Is Monty Python’s ministry of Silly Walks the next step for Florida government? | Letters
Here’s what readers are saying in Tuesday’s letters to the editor.
Ministry of Silly Walks
Big staff, budget for election crime unit | Dec. 20
The governor’s budget contains a request for 45 “investigators” and $5.7 million to fight “voter fraud and other irregularities.” I guess he forgot about the National Vote Fraud Commission formed by President Donald Trump that disbanded itself after searching in vain for any voter fraud to fight. The Legislature should not take this up, unless they are trying to outdo Monty Python in creating useless and comedic government departments.
Frank McMullen, Ruskin
Big government spies
Big staff, budget for election crime unit | Dec. 20
With his new goon-squad, Gov. Ron DeSantis can have deep-dive background checks done on all of Florida’s county election officials and set up surveillance teams to spy on voters in line to make sure no one hands out water or renders any aid to the long lines of waiting voters. Don’t you feel safer already?
Brian Walkowiak, St. Petersburg
Support our veterans
I thank and commend County Commissioner Janet Long on her column severely criticizing the Seminole City Council and Mayor Leslie Waters for not supporting building a facility to house homeless veterans. I hope that the Seminole leadership has a strong Plan B to help them, but I doubt it.
My father was a captain in the Army during WWII and my uncle was a major. I was a lieutenant in the Air Force for three years during the Vietnam War. Two of our sons were Marines and served in Iraq under hostile conditions. One earned the Combat Action Ribbon and the other earned the Navy Commendation Medal. All the flag waving done by the Seminole elected leaders and multiple flags displayed in the Field of Honor outside city hall during Veterans and Memorial Days represents a huge hypocrisy. Hopefully, the city leadership will come to their senses and find an appropriate alternative solution for these homeless veterans who deserve much better. If not, never should an American flag be flown outside the Seminole City Hall building.
Albert Hine, Seminole
A different view
After seeing all the push back against the concerns of my small, middle class, nonpartisan neighborhood, I finally have to say something. This is the housing that really was proposed next to us straight from the Boley Center website: People who are recovering from mental illness, people who are homeless, individuals who have reoccurring substance abuse problems, people with low income, veterans and individuals living with HIV/AIDS.
I am a combat wounded disabled veteran myself and can assure you that nobody in this neighborhood is against helping veterans. This project was nothing but a bait and switch using veterans as a ruse. The Boley Center website speaks for itself. Mentally ill homeless drug addicts have no place in a neighborhood of families and children. You’re damn right not in my backyard! Maybe some of you compassionate folks will step up and put these people in your neighborhood. I can’t thank Mayor Leslie Waters enough for doing the research and standing up against this travesty.
Steven Smith, Seminole
Manchin gets his say
Manchin says he ‘cannot vote’ for $2T Biden bill | Dec. 20
Until Joe Biden was elected president, I had never heard of Sen. Joe Manchin. He made a name for himself being a poison-pill in the new administration’s push to invest in non-wealthy America. Manchin, a Democrat, claims along with all the Republicans in the senate that we are not worth the cost of the investment. Now, Sen. Manchin has made a name for himself and may he never live it down.
Brian Valsavage, St. Petersburg
Birth control and hypocrisy
A Wimauma letter writer is absolutely correct that widely available birth control could be an effective bastion against the necessity of abortion for millions. The problem is that the same myopic, sanctimonious and lazy weekend agitators in front of women’s health clinics who have elevated their partisans to the U.S. Supreme Court to destroy a constitutional right for the last 50 years and a common law right long before that are also attacking birth control with equal vigor. Their goal is complete hegemony over women’s’ bodies, dissenters be damned. Their war is in fact against sex, hypocrisy is their fuel, and a fetus is nothing but a leverage point to them. They have zero interest in the born.
They are a legion of Dimmesdales or worse, eager to mask their own manifold moral failures by harassing the already and truly beset. Theirs is the most cheaply bought and transparent “virtue” imaginable. Instead of winning it through penance and real sacrifice, they “earn” it by shrieking at the weak. Their supposed spiritual guide said “Love one another.” They’d rather abuse desperate women on the sidewalk.
