Obama worst president

I believe history will judge Barack Obama as the worst president the United States has ever had.

There is no comparison between him and Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman or other great presidents.

I give him an F-minus and the same to the liberal media. Hollywood gets a big fat zero.

God save us from Hollywood and the Obamas of this world.

Sheryl A. Hay

Lenexa

Joke on top 1 percent

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker won as the GOP poured millions of dollars into this recall election.

This will go down in history as the biggest setback for the working men and women in the United States.

We will go back to the good old days of 50-hour work weeks with no overtime and one week of vacation maybe. There will be plenty of $5-an-hour jobs.

Remember how each and every one of you received the benefits you have now. The biggest surprise will be the GOP gave all the money to Walker’s campaign and then depends on us to buy all these things we produce.

Guess what? How many expensive things can you buy with a $5-per-hour job?

At least we will have the last laugh.

Very sad but true.

Russell W. Taylor

Blue Springs

Voting easy in Kansas

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback has made my job as a voter far easier.

With a stroke of a budget-signing pen, he has eliminated any need for me to listen to the news, vet candidates or make decisions.

All I have to do now is look for the party designation for candidates.

I will be voting a straight Democratic ticket at all levels.

Mr. Brownback and his ilk have been allowed to run amuck with hubris and ego aloft far too long already.

Kathryn Moore

Manhattan, Kan.

Auditor’s faux report

The June 7 story, “Agencies made budget haste, but not waste, auditor finds,” on Missouri auditor Tom Schweich’s report on state agency spending habits was interesting except that the custom of spending lots of money just before the end of the fiscal year, June 30, is something state agencies have done for decades, apparently because of the method the General Assembly uses to appropriate state funds.

The auditor’s report was hardly news.

Russ Warren

Nevada, Mo.

Sickening practice

Until reading a June 11 story, “MU vet school is ending life-dog surgeries, euthanasia,” I’d held the MU College of Veterinary Medicine in high esteem and considered it one of the best in the nation.

This is no longer the case after learning that the faculty there has had students operate on dogs and then euthanize them.

I understand the need for students to practice, but why didn’t they do it for dogs belonging to people who couldn’t afford it?

Better yet, why not operate on animals in shelters and return them to improve adoptability?

I’m shaking on the inside as I write this, because it is a cruelty that I cannot wrap my mind around.

The school should be ashamed, and any student or official who knew should be even more so.

I had wanted to be a vet and would have gone to this school. They can thank their lucky stars that my life led in another direction.

Had I learned of this senseless slaughter, I’d have gone to the press, the SPCA, PETA and anyone else who would have sought to expose these heinous activities.

There is no excuse.

This practice is more sickening than using animals to test products.

D. Jeanine Wilson

Raymore

Theocratic Republic

Being a citizen of the “Theocratic Republic of Kansas,” I have much to be thankful for:

•  As a retiree, I’m thankful that so many people will benefit from the recently passed income tax cut, even if I won’t.

•  Since I rarely drive on the highways, I’m thankful that I’ll be dodging potholes at 35 mph rather than 75 mph.

•  With my youngest son just a year away from high school graduation, I’m thankful that he won’t have to endure 40-student classrooms.

•  I’m also thankful that I’ll be facing only four years of in-state college tuition increases.

•  Most of all, I’m thankful that the income tax cuts will create so many thousands of new jobs — an estimated half-million needed to pay for the cuts — that there will be plenty of wealthy citizens ready to buy my home when I decide to downsize and move.

I hear Yazoo City, Miss., is lovely.

Jim Sheldon

Westwood Hills

Don’t stop running

To all the well-meaning doctors telling us to stop exercising so much, please stop using ultra-marathon runner Micah True as an example of what will happen if you run “too much.”

Yes, it is tragic that he died, but to attribute his death to running too much ignores the many, many older runners who live and run to a ripe old age.

Please, everyone, take note that the recent study in The Star about marathon running and heart damage involved 10 percent of the study’s participants. What about the other 90 percent?

Run healthy and run strong.

Dan Hall

Kansas City

Suburban museum

Hasn’t this community learned anything from the restoration of Union Station as applied to the proposed museum on Metcalf?

The question is, Just who is interested in knowing how people in the 1950s lived?

Too many of the people living in Johnson County are well-acquainted with their grandparents’ living styles. And, I’d say they have no interest in perpetuating that lifestyle or viewing it in some museum.

We have cuts in funding at all levels of education in Kansas. Why do we want to take on this money pit?

Where are the so-called conservative values of our Johnson County commissioners now?

For sure, education of our young pays off.

Museums are the opposite side of that coin.

Doris A. Duke

Overland Park

Nude statue flap

Artist Yu Chang’s sculpture in the Overland Park Arboretum and Botanical Gardens on West 179th Street and one mom’s negative reaction to it reminded me of something that happened some years ago.

Our next-door neighbor, offended by the literature our high school-aged children were assigned to read, photcopied all the “obscene” pages. Then she distributed them with a petition to have the teacher censured and the offensive books removed from the school library.

The response was instantaneous but not in the way she expected.

She had provided a virtual catalogue of all the “good stuff” for students to see without having to actually read the books.

However, the library noticed requests for these “offensive” books increased. Some parents noticed their 17- and 18-year-old boys were reading again.

And we had some of the best conversations around our dinner table with our children about literature and our constitutional freedoms.

Thank you, Stilwell mom, for reminding everyone how lucky we are to live in a country that protects our freedoms.

“Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too.” Voltaire

“Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.” Mark Twain

Bernie Kline

Liberty

Congress’ deadbeats

Let me see whether I’ve got this straight: Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, doesn’t pay her taxes on time and bills taxpayers for the use of her plane when she should be paying for it.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Kansas City Democrat, doesn’t pay his taxes on time and may be sticking taxpayers with more than a million dollars for his failed business.

With congressional deadbeats like this, it’s no wonder the country is in such dire financial straits.

Fran Baker

Lee’s Summit

Small-town feeling

After the constant grumbling about how government, at every level, seems to get even the simple things wrong, I figured I owe it to let government officials know when they get it right.

I’ve been a Shawnee resident for 40 years now, and never did I feel better about my town than I did one recent Saturday night at Old Shawnee Days.

At what can only be described as a “chamber of commerce night,” we spread a blanket on the grass with family and friends and took in a great concert.

At one point, I looked across the large crowd, with the backdrop of the carnival lights, and realized that it felt as if I were in the middle of a Norman Rockwell painting.

To the city of Shawnee and its volunteers, thank you.

Even though we’ve grown threefold in the last 40 years, you still know how to give us that close “small-town” feeling.

Mark Cahill

Shawnee