Letters to the editor Aug. 5

Resentment lingers for Bush's wanton ways

I am responding to the letter to the editor written by Mitzi Neilsen July 16. She stated she resented President Obama using her tax dollars to come to Nevada to campaign for Harry Reid.

After doing some research, I found out that there is a partial reimbursement for presidential campaign visits from the candidate's campaign fund. I Googled presidential campaign visit reimbursement. What I found interesting is that the formula used then-President George W. Bush's campaign visits for candidates, such as Nevada's Dean Heller, as a tool to evaluate and equate how much the campaign reimburses.

That being said, I would like to point out a larger issue and a resentment that all American taxpayers should share, and that is the bringing of our country to near demise by the George W. Bush administration's greed, deregulation policies for Wall Street and banks, two wars that were not paid for, tax cuts for the top 2 percent of Americans that were not paid for, turning a blind eye and deregulating of the big oil companies, and Medicaid prescription drug plan that wasn't paid for.

Now that is a resentment we should all agree on.

Jenny Smith

Carson City

Sharron Angle sincerely wants to help Nevada

Letters denigrating Sharron Angle are long on accusations but short on facts. Sharron answers questions honestly; Harry Reid is evasive. Sharron wants to change Social Security to the same kind of plan Harry and his cohorts have voted for themselves. Harry has no plan, but uses millions from his rich cronies to twist Sharron's words into false attack ads.

Harry has enriched himself, not helped Nevada. How did the government land west of Las Vegas get into the hands of the developers? Is it a coincidence that Reid concurrently went from a relative pauper to a multi-millionaire? You connect the dots.

I have known Sharron personally since she first served in the Nevada Assembly. Unlike Reid, whose full time residence is in a ritzy Washington penthouse, Sharron is from the heart and soul of Nevada. She sincerely wants to serve, to put this country back on the right path and to reduce the federal tax bite. One example, the Department of Education, has spent over $1 trillion since 1980, and education has gotten worse. Nevadans could have done more with our share of this money.

But rich and powerful interests support Reid. Why? Because they know they can count on him to deliver your tax dollars to their corporate coffers. Are you and your children better off under the Obama, Reid, Pelosi policies? Or would you and America benefit from having an honest, intelligent and dedicated person working hard for you in the U.S. Senate?

John Vettel

Carson City

A power and money grab over state boards

Dovetailing nicely with the governor's thinly veiled plan to raid the assets of occupational licensing boards under the guise of rationalizing Nevada's boards and commissions. On July 20, the lobbyist for the state medical association proposed to the legislative committee on health care that many licensing boards be placed under a new office of health professional boards.

This office would put taxpayer-funded bureaucracy over what now are independent self-supporting boards that don't cost the taxpayers a nickel. Exempt from the state's use-it-or-lose-it fiscal practices, these boards have developed rainy-day assets, ripe for plucking by the governor to support a state bureaucracy that can't even make payroll.

The lobbyist showed the committee a complicated matrix of state healthcare boards' non-compliance with open meeting and public records laws. That matrix purported to show that various boards had violated such requirements that simply don't exist under either law. So many boards exceed what's required by law that the lobbyist thought there are at least a dozen requirements more than actually exist - or the lobbyist made them up out of whole cloth for the occasion.

I hope the committee didn't miss the irony of his not making copies of the matrix available to the public at the meeting so we could study it. This power and money grab is an insult to the taxpayers.

Barry W. Lovgren

Carson City