Letters to the editor

Resident speaks out about construction road damage

Have you noticed that Pahrump is becoming a speedway? Big trucks are rumbling down neighborhood roads using them as shortcuts to construction sites. Heavy loads are destroying house foundations and walls causing the stucco to crack. Walkers, bicyclers, and children playing are in danger from these vehicles who can’t easily stop or even see those on the side of the road.

All sorts of vehicles are treating our streets like a NASCAR race track. How often have you seen cars and trucks on both main and side streets going twenty or thirty miles over the speed limit? Cars trying to drive the limit are hounded by tailgaters or those who roar ahead to pass anything on the road, even if they are turning at the next corner. It’s time to slow down and start obeying the law.

Speed limits are meant to be enforced; they aren’t just a suggestion.

Betty Cotner

Reader submits a rebuttal to offended letter writer

Regarding the letter to the editor from Dave Thomas published on May 12: Mr. Thomas, I am a retired businessman from private enterprise, hardly the qualifications to be a socialist. I have never advocated socialism. Private enterprise, allowing competition, is the most effective means of getting goods and services to consumers at the best price, and I believe we in the good old USA are as good, if not better than anyone when it comes to free enterprise.

However, having said the aforementioned, I do not have to approve present day Republican leadership. I am just one of many who has left the Republican Party, and I am not totally pleased with the Democratic Party.

I don’t believe in all the entitlements by the Democrats, but I also don’t believe in tax giveaways of two trillion to the top 1% on income to the richest billionaires.

Jim Ferrell

White ‘privilege’ sometimes is not all that it seems

I am really sick and tired of the idiots in Washington, D.C. telling me that I am racist and of white privilege. The following is a short synopsis of my life. I grew up around black people and consider some my friends. We were all Americans and bled red blood alike. My father was sent to prison when I was 5 years old. My mother sent me and my two brothers, seven and nine years to a children’s home in Kansas. We were there for five years and I consider it a prison for little people. After our release we went to live with my mother and after a little over a year, when my father was released from prison, we were sent to join him and his new-found wife. My brothers found a quick escape from that scenario very quickly. I was the youngest and endured it for a little over a year. It wasn’t pleasant but I survived.

I went down the road with my meager belongings with my thumb in the air. I grew up and survived through some rather tough years. There was no one to complain to because most of them were having just as hard a time as I was. I graduated with very good grades from high school.

I went on to become a soldier, a highway patrolmen and a business owner and truck driver for 35 years. I am currently an 84-year-old registered Democrat. I have not voted Democrat since JFK. I didn’t leave the party - it left me and is currently fast moving to the communist party. I made it without minimum wage or welfare to fall back on. I pulled myself up like all of the other people did in that era, by hard work.

I didn’t not do this by myself. I finally realized lately that there was a much larger force than anything on this earth helping me along, GOD was by my side. I can’t praise him enough. May God bless each and every one of you. God bless America.

Stacy L. Riney

Is our hard-fought freedom now being forgotten?

Slave trading is still being done in some countries overseas today. Question is, how many American families now in America still have families overseas or come from early American slave families and have no knowledge of their ancestors or whereabouts of them?

We are all alive and most are well here in the USA because of our forefathers pulling together and fighting for our republic, a government of the people, by the people and for the people, not the rich or famous by force.

Everyone has the right as citizens to be who they want to be and elect who they think is best for themselves and their future family. Think how lucky we are to live in such a country.

Most of this was fought for with great loss of life by many of today’s families’ forefathers’ dreams of the belief in our Constitution and the thought of being free.

It’s time our young understand the trials our past has gone through to be who we are now. Long live the republic of the United States of America.

Henry Hurlbut

Socialist countries under defense umbrella of US

Calling the “kettle black” about facts. CJ Stevens April 30, 2021 PVT letter, criticized George Cross’ facts. Omission of facts can be just as misleading as altered facts, sometimes even more so.

For example, the “successful” socialized countries mentioned in CJ’s letter have lived under the protective ‘defense’ umbrella of the U.S. for many decades (even those not in NATO). The biggest expenditure in most nations’ budgets is defense, reaching close to 50%. Most of those nations haven’t been “paying their fair share” for decades, which releases funds up to 20, 30, or 40 percent for other things.

Trump did squeeze and embarrass some of them until he left office, but we returned to the longtime ‘status quo’. The few exceptions today are nations that are now in NATO that were previously behind the Iron Curtain.

Next, CJ’s “court-packing fault assignment”. Historically, it has happened several times before, it all depends on who held the presidency and how big the party majority was in the U.S. Senate. So much of the ‘blame’ rests without our own former senator who dissolved the filibuster regarding judge approvals, which would have easily stopped that terrible “pro-lifer”. This space is too small to get into everything, but I do agree in part with CJ’s spending’ statement, at least in part.

Both parties and most politicians, in general, find it much easier to spend other people’s money for their own usually covert reasons. The biggest difference particularly in the previous administration, was due to his tax policies, cutting regulations, etc.

For the first time in over 60 years we were energy independent, tax revenues reached record levels until the communist Chinese virus closed the economic world. The new administration may very well surpass spending in its first year, what took four years prior.

The only difference people may find is their new ‘sugar daddy’ is just giving them Monopoly money.

David Jaronik