Walk, bike to school

Today is International Walk and Bike to School Day. This event promotes physical activity and helps children become safer pedestrians and bicyclists.

It’s great for the environment. Please encourage your children to walk or bike to school and teach them to navigate the roads safely.

Motorists, please be mindful of children walking and biking to school. Learn more at www.walkbiketoschool.org

Martha Weber Conradt

Leawood Sustainability

Advisory Board

Leawood

Obama out of touch

President Barack Obama is not a serious man. In terms of fiscal and foreign policy he is woefully unprepared and frighteningly inept.

On the very day that the Mideast burns and our ambassador is assassinated, this unserious man travels to a fundraiser in Las Vegas (the media would have castigated President George W. Bush for the same). Narcissistic megalomania is a more apt description.

Obama’s need to hobnob with Barbra Streisand, Whoopi Goldberg, David Letterman, Jay-Z, George Clooney, Beyoncé and Jay Leno, coupled with 100 trips to the golf course, is much more important in massaging his ego. At a very serious time in the United Nations’ deliberations he found no time to meet with world leaders yet appeared on Letterman and “The View.”

His foreign policy is naïve and conciliatory toward radicals around the world. His fiscal policy is merely to pit groups against each other, creating jealousy, instead of “hope and change.”

The greatest travesty is in the adoring, fawning media’s raising the race card every time anyone disagrees with this man’s public policies. Wake up, moderate Democrats and independents.

Dan Sarver

Overland Park

Modern-day racketeers

A main business of the mobs in their day was the “protection racket.” A mobster would make a gruff visit to the owner of a bar, restaurant or business office and explain how protection was needed.

If the mobster’s appearance or demeanor was not intimidating enough, smashed windows, intimidated suppliers or a more personal home threat usually made the sale for promise of payment of a monthly protection fee.

More than 75 percent of current Republican congressmen were approached by Grover Norquist and signed a pledge to agree not to ever vote to raise any taxes, especially on the super rich. Norquist’s method to extract the no-tax pledge, he said on television, was a threat that his well-financed political action committee would run a Republican opponent in the next primary election if the candidate did not capitulate and sign the pledge.

My congressman, Kevin Yoder, stood strong and was not intimidated by Norquist. He did not sign the pledge.

He may have taken a nighttime dip in the buff in the Sea of Galilee, which may show some excess personality, but he never caved in to Norquist’s racket.

Lloyd Hellman

Leawood

Least of political liars

As a cadet at the Military Academy at West Point, I lived by an honor code that stipulated that a cadet will not “lie, cheat, steal or tolerate those who do.” Even if someone cannot adhere to the code at all times that person should at least aspire to its precepts.

As I observe the current political discourse, I cannot see where either party is even aspiring to honesty. Sadly, I must add another parameter to my act of choosing a candidate, and that is to choose the candidate that lies the least.

Richard Randolph, M.D.

Lenexa

Dear Sen. McCaskill:

After watching your ads, I know that you rearranged headstones in Arlington. Very noble.

And I know a lot of negatives about your Republican challenger, Rep. Todd Akin. What I do not know is what you propose to do with six more years.

I know that in your first six years you voted to increase spending, expand entitlements and help the president expand government. But I do not know what you plan to do with the next six years.

Tad DeOrio

Lee’s Summit

McCaskill out of step

So Sen. Claire McCaskill is No. 50. That means she is just the 50th least liberal in the Senate. I guess I don’t understand how that makes her attractive to the average Missouri voter.

Let’s review. She was one of President Barack Obama’s first supporters, campaigning for him.

On spending, forget about the stimulus bill. McCaskill voted to spend the money. It doesn’t say much about her willingness to cap federal spending.

On health care reform, she was a supporter even though the majority of Missouri voters opposed the bill. Many of us didn’t know what was in the bill or what the real cost would be.

On veterans’ benefits, McCaskill has been an ally for veterans. However, when there was concern the debt ceiling would not be raised, Obama made it clear one of the first to have payments withheld would be members of the military.

How about when she supported adding two members to the Supreme Court whose answers during the confirmation hearings indicated a lack of qualification to serve or were just misleading?

No, you may be a 50 now, but that must be just temporary during the election process.

Tom Turner

Lee’s Summit

Suppressing voters

If Republicans are truly concerned about the unproven allegation of voter fraud (10 convictions since 2001), why are they trying to reduce the days that have historically been available for early voting? What does early voting have to do with voter fraud?

It is nothing more than a phony attempt to create a GOP version of fascism by using a new form of a poll tax to create voter suppression. As a Pennsylvania congressman admitted on TV, “Voter ID laws will get Mitt Romney elected.”

How can anyone vote Republican?

Martin Kaynan

Olathe

Trashing the planet

People in the Republican Party are so worried about the amount of money they are able to leave to their offspring that they are more than willing to abort any environmental causes to save our planet.

They have said they want to rid us of the Environmental Protection Agency, which is the watchdog for our planet.

Apparently, they don’t care that the planet they are leaving to their offspring may not be inhabitable. This is because of greed, and greed is an awful thing.

J. Allen Smith

Excelsior Springs

Akin’s view of women

Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin’s “ladylike” comment on Sen. Claire McCaskill only parlays his “legitimate rape” view toward women.

Sensitivity is not the issue here. The vote in November for the state of Missouri is the big picture.

If Missourians vote in this extremist candidate, labeled “unfit” by his party’s national leaders, the state will suffer as Alabama did in the 1960s.

Rep. Akin’s opinions of women today reflect those of the racist Southern whites toward the President Lyndon Johnson-signed Civil Rights Act in their refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy or status of black Americans in their state.

Missouri would be mocked, satired and, for the women across the country, labeled as the state to stay away from.

What’s next for Akin and his Republican supporters? Repeal of women’s suffrage?

Harry Noll

Shawnee

Hate taught correctly

When each day I read about cruelty and hatred, I am compelled to think long and hard about how to use hate to an advantage.

Hate is as old and commonplace as this world.

Hate crosses every line that we know — economic, ethnic, racial and religious, just to name a few. I came up with some suggestions that could help us, a civilized people, hate in a positive manner:

If you would learn to hate war, then peace would prevail.

If you would learn to hate hunger, then the multitudes would be fed.

If you would learn to hate bigotry, then prejudice would become obsolete.

If you would learn to hate ignorance, then every moment would be a teaching moment.

If you would learn to hate homelessness, then volunteering to build homes would be your passion.

If you would learn to hate murder, then you would use tolerance at all times.

If you would learn to hate rudeness, then you would perform random acts of kindness every day.

Teach this type of hatred to everyone you encounter.

This is the way to make the world more productive and more gentle for all who inhabit it.

Terri E. Byrd-Jones

Kansas City