Letters: Boating tragedy, Memorial Day and election season
MATTITUCK
Sorry for family’s loss
I want to express the deepest sympathy to the Trionfo family regarding the tragic loss of young Dominic’s life this past Sunday in Mattituck’s Peconic Bay.
As a lifelong resident here, it brings me great sadness that this beautiful place has been connected to such a tragic and awful thing.
No parent should ever have to face losing their child.
Please accept my apologies and sincerest concerns. May God keep you and bless you indefinitely. You will be in my thoughts and prayers.
Erica Wells
EAST MARION
Memorial Day poem
This Memorial Day let us all take time out to give thanks to the one million servicemen and -women who, throughout our history, gave their young lives to preserve our liberty and freedom.
What poem can better describe their sacrifice and show the high esteem in which we hold these young heroes?
“America the Beautiful”
O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood,
From sea to shining sea.
Let us all pray that all our servicemen and -women return home unharmed from these foreign wars, which we should end as soon as possible.
God Bless America!
John Copertino
GREENPORT
Ka-ching
I am dismayed by the Suffolk Times’ willingness to repeatedly publish lunatic rantings on its letters page.
It must sell papers for them. (Why publish otherwise?)
On the upside, these embarrassing spewfests are also magic fundraising tools.
Every time J.C. of East Marion writes another letter, ka-ching, money for the Democrats.
Mr. C. turns out to be the goose who’s laid the golden egg — whodathunkit, but it serves him right.
His bullying tone and twisted read on everything instantly bring back the ugly.
They tell you everything you’d want to know about what a disgrace really is, and will raise a ton of cash for everything he hates.
Keep writing, John, I am sending your brain-busters out to everyone I can think of, especially all the Socialists, Ingrates and Trust Fund Babies.
Everyone’s waiting to hear more about Emperor Hussein’s Plantation, and all those CrAzY misguided converts — we’re depending on you!
$$$$$$.
Jenny Feder
MATTITUCK
Out of whack
It’s all about “equality and fairness.”
Ah, yes, there’s good news tonight. As with all things there is a silver lining out there somewhere — you’ve gotta search for it. Keep looking.
In Mattituck, the small hamlet in the township of beautiful Southold, apparently, the human race is not an “endangered species” — at least when compared to the, I guess, declared “endangered piping plover.”
Based on the allotted fenced-off area on Breakwater Beach, we human erectors are doing just fine — we’re down to a small spot near the water’s edge. The small “endangered” feathered species of life have all of the more spacious terra-firma now to browse about; claiming their “natural” right to produce and multiply. As Obama would probably say, it’s all about “equality and fairness.”
They have their rights too. Hmmm.
Something is definitely out of whack.
Jack McGreevy
LAUREL
Background blather
Recently a GOP supporter spoke of the GOP intransigence on tax hikes. To justify his party’s anti-tax philosophy, he said “The tax structure in the U.S. is the highest and most damaging in the world. To rebuild the economy and bring in business and jobs we must lower taxes.” If true, this would make sense. However, the actual situation is not like that. The United States is actually lower taxed than our Democratic world competitors.
Taxation is made up of two rates. The published tax percentage rate is the public information. The rate that is actually paid when the loopholes and gimmicks are applied is the real rate.
The actual tax rate, as explained by the Heritage Foundation in Wikipedia, is the dollars paid by a nation as the percentage of its GDP. Looked at from this point of view the tax cost in various countries, which could be seen as our competitors, is compared with the United States: United States, 27 percent; Ireland, 31 percent; Canada, 32 percent; Israel, 37 percent; United Kingdom, 39 percent; Germany, 41 percent; and Italy, 42 percent.
You can see that the claim that the United States needs to lower taxes to stop the migration of jobs and business to lower-taxed competitors is untrue.
Unfortunately, this is just one more example of the GOP zealots manufacturing facts to suit their current argument. It is unfortunate that the desire to take the White House and depose President Obama overpowers their desire to rebuild our United States.
Howard Meinke
ORIENT
The land of ‘no’
The “no” community has once again raised its ugly head.
