Letters to the Editor

Out-of-town reader supportive of Pahrump after reading local news

Although I am not a member of your community (I live in Helena, Montana), I was curious about your valley after having read the letter published by Chris Zimmerman, Nye County GOP chairman. I value local news and national news.

I appreciate Pahrump Valley has a local paper that serves you. What is great about a local paper is you can read what’s important - events, family, lives well lived, sports (go Trojans), opinions, and more.

I enjoyed reading the local news. Each article tells a story.

While Mr. Zimmerman may mean well, his recent GOP letter has a number of inaccuracies, predictions, and misplaced anxiety. It has drawn national attention to Nye County.

Reading your local paper, however, shows me your community is more complex, caring, and challenging than one man’s opinion, including, of course, my own. All the best and congratulations to the Pahrump Valley Times on its 50th anniversary.

Bill Hallinan

Unproven assertions not as reliable as hard evidence

Undoubtedly, there will be different opinions on why a mob attacked a duly constituted government on Jan. 6,,2021. The most immediate reason is that President Trump did not accept defeat in our recent election and that he and some Republicans, including senators Cruz, Hawley, and House minority leader, McCarthy, kept broadcasting that the election was fraudulent, despite the facts that numerous courts, many of them presided over by Republican judges, denied all of president Trump’s petitions for a hearing on a fraudulent election because Trump and his associates did not produce one shred of evidence of voter fraud.

My understanding of the law is that assertions without evidence are hearsay, and that the person or persons who make unproven assertions have assumed fact without evidence.

I admit that lack of evidence does not in all cases prove the allegation to be false. However, this is our system of justice. How many times have the accused been acquitted because the prosecution could not prove its cases? There will probably never be a perfect justice system.

However, believing and adhering to the legal system we have is much preferred over mob violence. Does anyone want a justice system whereby the accused would have to prove his innocence?

Finally, believing something by huge numbers of people does not always make it true. For example, masses of people used to believe the earth was flat; that the sun orbited around the earth; witchcraft; that a cure for some diseases was to drain blood from the patients; that heavier weights of the same material would fall faster to the earth than the lighter ones, these being just some examples.

Our representative republic would be better served if more of us would rely on our system of justice, fact based on evidence, instead of believing hearsay put out by demagogues.

Jim Ferrell

Both parties are guilty of bad behavior in Washington

The extreme leftist Democrats are idiots, they flap their lips about anything that will get them on the TV news. Recently I have seen Pelosi, Schumer and others demand that Trump be impeached or the 25th Amendment be invoked, knowing that either one of these would take more time than he has in office.

This is only part of my gripe, politicians always want to look like they’re doing something that they know has little or no chance if becoming reality. Most seem to think that they were sent to Washington to score points by bashing the other side and both sides are guilty of this behavior.

I wish that this would stop and our elected officials would spend their time doing something worthwhile for their constituents and the country.

George Cross

Republican Party needs to regain control of itself

I am writing this in response to a front page article I read in the January 11th Review Journal. It is titled “Conspiracy post on GOP site”.

My jaw almost hit the floor when I read that this was coming from the Nye County GOP headquarters here in Pahrump! At first I thought the letter might be just the opinion of Mr. Zimmerman, the chairman of the Nye County Republican Central Committee.

However when I contacted the office, I was told that the contents of that letter was the joint opinion of the individuals on that committee.

To refresh the minds of readers, Mr. Zimmerman states in his letter that Vice President Pence is guilty of conspiracy and treason!

It also states several other crazy ideas, such as the presidential election results were altered by rouge satellites in space! Oh my, what about the UFOs? Were they involved as well? Does this sound to anyone else like it might be coming straight out of QAnon’s playbook?

You can read Mr. Zimmerman’s entire letter that is posted on the central committee’s website. As a resident of Pahrump and Nye County I am completely embarrassed by this! So Pahrump will probably make national news again. It seems like it’s almost always for some kind of bizarre headlines!

It is time for responsible mainstream Republicans to stand up and not let the party be taken over like this! If not, it looks like a sad time in history for the Grand Old Party!

Richard Evanson

Should we call it ‘propaganda’ or ‘public relations’?

Ever since I can remember, I heard the narrative that the Democrats are for the poor and working people and the Republicans were for the rich and business people, and every family I knew were Democrats but did occasionally vote for certain Republicans they liked, like Eisenhower, who they credit with the defeat of the Nazis.

I still hear that narrative in many circles today, but do the actual today facts support it? The propaganda machines continue to perpetuate that narrative for many years now, and yes, today it is called ‘public relations’ which when Joseph Goebbels copied the ‘propaganda playbook’ developed by the Woodrow Wilson administration, the word propaganda got changed to ‘public relations’.

The President-elect is putting forth his choices of people who will be in charge of powerful positions in his administration. It’s a tedious job and difficult for one person to look into all these people, their backgrounds, figure out their true beliefs, their family, and friend connections.

Getting back to the narrative in the financial arena, few people have heard of Black Rock Financial, which has at least some effect on nearly everyone in the world, especially in developed countries. As of 2020, Black Rock holds nearly 8 trillion dollars in equity, which if they were a country, they would be the third largest country in the world, behind only the U.S. and China. Biden has tapped Brian Deese, a lifelong Democrat, and big contributor, also a top executive in Black Rock, who also previously did some work for the Obama administration.

