Letters, 2021, Cannot Be Said Enough, December 1; December 23, January 5; December 24

 

Please read the following excerpts from the outstanding The Atlantic December 6, 2021, article about what many media observers are asserting: that the Republican Party is conducting a slow-moving coup to establish permanent one-party, Republican Party autocratic rule. The two letters that I wrote this December focused precisely on that subject matter.

***

For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.

By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response.

Any Republican might benefit from these machinations, but let’s not pretend there’s any suspense. Unless biology intercedes, Donald Trump will seek and win the Republican nomination for president in 2024. The party is in his thrall. No opponent can break it and few will try. Neither will a setback outside politics—indictment, say, or a disastrous turn in business—prevent Trump from running. If anything, it will redouble his will to power.

As we near the anniversary of January 6, investigators are still unearthing the roots of the insurrection that sacked the Capitol and sent members of Congress fleeing for their lives. What we know already, and could not have known then, is that the chaos wrought on that day was integral to a coherent plan. In retrospect, the insurrection takes on the aspect of rehearsal.

Even in defeat, Trump has gained strength for a second attempt to seize office, should he need to, after the polls close on November 5, 2024. It may appear otherwise—after all, he no longer commands the executive branch, which he tried and mostly failed to enlist in his first coup attempt. Yet the balance of power is shifting his way in arenas that matter more.

…

Trump has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire. Tens of millions of Americans perceive their world through black clouds of his smoke. His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.

…

Trump and some of his most vocal allies, Tucker Carlson of Fox News notably among them, had taught supporters to fear that Black and brown people were coming to replace them. According to the latest census projections, white Americans will become a minority, nationally, in 2045. The insurgents could see their majority status slipping before their eyes.

…

… the Trump team achieved something crucial and enduring by convincing tens of millions of angry supporters, including a catastrophic 68 percent of all Republicans in a November PRRI poll, that the election had been stolen from Trump. Nothing close to this loss of faith in democracy has happened here before. Even Confederates recognized Abraham Lincoln’s election; they tried to secede because they knew they had lost. Delegitimating Biden’s victory was a strategic win for Trump—then and now—because the Big Lie became the driving passion of the voters who controlled the fate of Republican legislators, and Trump’s fate was in the legislators’ hands.

…

… Since the 2020 election, Trump’s acolytes have set about methodically identifying patches of resistance and pulling them out by the roots. …

In at least 15 more states, Republicans have advanced new laws to shift authority over elections from governors and career officials in the executive branch to the legislature. Under the Orwellian banner of “election integrity,” even more have rewritten laws to make it harder for Democrats to vote. Death threats and harassment from Trump supporters have meanwhile driven nonpartisan voting administrators to contemplate retirement.

Vernetta Keith Nuriddin, 52, who left the Fulton County, Georgia, election board in June, told me she had been bombarded with menacing emails from Trump supporters. One email, she recalled, said, “You guys need to be publicly executed … on pay per view.” Another, a copy of which she provided me, said, “Tick, Tick, Tick” in the subject line and “Not long now” as the message. Nuriddin said she knows colleagues on at least four county election boards who resigned in 2021 or chose not to renew their positions.

…

The coming midterm elections, meanwhile, could tip the balance further. Among the 36 states that will choose new governors in 2022, three are presidential battlegrounds—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—where Democratic governors until now have thwarted attempts by Republican legislatures to cancel Biden’s victory and rewrite election rules. Republican challengers in those states have pledged allegiance to the Big Lie, and the contests look to be competitive. In at least seven states, Big Lie Republicans have been vying for Trump’s endorsement for secretary of state, the office that will oversee the 2024 election. Trump has already endorsed three of them, in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan.

…

There is a clear and present danger that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it. Our two-party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election. The other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot live without.

Democracies have fallen before under stresses like these, when the people who might have defended them were transfixed by disbelief. If ours is to stand, its defenders have to rouse themselves.

…

Donald Trump came closer than anyone thought he could to toppling a free election a year ago. He is preparing in plain view to do it again, and his position is growing stronger. Republican acolytes have identified the weak points in our electoral apparatus and are methodically exploiting them. They have set loose and now are driven by the animus of tens of millions of aggrieved Trump supporters who are prone to conspiracy thinking, embrace violence, and reject democratic defeat. Those supporters ... are armed and single-minded and will know what to do the next time Trump calls upon them to act.

