Abortion is wrong
The letter ''Right of abortion'' is wrong. A
woman has a right over her own body -- but a fetus is not technically
her own body. It has its own DNA code at conception. By 24 days it has
its own heartbeat and blood type. By the seventh week it has its own
brain waves. By the ninth week it has its own fingerprints. By the tenth
week it can feel pain.
We should always protect women's rights. But babies' rights are just
as important. As abortion becomes an issue of "fetus rights,' its legal
days are numbered.
Michael Barber
Covina
Chilling thought
Re Your View, "Right of abortion,' Billy Wong's letter concludes with
the statement that abortion is done, in many cases, for the good of the
fetus as well.
How beneficent of Wong. And just what are the other cases?
Convenience? But since those little ones have no self- awareness (Wong
graciously reminds us that none of us can remember our time in the
womb), it's the merciful thing to do. How chilling.
Michael Allan
West Covina
Live and let live
Several recent stories reported in the Tribune have shown homeowners
throughout the East San Gabriel Valley at their worst.
Heedless of constitutional rights, and brazenly disregarding
elementary values of neighborliness, these adult men and women have
demonstrated levels of isolationist intolerance staggering and shameful
in both the actual harm caused and the desired adverse consequences.
In Glendora, which only has had nine hate crimes since 2002, an
African-American family's residence was vandalized because of anti-black
racial bigotry. In unincorporated Covina, neighbors resent the
construction of a Coptic Christian Church, which has services on Sunday,
one day of the week. In Azusa, part of the political establishment has
aligned itself with NIMBYs desiring to eliminate a gun club whose
half-century existence long predates the arrival of the vociferous
Johnnies-come-lately.
If you live anywhere in America, you should learn to live and let
live, and if you cannot abide residing near peaceful people of other
races or religions or individuals exercising their Second Amendment
liberties, then move to Falloujah, Iraq, another community seething in
acrimony and turpitude.
Maurice Kane
San Dimas
Sickened and angry
When I read about the hate crime and vandalism of the beautiful new
home under construction in Glendora, I was sickened and angry. I hope
the family knows that there are people in town who won't tolerate this
stupid behavior. I want the criminals who did it, to know that they have
disrupted many families and school children of all races, not just their
target.
I also think the city of Glendora ought to be a little more vocal in
their denunciation of this embarrassing, immoral, behavior.
Elizabeth Glover
Glendora
Who cares?
Dangers of old age. I left my HMO because I felt they were not
responding in my best interest.
Now after waiting for a prescription that I have been taking for
several years and that several doctors have prescribed, another HMO has
sent me this memo:
"I understand that you are experiencing difficulties with obtaining a
medication that was prescribed by your doctor. Member Services
Department has reviewed your concerns. You will receive a letter about
this issue shortly and a decision will be made within 30 days.'
I've been waiting five months. I had to order from out of the
country. A good thing it is not life threatening ... yet. Huh? Once you
become a senior citizen, no one cares.
Bill Noyes
Walnut
Wrong road to empire
Senior administration official Richard Clarke testified, "Your
government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you
and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we
failed.'
He continued: "And for that failure, I would ask once all the facts
are out for your understanding and for your forgiveness.'
At long last an apology from our establishment for their inexplicable
incompetence for failing to protect Americans from foreign invasion, the
single most important responsibility of the federal government.
Just why the Serbo-Croat word, "bojinka' is not the focus of our
discourse on the subject 9/11 can only be understood by its dearth of
usage in any public media discussion of the terrorist conspiracy
uncovered by authorities in the Philippines.
"Bojinka' (loud bang), the code name bin Laden operatives had given
to an audacious plan to hijack 11 U.S. airliners simultaneously and fly
them into various targets in the U.S., was known to the FBI and other
federal agencies as early as 1995, but the intelligence did not result
in any heightened alert affecting U.S. commercial aviation. Why?
What we should be asking before we continue to entangle ourselves in
a perpetual war against terror is, why doesn't the U.S. government stop
arming and training foreign terrorists and the dictators who support
them? From the end of World War II through the early 1990s, from Nikita
Khrushchev to Saddam Hussein to Osama Bin Laden, the U.S. has now
committed our sons and daughters to 135 countries around the world;
countries whose governments are generally despised by their own people.
Consider the admonishment of George Washington's Farewell Address,
Sept. 17, 1796:
"It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any
portion of the foreign world... As avenues to foreign influence in
innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the
truly enlightened and independent patriot... There can be no greater
error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to
nation. It is an illusion, which experience must cure, which a just
pride ought to discard...'
The financial cost of our "any enemy of my enemy is my friend' policy
has charged the U.S. taxpayer more than $950 billion in foreign or
military aid to more than 100 nations, according to the Cato Institute.
Hard as it may be to believe, early in 2001, Secretary of State Colin
Powell gave $43 million to Afghanistan in exchange for declaring that
growing opium is "against the will of God.' That was just part of $125
million in foreign aid the U.S. gave the Taliban that year, making the
U.S. the biggest sponsor of that virulently terrorist regime.
Waving the flag has come to mean something other than what the
framers intended. Simply translated, the Stars and Stripes now represent
the architecture of the American Empire.
"The New World Order,' as invoked by fellow travelers of the Council
on Foreign Relations, actually means the United Nations. The voting
citizen of the American Republic must elect citizen-legislators that
will no longer impose its will on any portion of the foreign world.
The citizen must resolve to return to the peaceful foreign policy
that America followed for its first century until President McKinley
took the country into the Spanish-American War and down the road to
empire.
Leland Faegre
West Covina
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