This only one example but there are many, many more and yes, there are exceptions, but just think and look at all the big businesses and corporations doing very well, especially since the pandemic and all the small businesses get squashed and/or silenced at this time. Maybe, with cognitive decline, the “Big Guy” still knows how to secure his 10 percent.

David Jaronik

Evidence does not back up claims of stolen election

According to the Washington Post, the biggest of Trump’s lies, over 3,000, is that the election was stolen from him. The facts do not back up Trump’s claim. Some are: The polls for several months before the election gave Biden an edge in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona with Ohio and Florida being toss-up states some of the time. Trump won three states- Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania by less than 80,000 votes in 2016. Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,000 votes in 2020. The votes were challenged and recounted without any significant change. Some states, like Georgia, had Republican governors and secretaries of state. In each state the secretary is responsible for overseeing the election and verifying that the votes are fairly counted. Trump and his Republican allies made 61 court challenges, many of the courts were presided over by Republican judges, and failed to produce evidence to even have a hearing. Trump failed to produce one shred of evidence of voter fraud. It’s a known fact that Democrats outnumber Republicans and Democrats often win if they can get the Democrats out to vote. It’s also a fact that most blacks are Democrats. Barack Obama went all out in 2020 to get the blacks out to vote. We saw them in long lines for days, waiting to get to the ballot box.

So why did Trump, a person with no political background, challenge one of the most fair elections in American history? To understand this question Trump supporters should read the book by his niece, Mary Trump, “Too Much is Never Enough”. Mary Trump has a PhD in diagnosing psychological disorders. She has known her uncle and has firsthand knowledge of his distorted behavior for most of his life. At an early age Trump was placed in New York Military Academy because he was incorrigible. He has been diagnosed as a psychopath.

Probably the biggest reason for Trump’s big lie is that the blacks, the race he hates with a bitter passion, defeated him in this recent election. There is proof aplenty of his dislike of blacks. The government cited him for discriminating against black renters. He had The New York Times publish a full page ad, urging the death penalty for five young black men accused of raping and killing a white woman in Central Park. Later the five young men were released on DNA evidence which proved they could not have been guilty. Trump has never apologized or even admitted he made a mistake. Psychopaths can’t.

So, why have so many bought into the big lie? I see parallels to Germany after World War I. Like in Germany we have an angry mob, albeit not wearing brown shirts, following a psychopathic charismatic leader.. In Germany the hated group was mostly the Jews.. In America it’is the Jews, blacks, socialists, abortion rights believers, and immigrants. Mob violence never has a good ending, it is almost always tragic.

Jim Ferrell

Reader disputes recent PV Times opinion column

Debra J. Saunders’ “How To Start A Civil War” is another example of the double speak that defies logic and truly infuriates conservatives. Her inane piece of hatchet work is mostly mistruths interspersed with outright lies, and like all good fake news writers, she uses apples to describe oranges.

Her take on the Russian collusion and massive mail-in voting was that it was not meant to nullify honest votes. Yes, it most definitely was, but it goes much farther than that. The theft of the election, and make no mistake because it was a theft, began when Mr. Trump secured the 2016 nomination. From that day on the mainstream media, including socialist-controlled media did everything ad nauseum in their power to degrade, debase, and denigrate him without any bases in fact. Lies often repeated become facts and who knows that better than Ms. Saunders?

The title of her fake diatribe, “How To Start A Civil War” is not even factual. It would not be a civil war, it would be a revolutionary war meant to reestablish a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That is obviously something foreign to Ms. Saunders and her ilk.

David Perlman

Unlikely Nevada will have enough vaccine for near future

On Jan 11, 2021, governor Sisolak gave a news conference, aired on Channel 5, about the COVID-19 vaccination program in Nevada. It emerged that the state of Nevada had received 170,000 doses of vaccine since Dec 14, 2020, and that 61,000 have been used, leaving 109,000 in storage.

There are about 3 million residents in Nevada. If all residents were vaccinated twice, then 6 million doses would be needed. At 60,000 shots in the arm per month it would take about 100 months, or more than eight years to complete the vaccination program (or four years if we went with one dose)!

Now, that length of time is not likely because our health care system is currently under a terrible strain from the surge in COVID-19 cases. We will likely be able to devote more resources to vaccination when the surge abates. Also, we will learn how to be more efficient.

However, that being said, it seems highly unlikely that Nevada will be able to boost its vaccination rate to over half a million per month. This would be about ten times the current rate, and needed to complete a one-dose program by end of June this year (HHS secretary Azar on Dec. 23 claimed this would be done). Even if we could do a half million per month we might be limited by supply from the manufacturers. Let’s hope that as more vaccine manufacturers come online, and existing ramp-up production, supply will not be limiting.

Anyway, what I conclude is that the state will not be able to vaccinate enough people to provide a general immunity anytime soon. Maybe by the end of 2021. We are sensibly prioritizing health care workers, the elderly in nursing homes, and other essential workers for shots which should reduce the death rate faster than a ‘first come-first served’ program.

George Tucker