Speak Out 2/9/17

Better care

If EVERY employee at nursing facilities would treat EVERY resident with a little more respect and friendliness, perhaps they would be a better place to stay. Every patient in there is someone's parent, grandparent, sibling. I wish they'd treat them as if they were their own.

SEMO spending

Regarding Dr. Vargas' comments about "bad" budget cuts: Dr. Vargas is a fantastic president who is doing a phenomenal job, but as a SEMO employee, I can attest to a very long history of extremely wasteful spending habits at the university. These cuts are only forcing the university to do what it could and should have done years ago -- cut the fluff, of which there is plenty. Sadly, though, once again people and programs and practices that should be cut will not necessarily be done away with. Instead, there will be fretting and fussing and cuts made to programs that should not be cut. Cutting Malden classes is a good first step, but there are many other things that should be cut, and Dr Vargas will show his true colors and his true priorities by those cuts.

Greitens cut

Polls show that Republicans are more than rapidly losing faith in public education. This is reflected in Gov. Greitens' proposed draconian cuts to SEMO's budget. Still, there may be hope that the proposed cuts won't come to fruition since Greitens has already alienated so many members of his own party in the Missouri General Assembly as a result of his shenanigans, and now dead in the water to use his position as a stepping stone to the presidency.

McCaskill disgrace

As I read Claire McCaskill's comments regarding how awful things are now under President Trump ... meager wage increases, crumbs being offered to American workers for tax relief ... I have to wonder what planet she is from. She certainly doesn't speak for me, a Missourian, and obviously she is only listening to her group that opposes anything and everything President Trump says, thinks or dreams. I would really like to ask her what did her poster boy Obama do? Did he lower taxes at all? Nope. Did he bring jobs back to this country? Nope. Did he tell the world that America is great? Nope. Did he slash the number of people needing food stamps? Nope. Did he increase the percentage of African Americans job opportunities? Nope. In fact, he had the opposite effect in all categories. Oh, he did preside over the largest increases in healthcare premiums we have ever witnessed in our country's history. Maybe Ms. McCaskill, you should run on that point.

Rust's remarks

To read Jon Rust's excessively effusive praise of the energizer bunny of Congress, the evidently already re-elected Congressman, Jason Smith, is to be expected. However, to give Smith a pass on invoking the long-ago discredited supply side theory of economics as the way to cut into the gargantuan federal debt Smith voted for was, to use Trumpian terminology, sad.