Speak Out 9/9/09

Bus monitors

IF you want your children to be safe on school buses, make sure that the school has enough money to pay for bus monitors. The bus driver cannot monitor the students and drive safely. I'm speaking as a former bus driver.

Big containers

I certainly hope the city of Cape Girardeau reconsiders its plan for redoing its trash pickup program. I don't know what in the world a lot of people are going to do if the city switches to huge containers. Where in the world are we supposed to store them?

Pig in a poke

ABOUT the cost of a government health plan: Has anybody ever known anything the government has done that has cost what it was estimated to cost? Everything, including our new federal courthouse here in Cape Girardeau, cost millions of dollars more than what originally was estimated. We're buying a pig in a poke.

Kids on dirt bikes

I live on County Road 651 in Cape Girardeau County. Is there anything that can be done about kids riding dirt bikes up and down the road at high rates of speed?

Suicide recipe

REGARDING the article and photo in the Southeast Missourian about the new ingredients for methamphetamines: I believe if I were a drug addict I would look for an easier way to commit suicide.

Champagne appetite

THE former governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, once said his mother used to say he had a champagne appetite and a Coca-Cola paycheck. I think that is true of President Obama and his Democratic partners. They are spending like mad. Sooner or later, they're going to run out of other people's money to spend.

Pathetic posturing

PUBLICLY elected officials who are excoriating the chief executive for his televised pep talk to students are engaging in political history's worst and most pathetic posturing.

Providing care

THE Bible may not say anything about the government helping the people, but I doubt that the Middle Easterners who wrote it during the Bronze Age could have conceived of government of, by and for the people. By far, the biggest welfare recipients are the CEOs of huge corporations who have been handed billions in government handouts, but God forbid we should provide health care for our people as every other industrialized nation has done. I can, however, understand the people who have interrupted the health care meetings. To those whose sense of identity has been premised on a race-based, masculine, conservative hierarchy of American power, the world must seem even more emotionally terrifying than the facts would indicate.

Stand pat

IN a vicious verbal salvo favoring the status quo when it comes to health care reform, Tom Shupe, assistant secretary of the Adam Smith Foundation in Jefferson City, referred to what he called "needless health care legislation." Shupe reveals himself as someone who wants to stop Obama at any cost, even at the cost the health and well-being of society. Shame on Shupe.