• Vets’ health care costs rising • Crazy days, people • List maker marvels at letter • Osama’s not in charge • Kind gesture Vets’ health care costs rising In the near future you will be asked to vote on
• Vets’ health care costs rising
• Crazy days, people
• List maker marvels at letter
• Osama’s not in charge
• Kind gesture
Vets’ health care costs rising
In the near future you will be asked to vote on an increase in health care costs for retired career military veterans.
As a retired career military veteran, I ask that you vote NO for any proposed increases.
President George Bush, during his campaign in 2000, and again in 2004, promised military retirees they would receive the health care they were promised. These promises have not been kept. In fact, we are now faced with increased costs for the care we do receive.
We retirees do not have money like Abramoff; all we have is our blood and a vote. We have given our blood (for more than 20 years) and given the Republican Party our vote during the last election.
Will the Republican Party receive the military vote next time? How I vote will depend heavily upon the administration’s position. That position should determine how you vote on this matter in the upcoming election.
Crazy days, people
The world’s gone crazy! In Williamsville, N.Y. a 6-year-old boy kissed a girl on the cheek, after she asked him to, and was charged with sexual harassment. The boy was more upset for being banned from “coloring time” with his friends, and not being allowed to participate in his ice cream party for his good attendance.
In Canton, Ohio, a 6-year-old boy with ADHD had to go to the doctor on the day of his class field trip, so his mom put him in the tub so he wouldn’t see the school bus. When he heard the bus and ran to the window to tell them to wait, not only was the little boy suspended for sexual harassment, he was told by school officials to sign a paper stating that he understood the charges against him.
In El Paso, Texas, a boy stuck his tongue out at a girl during a play-ground dispute and was charged.
The sad thing is that these boys don’t understand the severity of what has happened. A California boy was told by a friend that he wasn’t allowed to attend his birthday party because of a similar incident. When these boys apply for college, they’ll find a “sexual harassment charge” on their permanent school record.
Title IX’s unfortunate side effect has created this atmosphere that it’s okay to target and label boys as young as 6 years old as sexual predators by adults who are lacking in experience, knowledge, or plain common sense.
Title IX was written to ensure equal rights for both men and women, but is primarily used to eliminate athletic opportunity for college men. The law never seemed to apply whenever gender-inequities favored women, and this precedent has made it to the elementary school level where girls are just as, if not more, physically expressive as boys. But nationwide, only boys have been charged for sexual harassment for innocent hugs or kisses.
By the way things are going, if a kindergartner falls on a girl in the schoolyard, he may be charged with anything from sexual harassment to attempted rape.
It’s totally crazy.
- Edwin Ramos, UH Manoa
Lihu’e
List maker marvels at letter
In Mr. Machell’s Feb. 12 letter, he quotes President George Bush’s July 14, 2004 remarks about the Patriot Act. Those remarks about “wiretapping” were in regards to domestic wiretapping without a warrant.
The wiretapping that the president is being accused of breaking the law by doing is always on calls where one end is in a foreign country, and especially if that country is known to harbor terrorists, or be a terrorist nation itself. And the president has followed the law by briefing at least eight members of Congress, four from each party, in the manner prescribed by law. There’s nothing in either the Patriot Act, or even FISA, that supercedes the president’s Constitutional authority … duty, even, during war-time, and like it or not, Mr. Machell, we are in a war.
Evidently Mr. Machell either neglected to read the joint resolution authorizing the use of force, or he failed to notice this part: “Whereas the president has authority under the Constitution to take action in order to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States, as Congress recognized in the joint resolution on Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40).”
Mr. Machell wishes me to add him to my “list”?
This list I would “add” you to is not the one you might think it would be.
Osama’s not in charge
Oh please, Mr. Broussard.
Osama bin Laden in charge?
Of us?
Of our president?
If he were, our presence would be long gone from all Arabic countries. I’m sure that would make him happy as a clam. But our president (the one, like it or not, that was voted in by the majority of the American people), has chosen to stay the course, not be a quitter, and finish a job that needs to be done.
That he obviously walked the fine legal line between protecting the people of the United States and infringing on constitutional rights by eavesdropping on honestly targeted terrorist telephone activity, well, as for me, he can tap my phone anytime if it help keep the people who have vowed to hurt me and my own out of my back yard. And I just bet there are a lot of silent folks out there who agree.
Kind gesture
On Feb. 9, just as we returned from an errand in Kapa’a Town, a gentleman phoned to let us know that he had found my husband’s wallet. We took the directions to his home in Kapahi and went immediately to pick it up and are so grateful for this kindness.
Not only did Roland take the trouble to contact us right away, he was most concerned that he had run over the wallet and may have damaged the contents.
We had not even had a chance to notice that the wallet was missing and can not begin to thank Roland for all the worry and aggravation his honesty and thoughtfulness has saved us.
The Garden Island produces more than just beautiful flowers — beautiful people with the spirit of aloha abound — and Roland, you are one of them.
- Syd and Sandy Jacobs
Kapa’a
