Letters to the Editor - 11/18/2020

To the Editor:

I am not much of a communicator but I feel a need to convey some of my thoughts to our special town.

How fortunate we are to live in Sisters. I have been blessed to have lived here over 40 years and certainly have seen many changes — some I have liked and some not so much. One of the best things I have learned is that our community is always ready to step up and help. My husband, Jim, was placed in memory care last December, but before that people in town watched over him and always took care of him. The restaurants would call and let me know where he was, the barber shop would let me know, the deputy sheriffs would bring him home. Rollins Automotive has kept my car running. I could go on and on with all the great people that live in Sisters.

You now know why I love this town and why it has a special place in my heart. This has been a difficult year with so many adverse things going on but I’m so thankful for friends and the town of Sisters. I am so thankful to everyone.

Dorene Fisher

To the Editor:

I do not consider myself to be a political person. However, after watching over 25 hours of post- election TV coverage by numerous news sources over the past week, I agree 100 percent with the letter to the editor submitted by Michael Wells.

Trump is making a mockery of our democratic institution and standing in the world. Two of our most prominent Constitutional and election legal scholars, Laurence Tribe and Benjamin Ginsburg (a Republican who has represented 4 prior Republican presidential candidates), have stated that there is “no evidence to support Trump and no election fraud has been demonstrated.” As of November 11, 12 lawsuits in various states have already been dismissed. Furthermore, Trump went on TV prior to the election and told the voters of North Carolina to each vote twice for him, despite it being illegal.

Trump cronies (Mitch McConnell, Mike Pompeo, William Barr, and Lindsey Graham) are clearly pandering to him. None of them have the guts to confront him with the reality of the election….HE HAS LOST! Many Republican senators are cowards and afraid to cross Trump and risk their base. However, several Republican governors have recently called on him to concede the election.

Based on the recent firing of the Secretary of Defense and resignation of several key individuals in the intelligence community, Trump’s actions are strongly perceived to be “reckless” for our democracy. The fact that he is also blocking GSA’s transition effort to share information is both childish and potentially dangerous.

Many world leaders have called to congratulate President-Elect Biden. He is the one looking very presidential at this time. Hopefully, reality will eventually set in for Trump, and he will ultimately do the right thing and resign.

Steve Auerbach

To the Editor:

For over four years the most powerful security agencies of the Obama administration and their comrades in the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party, the mainstream media, have attempted to put President Trump, his family, and his staff in prison or drive them out of office.

Now the American people are expected to stand passively by while Joe Biden and his San Francisco minder ascend to rule America and implement the statist collectivist utopia the Left demands. Socialism with steel teeth.

Larry Benson

To the Editor:

What if the state of Oregon asserts it knows what is best for you and your ability to earn a living or live a full life, but that same state government can’t maintain it’s computer systems, can’t manage a healthcare exchange, can’t manage mental health services, can’t manage foster care, can’t manage Oregon’s forests, can’t track sex offender’s, can’t process unemployment claims and lacks transparency?

What if Article X-A of the Oregon Constitution requires the Governor to get a three-fifths approval from both houses of the Oregon Legislature to extend any declared emergency beyond thirty days? What if the Oregon Supreme Court engaged in judicial gymnastics to strike down a lower courts ruling that Governor Brown’s emergency powers expired in May? What if the Oregon Supreme Court claimed the written words in Oregon’s constitution for emergency powers don’t mean what they say? What if five of seven justices on the Oregon Supreme Court were appointed by Kate Brown? What if the court handed the Governor unlimited power over you and I?

What if a Philadelphia federal judge ruled that Philadelphia’s lockdowns and social distancing are unconstitutional by reasoning “such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional”?

What if U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr stated, “stay-at-home orders is like house arrest” and excluding slavery, “this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history”? What if Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito stated the pandemic has “highlighted disturbing trends” in the law such as “dominance of lawmaking by executive fiat rather than legislation” and “previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty”?

What if the virus is real but the numbers are not? What if the New York Times reported that coronavirus tests are over-sampled during analysis, causing positive results for genetic fragments that pose no particular risk of the virus in ninety percent of positive test results? What if Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently tweeted, “something extremely bogus is going on. Was tested for COVID four times today. Two tests came back negative, two tests came back positive. Same machine, same test, same nurse. Rapid antigen test from BD”?

What if personal responsibility and free choice based on the best information from the government is our natural and constitutional right as free people?

What if we are being stomped on by our government?

