Old voting rule should be abandoned
Certainly Bryon White was joking when complaining about the county rescinding a two-hour paid leave allowance for employees to vote. It’s almost 2018 — we don’t even have to leave our homes to vote.
(READ: Should employees have two hours to vote?)
To make the statement that, “The only reason I can come up with is that the county management wants to dissuade county employees from voting,” is ridiculous. I’ve voted in every election since I became eligible and worked for 37 years without having to do it on company time. When need be, I’d get up early and vote before work, or hit the lines after I got off. We are now to the point where there is early voting, extended voting and even absentee voting, which both my wife and I have done from the start. There is absolutely no reason for employees to be getting paid to vote.
Tom Nasella
South Daytona
Trump changed things
When Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukrainian Crimea, the Ukrainians asked President Barack Obama to sell them military weapons. Obama denounced the invasion, but sent only non-lethal supplies like night-vision goggles (to better see Russians attacking at night), arguing that lethal weapons would only provoke Putin. On Dec. 20 President Donald Trump confirmed that he’d approved the sale of lethal defense weapons to Ukraine as it continues to fight Russian aggression. As Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis stated, “Defensive weapons are not provocative unless you are the aggressor.”
Selling the Affordable Care Act, Obama told us that our health insurance premiums would go down and if we liked our doctors we could keep them. Those proved to be false and people who didn’t buy policies were fined. Trump just signed the tax cut bill that repeals the mandate to buy Obamacare policies. Now if you don’t like Obamacare you don’t have to buy it.
In one year President Trump has all but destroyed ISIS, cut taxes, ditched reams of unnecessary regulations, approved pipeline projects and new drilling, and set a one-year record of placing judges to federal circuit courts. Yet 80 percent of the liberal mainstream press coverage has been negative. Give me a break!
If he got an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and then parted the Red Sea, the headlines would probably read, “Trump policies increase global warming — Red Sea drying up.”
Ronald Medhurst
Port Orange
Politically correct?
In the run up to the last national election, there was increasing condemnation of “politically correct language” from conservatives. In the Sunday News-Journal an article by Lena H. Sun and Juliet Eilperin reported that under the Trump administration, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are not using these words or phrases: “fetus,” “transgender,” “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” evidence-based” and “science-based” in official documents being prepared for next year’s budget.
I think that inclusive language, “people-first” language, and other attempts to encourage respectful speech are more about being considerate than about politics. It’s when administration officials use their authority to order officials at our nation’s top public health agency what words to avoid that we really enter the realm of politically correct language.
Dennis R. Meyer
Palm Coast