Executive Council, Janet Stevens, must stop blocking family planning funds: Letters

Executive Council, Janet Stevens, must stop blocking family planning funds

Nov. 29 − To the Editor:

The NH Executive Council needs to stop making a political football out of funding reproductive health centers. My district’s Janet Stevens is complicit in denying funds, ostensibly to prevent them from being used to provide abortions. One and a half million dollars in federal and state money is available to support family planning for low-income women. Year after year these dollars are denied by four out of our five Councilors voting along party lines.

The implications are:1. Women are second class citizens.2. Women don’t know what they need.3. Women’s health centers are dishonest in how they spend government money.4. Despite being a legal right in NH, reproductive health services should be denied to low income women.

I am embarrassed to live in a state where this occurs.

Peter Cady

Rye

Judd Gregg's comments on NH primary are way off the mark

Nov. 28 − To the Editor:

I am responding to Judd Greg’s shameless attempt to compare Biden with Trump. This is another example of the pathetic mess the Republican Party made for itself.

Asking us to believe that Joe Biden is as incompetent as Trump solely because of his age is an insult to our intelligence. I point to Joe Biden’s experience in Washington: his many years in the Congress, two terms as Vice President and his record as President.

Donald Trump came to Washington as a bungling businessman with no political experience. He promised us he would do away with Obamacare and give us a much better program. This never happened. Instead, he cancelled a number of international treaties and isolated America. He cultivated friendships with Russia and North Korea. He ordered a withdrawal from Afghanistan against the advice of our military. Biden was stuck with Trump’s publicly announced date. Anyone with combat experience knows that the most difficult phase of any hostile engagement is the withdrawal. I am astonished at how few losses we incurred in that impossible situation.

Trump’s administration was marked by incompetence. Most members of his administration left. Those who replaced them also quit or were fired. At the end, he refused to accept his loss to Joe Biden and encouraged a violent attempt to overthrow the government.

Since his defeat, Trump is on trial for serious civil and criminal charges. His business empire is failing.

What is most disturbing are his deranged rants threatening retaliation against his enemies once he is elected. He blames immigrants for America’s problems and plans to establish concentration camps for them. This is exactly the same rhetoric used by Mussolini and Hitler.

Can America afford to give this sociopath another term in the White House?

In contrast, Joe Biden has successfully repaired the economic damage from Trump’s administration. Every aspect of the economy has improved. International treaties are back in place. We are supporting Ukraine’s defense against Putin’s invasion. In cooperation with other world leaders, he has quietly persuaded the Israelis and Hamas to pause their terrible hostilities and exchange prisoners.

Age and experience make a difference. If Judd Greg wants to endorse Nikki Haley, he should do so without further embarrassment to the Republican Party.

Bill Kingston

New Castle

Biden and his administration are serving America well

Nov. 28 − To the Editor:

How to respond to my oldest granddaughter--an outspoken, Tik-Tok informed 18-year-old- when she argues that Joe Biden is too old to run for re-election? As I clean up from an intergenerational Thanksgiving, I am pondering this.

The interconnected, digital world of 2023 seems to generate longing for strongmen leaders who hurl simple slogans at our problem-ridden, complicated lives. Homelessness. Crime. the urban-rural divide. Sectarian wars. The list goes on. Catchy phrases latch onto us in our over-stimulated, often overwhelming individual and community situations.

As a' boomer' for whom the McCarthy period was foundational and the Vietnam War a wake-up call, I am not only skeptical of simple slogans; I am frightened to my core of candidates who promote divisive, often bellicose, remedies to our twenty-first century, most vexing issues.

YES, Joe Biden is a senior stateman. Yes, he is old. But he has assembled a team of the most able statesmen and women I have seen in my lifetime. Lloyd Austin at Defense; Anthony Blinken as Secretary of State. William Burns at the CIA. These are leaders whose gravitas and intellect on the dangerous world stage are essential! They don't crave the latest headline. They persistently seek steadying solutions to the thorniest and threatening geopolitical problems−i.e. Russian aggression in Europe, the quest for a Palestinian state & security for the state of Israel.

Yup! Biden is old, but the team of experts he chooses and empowers to address the problems that endanger our very survival are unrivalled in resolve and experience. That matters above all to me as a grandmother.

Ronna Flaschner

Rye

Trump will lead us down the road of fascism

Nov. 25 — To the Editor:

There is a saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Unfortunately, the Republicans led by Donald Trump are leading America to hell on a road paved with their evil fascist intentions, and they are openly and blazingly advertising them.

In a recent speech in New Hampshire Trump stated that he plans to “Root out the communists, Marxists, racists and radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” He followed this up with “We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country, we will rout the fake news media.”

Mike Davis, a leading candidate to be Trump’s next attorney general, stated that he would “unleash hell on Washington, D.C. We’re going to put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glorious. We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo.” And even more ominous, if that is possible, is the Project 2025 manifesto whose objectives, as reported by the New Hampshire Gazette include, tearing down the wall between church and state, eliminating the IRS, gutting Social Security, tightening voting restrictions — to create an explicitly reactionary state.

Getting to hell on a road paved by either good or evil intentions still puts you in hell. However, when those evil intentions that will lead us to hell are advertised in advance, and we have the opportunity to reject that road, we can reject them and then work together to translate good intentions into real policies for the common good. We may not create a utopia, but what we can create will be a great improvement over hell.

Rich DiPentima

Portsmouth

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: NH Executive Council must stop blocking family planning funds: Letters