This time the children and community were saved from iPads, a lower budget (much lower then any other district of similar size) and possible school choice, in which few, if any, would not chose beloved Greenport.
In the past we were saved from a better cell tower and better emergency reception, a water pipeline that would help fight a house fire and ferry traffic.
Yes, we are for open spaces.
On May 16 Newsday said more than 93 percent of school budgets were approved. But not the naysayers of Orient. We were one of eight budgets that failed while 116 passed.
Thank God for the dedicated teachers and principal, administrators and staff and the very happy children. They stay above it all.
They love their school.
Bob Hulsmann
RIVERHEAD
Here we go again
Randy Altschuler, the biannual candidate for Congress, made a fortune by sending 10,000 American jobs overseas. He spent $3 million two years ago and lost to his opponent. It’s a shame he didn’t use that money to help the communities to which he recently moved. Mr. Altschuler is a wheeler-dealer and an opportunist. He has not done anything to merit his running for Congress.
This country needs builders and doers for our district.
Warren McKnight
SOUTHOLD
Presidential race leaves me cold
From the letters in last week’s paper it would appear that the 2012 presidential campaign is well under way. Supporters from both sides of the aisle came out swinging in support of their respective candidates and as I was reading I found myself asking, “What exactly have these two done? What, if anything, have they accomplished? What are we supposed to base our support on?”
It finally dawned on me that since neither one is a ball of fire in the action department we should come up with a different criteria for rating them. After thinking about this new political measuring stick it suddenly occurred to me that with these two individuals the only fair approach would be to judge them by their hairstyles. On the one hand we have the challenger, Mitt “The Wet Head Is Dead” Romney who, along with Elizabeth Bachmann, makes an ideal poster child for what is wrong with the Republican Party.
Way too rich, way too slick, I particularly enjoy watching him appear at a factory entrance with his sleeves rolled up, greeting the employees like he’s “just one of the guys.”
Can anything be more pathetic? Not a hair out of place, the only member of his entourage without a jacket and tie, I find myself yelling at the TV, “Hey, Slick! It’s not working! Get back in the limo and go have a power breakfast somewhere!”
On the other hand we have the incumbent, Barack “Pinetop” Obama, arguably one of the most inept presidents in our history. A former professor of constitutional law who, among other things, appears to know nothing about the Constitution. He continually amazes me with his ability to verbally pat himself on the back no matter what the situation. He, too, likes to appear in front of people with his sleeves rolled up, but unlike “Wet Head” old Pinetop’s appearances tend to take place in big union halls where the audience is always friendly and the contributions are plentiful. But as Willie Sutton once said, “That’s where the money is!”
So what does all this add up to? How do we get off the presidential treadmill that produces candidates as ludicrous as Rick Perry, as morally bankrupt as John Edwards or as brazen as Herman Cain? It seems the only real qualification a person needs is the ability to raise money and, as history has shown us, the candidate with the biggest war chest is the most likely to be elected. And what does this fact lead to? What we have now, no real choice because we haven’t been given any real answers to contemplate from the two “standard bearers” who claim to be everything to everybody. There has to be a better way.
Patrick Lohn
CALVERTON
What do the candidates think?
Last week a letter appeared entitled “He is a disgrace.” In it, the writer says that the president is a “disgrace … to this great country, which he is attempting to convert into his socialist empire.” He goes on to say that the president “is committed to converting our nation into a plantation society” and that “he will live in memory as our worst president, and he will not only have disgraced our flag, but his family as well.”
I would like the Times/Review editors to show that letter to Randy Altschuler and George Demos and get their reaction on the record for your readership. In 2008, Republican presidential candidate John McCain, a man universally recognized as a hero and a patriot, stood up to similar hate speech during his campaign. His response to a woman at one of his rallies was that then-Senator Obama is a “decent family man and citizen who I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.” It would be important for the voters of the 1st Congressional District to know whether our two Republican candidates for Congress have the backbone and decency to do the same.
Jerry Silverstein