Democracy will be on trial in 2024. A strong and clear-eyed president, faced with such a test, would devote his presidency to meeting it. Biden knows better than I do what it looks like when a president fully marshals his power and resources to face a challenge. It doesn’t look like this [what he has been doing, and not doing].

The midterms, marked by gerrymandering, will more than likely tighten the GOP’s grip on the legislatures in swing states. The Supreme Court may be ready to give those legislatures near-absolute control over the choice of presidential electors. And if Republicans take back the House and Senate, as oddsmakers seem to believe they will, the GOP will be firmly in charge of counting the electoral votes.

Against Biden or another Democratic nominee, Donald Trump may be capable of winning a fair election in 2024. He does not intend to take that chance.

Work cited:

Gellman, Barton. “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun.” The Atlantic, December 6, 2021. Net. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/january-6-insurrection-trump-coup-2024-election/620843/

***

I sent this letter off to the editor of the Siuslaw News December 1. She did not print it.

***

What are this newspaper’s right-wing letter writers being silent about?

We’ve been reading recently this kind of stuff.

Tony Cavarno (Nov. 24): the rise of white nationalism is not true, Democratic assertions are “liberal socialistic crap,” Trump’s (ballyhooed) economic achievements are fabulous (not according to Snopes.com and other fact-check organizations). Note: Trump ranks 41 of our past 45 presidents, according to CSPAN’s latest (June 2021) change-of-administration survey of historians, professors, and other knowledgeable professionals. He was judged dead last in the categories “moral authority” and “administrative skills.”

Marshall Denton (Nov. 27): a lengthy list of Democrat-defaming word frames that included “mandates,” business closures,” “open borders,” “CRT,” and “the propagation of division and racism.”

None of Florence’s right-wingers have addressed Trump’s “Big Lie”!

For decades the GOP has asserted Democratic Party-generated large-scale voter fraud in national and state elections to justify Republican Party passage of onerous voter suppression laws. Those minority, college-age, and octogenarian voters sure do get around and cheat! Honest investigations have repeatedly reported that voter fraud has been in the past and was in the 2020 election minuscule.

So now red state legislatures – already masters of gerrymandering – are passing laws to grant themselves the power to declare election fraud whenever they wish (a la Trump) and reverse Democratic Party victories!

So, you right-wing letter writers, like so many of your Republican office holders, are you okay with this – the destruction of our nation’s democracy and the inevitable establishment of one-party autocratic rule – if your party is doing it? I hope not.

***

While I waited in vain for the Siuslaw News to print my letter, I felt the need to really let loose. I was in a deep funk. I sent this letter to The World newspaper in Coos Bay.

***

We do not determine the time and place of our birth or our parents. We are not “created equal.” Not one of us is guaranteed “equal opportunity.” All of us will witness -- if not experience directly – exploitation, persecution, cruelty. Why? Human beings are egregiously fallible. Evil – not compassion, good works – prevails. Selfish beings trample upon the vulnerable to amass power, wealth. Liars, cheaters triumph.

I have lived 87 years. I once believed that here in American good people could keep at bay indefinitely that which the worst of us collectively fabricate. I have learned that we Americans are no better morally than the inhabitants of almost any nation or culture.

We have among us

the timid, managed by authoritarian fear-mongers;

the mediocre “every man” so protective of his Caucasian privilege that he embraces anything disseminated hatefully about minorities;

the voluntarily and not voluntarily uneducated so ignorant of fact that their emotions choose whom to trust.

We have, controlling the susceptible, a plethora of opinion-shapers devoid wholly of honesty and conscience.

Our country is months away from becoming an autocracy. Fox News, hate-talk radio, conspiracy-disseminating web sites, TV-hungry Republican Party fabricators, and fascist-minded legislators are accomplishing their coordinated objective.

60% of registered Republicans believe the humongous lie that Biden stole the 2020 election. Never mind the minuscule evidence of such. Or that their party continues to gerrymander, purge voter registration lists, employ aggressive voter suppression tactics.

The GOP knows it can no longer win honest Presidential elections. Its red state legislatures and governors are passing laws that grant them the power to reverse future Democratic Party victories. Federal legislation could stop this coup. Absent its passage, Democracy dies.

