Help limit smoking
Re “Smoldering butts” [RN&R, News, April 3]:
I applaud Senate members who passed SB 50, the bill giving school districts the authority to place more stringent regulations on smoking, marketing and promoting tobacco products on school grounds. However, I have a strong desire to boo and hiss at the gutting of SB 50 in the Judiciary Committee.
In its original version, the bill called for a Clark County Health District ban of smoking in many public buildings or in any area within 20 feet of a door of a public building. It would also have allowed a ban in video arcades, grocery and convenience stores and all areas of restaurants except where minors are not allowed.
I challenge all citizens of Nevada to contact their Assemblyperson and each member of the Judiciary Committee and urge them to amend the bill [to] include further restrictions. Fast action is necessary, as SB 50 will probably be heard in the Assembly next week. Following the reading, work sessions in the Judiciary Committee are scheduled. The amended bill must then make it out of committee by the deadline.
We should not let our legislators forget the total indifference they showed when nearly 70 percent of Clark County voters recently approved smoking bans in restaurants, grocery stores, schools and other public buildings.
Judy Andreson
Elko
Spoiled victors
It seems to me that the Bush administration is suffering from tunnel vision with regards to the Iraq war.
They have won the war and are now selecting who gets to rebuild Iraq. They are using American corporations as the primary contractors and excluding those countries that were against Bush and Company going to war. One of the excluded countries is Great Britain, which has been assigned a secondary role.
France, Germany, Russia, China and others have been excluded from rebuilding projects. Bush and Company need them more than they need us in rebuilding Iraq, yet Bush and Company burned those bridges and keep going back to stir the ashes.
Iraq still has the world’s second-largest oil reserves. Bush and Company can’t leave Iraq undefended. Not only are troops needed to defend Iraq’s borders from without, they must keep the peace from within. Without an armed presence in Iraq, other countries will try to invade, or civil war will erupt until Iraq’s military and government has been restored.
Who’s left besides the coalition forces? Several countries have the military might in troop strength but not the ability to maintain the troops in an extended overseas operation. That leaves France, Germany and Russia.
What is Bush and Company going to say to the United Nations, France, Germany and Russia? We want you to send peacekeeping troops at your expense, but you are not entitled to the billions of oil revenue dollars that the Bush and Company appointees will be handing out.
Unless Bush and Company get the U.S. troops out of Iraq, the war on terrorism will be stalled. One-third to one-half of the active U.S. troops in Iraq will have to remain behind to guard the country. Who’s left to go after the terrorists?
Rebuilding Iraq will take a global coalition, and that includes anti-war nations.
Dewey Quong
Reno
Chilling effect
Re “Peace of mind” [RN&R, View from the fray, April 10]:
I am an American, daughter of a Latina immigrant mother and a [white] father. My family, on both sides, has shed its blood in the name of American freedom and democracy. My son [who’s serving in the new Gulf War in Iraq], has a new sound in his voice. He will not come home the same person he was when he joined the Navy in August 2000, hoping for nothing more than to take advantage of the GI Bill for college.
When I have voiced my concerns about the killing of innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel, and when I have maintained my position that even Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, if captured, should receive due process, I have been called anti-American.
Aside from the obvious McCarthyist parallels and the Salem Witch trial associations on our own soil, this jingoism, this simplistic, pseudo-patriot twaddle parallels the dominant rhetoric of the Nazi era and the Stalinist era. It echoes with ghostly whispers the voices of Franco, Pinochet and countless other fascist dictators of the 20th century.
Shame on anyone who considers a war protester anti-American. Shame on every neo-fascist who defiles our flag, our Constitution and the very basic tenets of democracy when they disrupt legal, peaceful gatherings of citizens in their vigils for any cause. Shame on policemen who would stand across the street and watch.
Voltaire said, “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
What a romantic, old-fashioned idea.
Jeanmarie Simpson
Reno