Carry your voter card
It is imperative that every Arizonan have these three cards in their wallet: driver’s license/government ID, a health insurance card and, most importantly, your voters registration card.
Our Pima County Recorder’s Office has the most user-friendly website in existence. Go to recorder.pima.gov and find out all you need to know on how to vote in our county.
Having your voter registration card is the only way to combat the Republican Legislature’s attack on our voting rights. Whatever repressive rules they pass, you must fight back.
Make sure your voter registration information is current and accurate on your card. It is a guaranteed win over repressive voter tactics. Don’t let the Legislature scare you off from voting. No matter what they do, having an accurate and current voter registration card is the right weapon to protect our democracy. What’s in your wallet?
Richard Bechtold
West side
Coastal areas on knife’s edge
Re: the Sept. 17 article “Climate change’s impact on people migration.”
A recent World Bank report claims that up to 200 million people will need to move within their own countries in the next three decades due to climate change.
The recent opinion piece by Peter Orzag in the Star minimizes the economic consequences of the need for migration due to climate change.
Both these opinions may grossly underestimate the problem. A case in point might be Bangladesh, with a population of 166 million and 80% of the country less than 10 meters above current sea levels. It is already subject to extreme poverty and overpopulation, and is one typhoon away from total calamity.
Orzag states that only 7% of the population of Miami will need to migrate, which is ludicrous if sea level rises are near a worse-case scenario. If climate change is not substantially mitigated immediately, then a sea level rise of only a few feet would mean nearly 100% of migration out of both Miami and Bangladesh.
Michael Hamant
East side
Tax hikes just get passed along
The tax-and-spend folks are at it again. Tax the people who can afford it — the wealthy, the corporations. Protect the middle class.
Can’t the tax-and-spenders understand that the wealthy, the corporations, do not, will not and never have paid taxes? Taxes are for them a cost of doing business, just like the cost of raw material for any product they produce.
Raise taxes? They don’t mind. They understand that any and all of their taxes are paid by their customers.
The real taxpayers are always the end users, their customers, generally the middle class.
Chuck Josephson
Midtown
Audit supporters wear out welcome
It’s about over. The courts have ruled on the records and the phony audit wasting time and money is about to implode on the anti-democratic Republicans who pushed it.
The result is that every Republican who supported this waste of time, money and democracy should resign or be defeated in the next election. They have managed to create chaos in what has been a great voting system, which has its own safeguards built in. What these zealots have done is no less than demonstrating their dislike for our democracy and willingness to destroy it for power.
Donald Shelton
Northwest side
US drone strike was reckless
The U. S. military hundreds of miles from Kabul said they identified a vehicle in Kabul they suspected was filled with explosives so sent a drone to destroy it. In the process they killed a man who was beloved in the community and seven of his children.
Since the U.S. military knew the car was in a residential area, why didn’t they send someone on the ground to verify what they suspected? Seven innocent children and their beloved father might be alive if they had.
And we wonder why people seek revenge against America.
Jim Dreis
East side
Hospitalizations often preventable
Now that the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine has received the full FDA approval, it makes choosing not to get vaccinated only a matter of personal choice, rather than a matter holding out for a vaccine that has passed all the safety approval processes. COVID-19 is now a mostly preventable disease, at least for those over the age of 12 who are eligible for the vaccine.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reports that Medicare fee-for-service COVID-19 hospitalizations cost $24,033 on average. A study by the Kaiser Foundation estimates there have been some 287,000 preventable COVID hospitalizations from June through August, costing some $5.7 billion.
Freedom is not free, and choices have consequences. It is time people who choose not to protect themselves, and those they expose to this disease, to start paying for the consequences, not with just their lives, but also their pocketbooks.
John McConnaughey
Oro Valley
Vocal minority prolongs misery
Why do we allow a vocal minority to hold the rest of us hostage and prolong the COVID pandemic? Who is responsible for the thousands of infections and deaths, including children, that have occurred since the delta variant came on the scene?
There is no way to sugarcoat it. Those who will not get vaccinated and who refuse to wear a mask in public are largely responsible. The rest of us should be outraged! We should be outraged by the fact that the anti-vaxxers are endangering everyone else and prolonging a deadly pandemic that has killed over 680,000 Americans.
Therefore, it’s time to implement stronger measures. Mask-wearing should be mandatory in public places, including schools. No mask, no entry. We also need vaccine passports. Only the fully vaccinated should be allowed to enter a bar, restaurant, sporting event or movie theater.
William Ellett
Midtown
City elections not fair either
Re: the Sept. 23 article “City officials hold firm on threat to leave RTA.”
I read today that Steve Kozachik doesn’t think the voting structure of the RTA is fair, that it’s not representative. So I guess he does understand the concept of taxation without representation. Yet he apparently has no problem with the voting structure of the city of Tucson. Each ward submits candidates to represent their wards, but the final vote is citywide, not ward-wide. The result is taxation without representation. A little hypocritical, I think.
Susan Berger
East side