        Printed December 23, 2021, in The World

                    January 5, 2022, in the Siuslaw News

***

Joe Mack-McCarthy sent me this message Dec. 24 via Facebook Messenger:

Harold... I'm from Coquille originally, lived in Portland for 45 years. I read your letter to the editor in the World. You are much appreciated for speaking out and making your feelings public. I have to thank you, sir.

***

I decided to send the letter printed Dec. 23 in The World to the Siuslaw News to see if the editor would print it just before the first anniversary of the January 6, 2021, attack on the federal Capitol building. She did, January 5, changing nothing.

***

No follow-up from Republican loyalist letter writers as of January 16.

Letters, 2021, GOP Destroying Democracy, January 16, January 27, June 23, June 26, July 29, October 2, 9, October 23

An old adversary got me started in 2021.

***

A few years ago when Arnold Palmer was blistering the golf courses, the media labeled his many devoted followers as “Arnie’s Army.”

In my opinion, the liberal press and electronic news media should come up with the term “Trump’s Troopers” for those supporting the President, because no matter what they throw at President Trump and his devoted followers, the almost 75,000,000 folks that voted for him are not going away anytime soon.

There appears to be plenty of evidence regarding the fraud that went on to cheat the president out of his reelection.

One would have to be both blind and deft to believe otherwise.

I am standing by for the retort I will probably get to this letter but it will fall on deaf ears; a spade is a spade and by any other term it is a spade.

        Tony Cavarno

        Printed January 16, 2021 in the Siusalw News

***

I submitted the following letter to the Siuslaw News January 17, Editor “Ed” be damned. It was not printed on the 20^th or 23, the next two editions of the paper. This is what I had written.

***

Tony Cavarno challenged Siuslaw News readers to response to his January16 Opinion statement that the recent presidential election had been rigged, that Trump had won. I offer these excerpts from a 2018 article written by Christian pastor and author John Pavlovitz. https://johnpavlovitz.com/2018/08/07/you-cant-change-hatred-but-you-can-outvote-it/?fbclid=IwAR1QgD5MNAHrpzrkG_0ewKlZVkJRO7a1ZgTn9phxuZOw57esLfBdcEdPGis)

I think it’s time to stop saying that we need to understand these people. I think we do understand them:

We understand that they have dug in their heels so deeply, they will not be moved by anything—not facts or data or truth or their own eyes.

…

If adults are that fragile in the face of reality, that willing to deny country and humanity simply because they’re offended, that thin-skinned and prone to mutiny—their dispositions aren’t really a burden the rest of us should or could bear.

…

… since these people will not be moved, the rest of us need to move together.

…

We don’t need to convince or coddle or win over hatred, and we don’t need to outdo it either.

We need to outnumber it.
We need to outlast it.
We need to outlove it.
We need to outvote it.

To this I add: We need to declare always what is true and what is not.

***

Editor Ed printed a version of the letter January 27.

He removed the link to the Pavlovitz article.

He used a semi-colon and a closed quotation mark – neither of which was necessary – and omitted my three dots between certain excerpts that indicated that the excerpts were not consecutive.

He omitted (the phrase is in bold letters) a part of one excerpt that I definitely wanted included: “If adults are that fragile in the face of reality, that willing to deny country and humanity simply because they’re offended, that thin-skinned and prone to mutiny—their dispositions aren’t really a burden the rest of us should or could bear.

Ed cannot help himself. Everything must comport to his sense of propriety. Never mind that the author should be entitled to express exactly what he believes.

***

Several months later Ed resigned his position and left the newspaper. I submitted the following letter to test whether the new Siuslaw News editor would print what Ed would never accept.

***

Strike up the band. Release the balloons. Our greatest president will be reinstated in August!

Thank you, ninjas in Arizona, for exposing how the Socialist lefties and George Soros, Bill Gates, and Anthony Fauci cheated Donald J. Trump out of being reelected!

Our leader warned us about mail-in ballots. The media mob and the socialists in Congress have attacked Trump like no President before him. So unfair. You know it. I know it. He’s a stable genius. He’s got a big brain. He knows more than the generals.

You should thank him for Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J. And Biden, now taking all the credit! Disgraceful!

