the Navajo Nation beyond the 30-day time frame required by law. But when has the law ever meant anything to the Trump administration?
Peter Bakke
Northwest side
Role of emperor
doesn’t suit Ducey
A couple questions: Why does Arizona need a COVID-19 czar? If we do need a dictator to manage this virus, what in particular qualifies Doug Ducey to decide what businesses can be open, which ones must close and what changes our citizens must institute to safeguard our health? It turns out that the state law that gives the governor the power to declare an emergency also has a provision for “a concurrent resolution of the legislature declaring it at an end.”
A special session of the Legislature should be called, the emergency should be ended and a special coronavirus commission should be established. It should be composed of health experts along with some businesspeople who appreciate both the importance of controlling the virus and keeping the public employed and productive. Several heads are bound to be better than one. There is nothing about this virus that justifies making Arizona into a monarchy.
Paul Lotsof
Southeast side
Republican convention was actually full of light
I was watching the only conservative cable TV program Tuesday night, and the host played several clips of how the other networks were describing the Republican Convention. To a “t,” the hosts, reporters, and pundits at CNN, MSNBC, and ABC all used the exact descriptor “dark!” It was as if they had received talking points from the Biden campaign as to what to say.
Anybody who has watched the Republican convention knows that it was anything but “dark.” It was replete with inspiring stories of overcoming hardships, success, and optimism.
Yes, the left has been called out for their extremists policies. There is a psychological term called “projection” wherein a person’s own thoughts and feelings are redirected and applied to another person. The liberal media is transferring the real darkness displayed at the Democratic convention onto the Republican convention. Biden received no bounce in the polls after his convention.
Ric Hanson
North side