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Letters To The Editor

What does it take?

Early in his political career, Mr. Trump remarked that he could “shoot” someone in the middle of Times Square and get away with it. It sounded ridiculously self-aggrandizing and absurd then. Today, I’m not sure! Since that crazy observation, Mr. Trump has had plenty of opportunity to test that calculation in so many ways that one must wonder if he wasn’t right! Mr. Trump, while not with gun in hand but with presidential fiat, has been responsible for many deaths, not the least egregious of which are extra-judicial killings on the high seas. He has presided over deadly violence ...

City has way forward

“We don’t want to become the next Traverse City.” I’ve heard this my whole life living in the Upper Peninsula, but rarely does anyone explain what that actually means. At face value, it’s about rising housing costs and crowded streets. But those are symptoms. The real issue is a lack of planning, vision, funding, and infrastructure to support growth. At their core, Grand Traverse County and Marquette County share the same asset: natural beauty. And right now, we also share a similar challenge – growing tourism demand without a clear plan to manage it or the funding to ...

Smaller government needed

To the Journal editor: Recently, The Mining Journal ran an article of the U.S. Forest Service closing all four of its research offices in Michigan. In the article, which described the positions using an acronym that to most suggested these people were in fact research scientists. A comment from Michigan Tech University stated these people are needed to make sure timber harvest is done using the best, most recent scientific data. The reality is that after looking up exactly what the acronym stood for, I found that the people being relocated are actually “data analysts” and not field ...

Organized religion in trouble

To the Journal editor: And I must tell you, with great respect for the effort being displayed, this thing is over. Mainline protestantism has been bleeding out since 1965 and has not yet had the decency to acknowledge the wound. The Methodists split over homosexuality like a nineteenth-century frontier congregation and lost a third of their membership in the divorce. The Presbyterians count their remaining faithful in numbers that would embarrass a moderately successful restaurant chain. The Episcopalians hold magnificent real estate and virtually no one under 60. The evangelicals, ...

Opposes forest management plans

To the Journal editor: I am very disturbed by changes the Trump administration has proposed for management of our National Forests. These include transferring the headquarters of the Forest Service from Washington D.C. to Utah, closing regional Forest Service headquarters, and shutting down Forest Service research facilities and experimental forests. There are four U.S. Forest Service research facilities in Michigan, located in the Lower Peninsula (East Lansing and Wellston) and in Houghton and L’Anse in the Upper Peninsula. Collaboration with the Michigan Department of Natural ...

Is Donald Trump’s war against Iran inspired by Hollywood?

And it's still a mystery. We still haven't gotten a clear explanation about why Mr. T started this strange war in Iran. He's huffed and puffed about all sorts of bad things the Iranian government has done, from its assaults against its own citizens to its apparent efforts to develop a nuclear weapon. But as with so much of what the big guy pumps out in his late night Trust Social postings and his daily yak yaks with the press, there's no real consistency in his war talk. It's whatever blows into his mind one day and then he's on to something else 24 hours later. So, then, what about ...