Fake news wants you to believe that we MAGAs attacked the capitol. It was Antifa dressed to look like us! Yes, some of us were there, We were peaceful. We had really good reasons to protest! If you don’t play by the rules, you don’t have a country!

AOC, that Muslim Omar, Pelosi, Pocahantas, Clinton, Abrams, Shifty Schiff, Sleepy Joe want to ruin it! Every real American state legislator, governor and flag-waving patriot must stop the steal! Forever!

If you believe this garbage, you’ve been suckered by the king of liars and a political party shamelessly dishonest. GOP-controlled state houses and governors have passed legislation that cements autocratic rule. Congressional and Senate Republicans are fine with it. They and their media mouthpieces are traitors to our democracy!

Stop their theft of unfettered, universal suffrage, of receiving always from all media sources truthful information, of our wanting to attempt to enjoy a productive, fulfilling life!

        Printed June 23, 2021, in the Siuslaw News

***

The only change to this letter was that two words – “that Muslim” – were removed. One person responded to the letter.

***

This week’s Letters to the Editor made me wonder what a newcomer might conclude about Florence. My discomfort comes from the litany of “Trumpisms” which drip with disdain (“Suckered into Belief,” Harold Titus). Instead of a tone welcoming diversity of thought, these diatribes claim to be facts.

Publish more topics of shared interests and concerns, please.

        Bou Kilgore

        Printed June 26, 2021 in the Siuslaw News

***

The following letter was a condensation of a 400+ letter I sent to the Florence City Council honoring the request of Mike Allen, FADC member and local climate change activist.

***

Bruce Jarvis’s request July 19 that the City Council adopt a “Stand for Freedom” resolution to make clear that the city of Florence “will not assist our governor or any state agency with the enforcement of any law, mandate or edict that is against the United States Constitution” is the product of a fevered mind. Jarvis referenced “widespread discord and unrest … rampant in our society today” and that “such a resolution will serve to unite our community and increase our sense of personal safety.” The “discord and unrest” so rampant in our country is the result of the madness of current Trumpian Republican Party policy that seeks to cement permanent autocratic, one-party minority rule that is the antithesis of one-person one-vote democratic practice. 

Sam Spayd, referencing climate change, declared that “time spent by our city council would be better utilized in dealing with the issues that are right in our face .. [that] present a definite challenge to the time our city council has for dealing with issues which will have a direct impact upon our lives.” The menace of climate change is not “in our face”? Does not “have a direct impact upon our lives”? What can be said about such deniers of fact, of science – these blatant tunnel-visioned proponents of benefit solely for corporations and self – that evades derision?

There are principled Republicans who champion democracy, cherish truth, respect science, value individual sacrifice and social responsibility. Step forward.

        Printed July 29, 2021, in the Siuslaw News

***

I offered the Siuslaw News the following letter in August. The editor held the letter for 7 weeks. I finally sent my letter to The World. They printed it without a single alteration. Soon afterward the Siuslaw News editor sent me an email informing me that she had had a large backlog of letters yet to be printed and would print mine in the next edition, October 9.

***

Ultra right conservative viewpoints do not constitute majority thinking in this country. History has demonstrated that such thinking put into practice (anti-mask, anti-vaccination, and denial of climate change being examples) is invariably destructive of the lives and physical and economic health of most Americans. Right now we are 14 months away from becoming a fascist nation ruled by a soulless arty committed entirely to the seizure and maintenance of dictatorial power.

During my lifetime the GOP has always been a White male, Christian, corporation-directed party. Its office holders have been rewarded handsomely for promoting and protecting the interests of their wealthy donors. It can not dare to say to ordinary citizens, “You don’t matter because your well being clashes with what the Koch brothers, Exxon, Chevron, the pharmaceutical industry, and most large corporations demand.” Instead, Republican officials and their media mouthpieces lie, incessantly. The Democratic Party is evil incarnate. They will destroy our beloved country. With their costly economic programs, do you really really want – horrors – Socialism? The debt! The debt! Why, tax cuts for the rich grow the economy, create jobs! You, too, will benefit! (Never mind that your income has remained stagnant for decades. Never mind that so many Americans are destitute, about to be evicted, already homeless.)

Complementing GOP lies is the party’s use of wedge issues. They shape and intensify White Americans’ existing resentments, fears, and prejudices. Dems want abortion on demand. Biden’s gonna get your guns. Illegals are streaming across our borders. Blacks are gonna take your jobs and ransack your neighborhoods. God and our way of life are going to be erased.

