Readers react to smart TV, buying American and the presidential debates
Smart-TV challenge
My friend bought a smart TV, and I asked her whether the remote had a button to hide banners that crawl along the screen during programming, also known as weather bulletins, election results, school and church closings, Amber Alerts and more.
She said it wasn’t that smart. Too bad.
Judith L. Leonard
Butler, Mo.
Buy-American blues
I’m always amused when I read a letter to the editor urging consumers to buy American. It tells me one of two things: Either the writer is trying to be a comic or he or she doesn’t do the shopping in the family.
I have tried for years to buy American goods and can count on one hand the number of American-made products that I have found. I couldn’t find more because our chain stores, which claim to support American jobs, get more than 90 percent of their products from overseas.
I don’t consider “Assembled in America” because the parts are still foreign made.
The next time a letter writer urges us to buy American, I hope he or she includes a list of products and locations.
Tammy Elliott
Kearney
Painting popularity
Here’s a suggestion to spice up the presidential debates and guarantee record viewing audiences. Have each candidate appear nude, with appropriate parts painted in red, white and blue like the desnuda women of Times Square (8-16, A18, “Nearly naked in Times Square”).
After all, don’t all political candidates paint themselves as upstanding patriots while wrapping themselves in the flag to hide their own shortcomings?
Bob Tobia
Kansas City
What about Bush?
Your Aug. 17 editorial, “Clinton courted trouble with emails,” about Hillary Clinton’s emails may be accurate or valid, but because you and no one else will report with the same persistence and detail about Jeb Bush’s use of personal emails while he was governor of Florida, it smells a little like partisan hack work or something else equally invalid and unworthy of consideration.
Bush is also running for president. Bush also used a personal email server for state emails and exchanged some information on that server that could be very useful to a terrorist, regarding, among other things, security or lack thereof at power plants in Florida. All this in the days right after 9/11.
Until you give Bush’s use of personal emails during his time as governor the same scrutiny as Democratic presidential hopeful Clinton’s, I cannot take as serious journalism any discussion of Clinton’s use of a personal email server.
You can and should do better.
Martin Buchanan
Kansas City
Fishing stories
In Missouri, conservatives hire someone to fish for them.
Then they show everyone the catch and declare themselves “self-made fishermen.”
In Kansas, you need a license to fish but not to carry a gun. So people just shoot the fish.
Richard Johns
Kansas City
Closing at Capitol
I’m still fuming over the Aug. 14 article, “Is it the last stop for a snack shop?” about Don Wistuba and his snack shop closing. He’s a 59-year-old man, blind from birth, but has maintained a small business and worked 39 years.
Leave it to the lobbyists to put him out of business by offering the governor’s staff and state workers free meals. Once again, these lobbyists have offered a trough where influential state workers have their snouts.
Please, state workers and governor’s staff, don’t feel guilty. Don Wistuba won’t see you when you walk past for your free meals.
So, someone tell me this. Who’s really blind here?
Rich Hoffman
Kansas City
Checking all ballots
Shortly after the last Kansas election, I submitted a message to The Kansas City Star regarding my experience when voting. It took me three tries to get Gov. Sam Brownbeck off my ticket before I finally was able to cast my vote.
Now I read that statistician Beth Clarkson is requesting a voting-machine audit. At the time, I thought it was just a glitch in the voting machine I was using. Now I suspect something more. Thank you, Beth Clarkson, for checking into this.
This is not just a Wichita/Sedgwick County issue. Please, everyone, when you vote in the future, verify that the person you want to vote for is who shows up on that summary screen before you submit.
Wili McKinney
Lenexa
Former governors
An individual’s greatest asset when making any decision is wisdom. As the upcoming election cycle nears, our country is at a tipping point.
Electing a tried and true leader to take our nation forward is critical, and exercising sound judgment in electing our next president is vital. Wisdom dictates that the criteria for electing our next president should not be ideology, what a candidate says he wants or hopes to do or what he thinks should be done.
The criteria should be what a candidate has done. A candidate’s accomplishments as a leader or governor should determine his or her viability as a candidate.
In addition, the candidate’s honesty and integrity should not be in question, and one’s ability to cross party lines to get things done should be part of his resume for the job.
Personally, I think this narrows the field to looking at the records of present and previous state governors running for president, and we have some with excellent governing records. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee come to mind.
There are times when exercising common sense and wisdom is really not that difficult.
Scot Ewing
Blue Springs
Mental health funding
Words cannot express the pain caused by the South Carolina church shooter or the theater shooter in Louisiana. Not to mention many more shootings that happened in the past.
But in a big part I blame society. On the news I heard a shooting was warded off and the intended shooter was described as a “troubled young man.”
When are society and mainly the Republicans going to realize this problem is going to get much worse because of a lack of mental health treatment facilities?
The Republicans have drastically cut funds for mental health. I think they do not care unless something like this would happen to a member of their own family.
I know an individual who has been diagnosed as depressive, bipolar, suicidal and homicidal at Truman Medical Center. But the hospital has said there have been such deep funding cuts that this individual cannot receive counseling unless he has private insurance, which he does not.
This is very serious. This is a bomb ready to go off, and yet nothing is done because there is no money to be made in mental health. Look at the trouble with the Osawatomie State Hospital, for example.
People look out.
Susanne Carpenter
Kansas City
Generational test
I’m a 67-year-old baby boomer. My generation was the first to be college-educated in large numbers.
We are responsible for many of the country’s ills. As much as was done to build this country, we’ve managed to set it back 50 to 60 years (Iraq war, financial collapse, etc.).
President Dwight Eisenhower warned us to avoid succumbing to the military industrial complex. We didn’t heed his warning.
It has been said that the purpose of government is to protect the health, safety and welfare of its citizens and that a civilized society is one in which you have the right to be left alone.
You young adults are now in charge, whether in your late teens, 20s, 30s or 40s. Take care to avoid selfishness and greed, which became the legacy of the baby boom.
Protect rights and freedoms for everybody. Make government do its part.
We are a nation of laws, but some are unjust and unfair. Have them changed so they are just and fair for all Americans.
We owe everything to those who have passed, who served or are serving in defense of America on our behalf. The fight was not theirs alone.
Steve Sumner
Shawnee
This story was originally published August 19, 2015 at 10:00 AM with the headline "Readers react to smart TV, buying American and the presidential debates."