JK Wells

To the Editor:

Recently, the executive committee of the Sisters Folk Festival made the difficult decision to restructure its staff configuration, eliminating the development director position in response to the significant financial challenge presented by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The annual Sisters Folk Festival isn’t just a community celebration with a huge economic impact to local businesses; it is also the SFF organization’s single largest revenue generator, funding the lion’s share of our programming and operational costs. Despite the loss of that revenue in 2020, we were able to persevere with the help of the Payroll Protection Program, $195K in emergency funding through the CARES Act, and deep cuts to staffing hours across the board. There are no guarantees there will be additional economic relief for businesses next year — or an end to the pandemic — and the survival of the organization is our number one priority.

We are so grateful to our outgoing development director, Steven Remington, not only for the great work he’s done during his time with SFF, but also for his ongoing professionalism and dedication to the nonprofit organization as he assists staff through the transition. His wry wit and years of industry experience will be greatly missed around the office.

SFF will continue to serve the Sisters community in the best way possible throughout the duration of this pandemic, building on the recent success of our Close To Home Concerts and Creativity Camps with more day camps for kids next spring and summer, as well as music clubs, art classes, more outdoor, socially distanced concerts at our backyard venue. Stay safe and we will get through this crisis together!

Crista Munro

Executive Director

Sisters Folk Festival

To the Editor:

In a recent letter to the editor, Michael Wells submitted some rather inflammatory statements regarding President Trump that were simply false or misleading.

Mr. Wells first indicated that when and if Biden takes office that we should all engage in civility, cooperation and concessions.

Does he mean like the lack of civility and cooperation we have seen from the left for the last four years?

He indicated that President Trump is patently unfit for office and his election was a nightmare. Does Mr. Wells know who thought his election was a nightmare except the far left who never accepted his election? Mr. Wells is good at name calling such as serial sexual assaults on women. He also calls the president unfit and racist. He goes on to say the president encourages corruption and violence.

Laughable.

He indicated that the Trump administration engaged in targeted kidnapping and tearing children from their parent and putting them in cages. Perhaps Mr. Wells should do some research here. It was the Obama administration who built the cages. Our president has gone out of his way to provide help for these children.

He continues to say the response to the pandemic was gross mismanagement. However, it was Biden who called the president xenophobic when he started shutting down our borders to keep the virus at bay. Trump didn’t lie, he simply did not want chaos. It was Pelosi who went into the throngs of Chinese people in Chinatown telling the people it was good to come there and not be afraid of it.

And then Michael calls the president a charlatan.

Michael stated further that the President’s supporters are claiming that Biden’s win was illegitimate.

You mean like when Al Gore in 2000 fought the election for 47 days? Mr. Wells alluded, that when losers only recognize they have lost is when we have democracy.

Again, laughable.

Does he mean like the last four years that the left won’t recognize they lost in 2016? The violence, vitriol and conflict committed in cities like Portland, Seattle and many other cities was not the doing of conservative people but rather from the left who, to this day are the ones engaged in such behavior, not by Trump supporters.

One best know the facts before calling Trump supporters names including deplorables, xenophobic, racist and more.

As an aside, Mr. Wells should not overlook the pay-for-play we are seeing in the Biden family tree.

Owen Herzberg

To the Editor:

Residents in the Brooks Camp 55-plus Pines villa want to give much thanks to men and women who respond to calls for help. Last Friday again we witnessed their sensitive giving of care to a beloved neighbor. They saved her life and even comforted our painful concern for her, as well as transporting her to the hospital. We are fortunate to live safely here in Sisters.

JoAn Power, Joe Emmons, Marvin Emmarson, and many others

To the Editor:

I thought Contact Tracing was going to eliminate the need for another shutdown.

Were we lied to?

John Morter

To the Editor:

Governor Brown gets some credit for not following California and Washington with their absurd COVID-19 regulations which are strangling their economy, starving their people, and are not based on any real science. Her path for Oregon has yielded better results, and recognizes that this is a big state with many different parts to it.

At least up until this week.

Now with a spike in cases, more than half of which occur in three counties near Portland, our Governor is attempting to shut down the entire state. The survival of our once-thriving small businesses in Sisters is at stake, along with the livelihood of hundreds of people who work in those businesses.

Her current “freeze” order to close the entire state is neither based on science nor even common sense. She has repeatedly stated that the spikes in cases come from private social gatherings ­— weddings, house parties, holidays celebrations, etc. So to combat that she is closing all public spaces where social distancing was being enforced. This will of course cause people to gather in their not-socially distanced homes.

In addition to the legally doubtful authority she claims with which to do this (it was a 30-day emergency decree back in March), it is the wrong way forward for Oregon, and particularly Sisters. I encourage everyone to write the Governor with your views on her latest decree.

Carey Tosello