Same old, still same old. Now much more! Democracies don’t survive when dishonest politicians count the vote!

        Printed October 2, 2021, in The World

                    October 9, 2021, in the Siuslaw News. The Siuslaw News editor held the letter 7 weeks, informing me politely of a huge back load.

***

An old adversary responded.

***

In response to a letter in the Oct. 9 Siuslaw News entitled “They Say,” I want to ask --- what planet is Mr. Titus living on?

It’s easy for a retired person living in a very comfortable community such as Florence with a secure income to throw out a letter to convey that all is well and beautiful under the current administration, Really?

The influence of this administration is reaching across America to tear everything apart for our survival. When you go outside of our cocoon here, you will have a wake-up call.

Mr. Titus can criticize the conservative Christians, but I have to point out that these are the very people who are working tirelessly to maintain the freedom and values we grew up with as children.

We are not against masks and vaccinations per se, but the mandates of force. The climate change is another issue for control over the way we live. The liberal politicians say one thing and do another.

Our education system is one of the more serious issues at hand. Some things have no business being taught in our schools, directing our youth towards radical ideas. Education should be a guide towards a career, not an indoctrination to cause division.

It’s grievous to see what has happened to this country in these short nine months: gas prices on the rise and soon to be in short supply, empty grocery shelves in larger cities, nurses and doctors walking off their jobs, airlines canceling flights in large numbers and the list goes on. This is just the beginning.

People are afraid and becoming desperate.

In my mind, the delusional democrats need to get a grip on reality.

        Donna Dobson

        Printed October 23, 2021, in the Siuslaw News

***

I’m happy to report that in the Siuslaw News’s October 3 edition fellow Democratic Club member Karen Mahoney rebuffed Donna Dobson’s GOP talking points – especially this phrase: “The influence of this administration is reaching across America to tear everything apart for our survival” brilliantly.

 

Letters, 2019-2020, Few and Far Between, December 7, 2019; September 21, October 3, October 5, October 6

Can't resist starting with a joke.

***

An airplane is about to crash. There were 4 passengers on board but only 3 parachutes. The first passenger said, “I am Steph Curry, the best NBA basketball player. The Warriors and my many fans need me. I can’t afford to die.” He took the first pack and left the plane.

The second passenger, Donald Trump, said, “I am the U.S. President, and I am the smartest President in American history, so my people don’t want me to die.” He took the second packet and jumped out of the plane.

The third passenger, the Pope, said to the fourth passenger, a ten-year-old schoolboy, “My son, I am very old and don’t have many year left to live. You have more years ahead of you, so I will sacrifice my life and let you have the last parachute.”

The little boy said, “That’s okay, your Holiness. There’s a parachute left for you. America’s smartest President took my school bag.”

***

I finally had too much of a need to write a letter. This was the result:

***

Intriguing how the mind can flit from one image, fact, or event to another.

I was moved recently by a scene from the HBO drama “Chernobyl.” The entire population of a large area around the exploded core of the Soviet nuclear power plant had been evacuated. Animals had to be exterminated and buried under cement. In one sector three workers had to shoot cats and dogs, craving human contact. Across the TV screen dogs ran toward their destruction.

My mind jumped to the thousands of Latino children that were separated from their parents at the Mexican/American border. We know now that the Trump administration had planned approximately 26,000 separations, despite lacking the technological means to effect reunification.

Another jump. We have Donald Trump’s scheme to accuse Joe Biden of corruption during the upcoming 2020 presidential election, set up by Trump forcing Ukraine’s new prime minister to declare that Ukraine would investigate Biden and his son’s supposed participation in Ukraine’s supposed involvement in the 2016 U. S. presidential election to get Hillary Clinton elected, this to render false rock solid evidence that Russia had interfered to benefit Trump.

Next jump. Trump is supported by at least 40% of the voting public. A good friend of mine years ago noted: ”People believe what they want.” Every day GOP mouthpieces vilify, falsify, incite. Emotion trumps fact. We have a divided country and, alas, Trump, the worst of their worst.

Dishonesty, cruelty, lust for power, incompetence, ignorance, and stupidity endanger us all.

        Printed December 7, 2019, in The World

***

Then, this one.

