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Help for homeless
merely a PR stunt
Re. “Bay Area gets $5M for homeless housing,” Page B1, June 30:
The “homeless housing” referred to is vastly inadequate.
For example, in Santa Clara County it amounts to $6,258 for a pregnant woman. The average apartment rental — if one can be found — is $2,500. Pregnancies last nine months. Do the math. And what happens once a child is born? How does a mother, who may have other children, survive?
This is a feel-good PR gesture by Gov. Newsom and his political allies. Shame on them for doing so little when the need is so great.
Larry Bensky
Berkeley
Pac-12 defections show
it’s all about the money
The college football money grab is getting more brazen and outrageous each year.
USC and UCLA, two Los Angeles-based universities joining a Midwestern-based conference? (“What’s next for devastated Pac-12 without USC, UCLA?” Page C1, July 1) A conference that has already expanded to the East Coast (Rutgers/New Jersey and Maryland) removes any pretense of tradition and long-standing rivalries as a driver for college sports.
It’s strictly about the money for coaches and administrators, not the athletes.
Barry Gardin
Hayward
Biden must restore
protection for wolves
When I was a boy, I spent summers on my uncle’s ranch in Wyoming. At night the sky would blaze with the fires of billions of stars, and there was soulful, haunting music on the airwaves – the singing of what sounded like hundreds, thousands of wolves. It was primal and magical.
Now I hear that the federal government has allowed the wolves’ protection from death-by-hunting to lapse. And I read that they are being slaughtered by “hunters” (executioners using baits, traps and poisons, as well as guns) in those very same Rocky Mountains and valleys where they had thrived for eons. This is so wrong and so heartbreaking.
Please, Mr. President and Secretary Haaland, do the right thing — and do it right away. Restore the endangered species status to wolves, and enforce the law, immediately and emphatically. Please, before we lose any more of these precious creatures.
Michael Talbot
San Rafael
Roe decision was not
a left-wing aberration
All the news reports about the Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade have failed to point out that the opinion in Roe was written by Harry Blackmun, a justice nominated by a Republican president, and joined by four other Republican justices, Chief Justice Warren Burger, and Justices William Brennan, Potter Stewart and Lewis Powell. Two justice nominated by Democratic presidents voted in the majority: William Douglas and Thurgood Marshall. A Republican and Democrat dissented: William Rehnquist and Byron White.
Roe was not some left-wing aberration.
Thomas Sponsler
Moraga
Abortion compromise
needed to heal nation
An abortion compromise is needed.
I think it should be legal to abort during the first three months and illegal after that. That way no fetuses looking like babies would be cut up or dismembered, removing the main obstacle to aborting. This way each side gets some of what they want.
It’s time to end the debate and to give each side some of what they want. I hope you agree.
Joady Guthrie
El Cerrito
Applaud those who
chip away at the lies
As the principles I hold most dear in our nation are being trampled and cast aside, one young woman emerges from the shadow of obscurity to tell her truth. Will her story be trampled and cast aside as well? Or will her courage and integrity coax others to step out from behind shadow figures, so much larger and more powerful than themselves, to tell theirs?
No one person, from any single vantage point, can ever know the whole truth of any particular circumstance.
If we can’t unite through a single perception of what constitutes the truth, let us join hands in applauding those capable of chipping away at the lies, one by one, until whatever remains is capable of setting us all free to pursue those precious principles we hold most dear.
Linda Thorlakson
Castro Valley
Joyner story shows
need to carry a gun
The Supreme Court’s decision to support a person’s right to carry a weapon without any required justifiable reason was the right decision.
On Oct. 21, 2021, retired police officer Capt. Ersie Joyner shot and killed one of three armed robbers and attempted carjackers in self-defense. Joyner was quoted as saying in an exclusive video interview conducted by Channel 2 News on Jan. 30, 2022, that he knew he was going to have to fight for his life as he felt he was going to be killed no matter what he did in compliance.
Joyner is allowed to carry a concealed weapon as a retired police officer because of the potential targeting by previously convicted or arrested persons who could seek revenge. But this incident had nothing to do with his past employment. He was just another citizen like you or me but armed — something I can’t do.
Michael D. Scott
Walnut Creek
Source: www.mercurynews.com