***

I need to rant.

Is it stupid to expect those who legislate and administer the law to be honest, caring people?

Is it naive to want our elected officials to represent our values, not exclusively the selfish wants of large corporations and the very rich?

Is it wrong for me to judge as traitors to our country media outlets (Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, Breitbart, etc.) and individual commentators (Limbaugh, Hannity, Carlson, Levin, etc.) that manipulate the ignorance and emotions of their uneducated audience into believing, fervently, that Democrats are evil and today’s Republican Party and its leaders are America’s saviors?

Is it okay to let pass blatant violations of the law – for instance, the destruction of the postal service -- designed to benefit the political fortunes of a president if you support that president?

If you are white and, especially, male, what gives you the right to believe that minorities are not entitled to the same rights, opportunities, and respect that you yourself are provided?

Is it that easy for you to accept the response “There are always a few bad apples” when confronted so repeatedly with instances of police brutality toward and the murder of African Americans, none deserving aggressive confrontation?

I recall vividly every one of the 14 or 15 Republican Party candidates for President on the stage of one of the Republican Party debates in 2016 not raising their hands when instructed by the debate moderator, “Raise your hand if you believe that climate change is real and caused by human behavior.” Which is more important to you: loyalty to your party’s dogma or the survival of the human species?

Lies, lies, lies! Which you take as fact if they adhere to your political beliefs. Are you that sort of person – believing the present excrement offered by Republicans today, Sunday, September 20, that it is perfectly okay to rush through the nomination and acceptance of a new Supreme Court justice when there are less that 50 days left to the next presidential election when during President Obama’s last year in office (10 months before the 2016 election) Mitch McConnell refused to hold a hearing to consider Obama’s nomination to fill a sudden Supreme Court justice vacancy?

The least among us should never determine our country’s fate. Trump and his enablers would have us be Putin’s greatest accomplishment.

        Printed in The World September 21, 2020

***

Election time. Caddy McKeown and Arnie Roblan were retiring. New candidates (both parties) were running to fill their positions. Again, I felt obliged to support the Democratic Party candidates. I submitted the following letter to the Siuslaw News September 29 knowing that Editor Ed would meddle with it. The letter was mild in tone. He did meddle, made several middling changes entirely unnecessary in my opinion, done, I concluded, to rouse my ire. The letter was printed in the Siuslaw News October 3. I sent my original letter (below) to The World immediately thereafter.

***

We Democrats know a thing or two because we’ve seen a thing or two.

A minority party nationally and here in Oregon, the GOP will do just about anything to get its way.

Senate majority leader McConnell stole a Supreme Court justice for Trump in 2016 and is doing it again less than 40 days before Joe Biden’s probable election. Trump plans to use the resultant 6 to 3 conservative majority to kill the Affordable Care Act and to have Roe v. Wade declared unconstitutional. Many media analysts predict that after the election Trump will challenge in the courts Biden victories in key swing states and the Supreme Court will declare Trump president.

We who live along the central Oregon coast will be deciding who will represent us in the state house and senate. The recent fires that have ravaged the state should have made blatant to all one major consequence of climate change. In 2018 senate Republicans, by leaving the state, denied Democrats a quorum to pass a cap and trade bill that would have reduced the emission of global warming causing pollutants. In 2019 GOP senators and House members did it again for the same purpose.

Choose Cal Mukumoto (House District 9) and Melissa Cribbins (Senate District 5) – go visit their websites – to represent us. We need visionary, not reactionary public officials, to move this state (and nation) forward.

        Printed in The World October 5, 2020

***

I sent this email to the editor of The World October 6.

***

Dear editor,

This is not meant for publication.

I want you to know how much I appreciate your policy of allowing each letter writer, regardless of his educational background, regardless of the discomfort he exhibits selecting words to communicate easily his thoughts, to say his piece without interference. You value free speech.

Not every newspaper editor does this. The editor of the Siuslaw News in Florence does not. He deletes, he rephrases; in so doing he changes the force and tone of your message and he destroys your voice – usually to dissuade partisan division, sometimes to demonstrate his perceived superiority as a writer. I have told him that rather than include my name under any letter that I send him that he should print “Based on a letter submitted by Harold Titus.”

Again, thank you. Excellent newspaper practices should be acknowledged.