Healthcare Reform
I just read your article on the potential healthcare reform coming out of our Legislature (“Big Debate,” Aug. 13). I was surprised to see there weren’t any opinions from small-business owners or employers that would be likely to leave if any of those bills pass.
While I care what the providers and brokers have to say, don’t you think it’s a little one-sided to not get more employers’ opinions?
My company is part of the dying manufacturing base in California. My customers’ work is being sent offshore constantly or moving to Texas and Arizona, even Las Vegas.
Considering we are already constantly under attack, additional “reforms” that just cost us more money are counterproductive to say the least. I’m surprised that a business journal wouldn’t have more opinions from real businesses.
Eron Eklund
Owner, Electrolurgy Inc.
Irvine
‘Hillary: The Movie’
Great news in Rick Reiff’s Aug. 13 OC Insider column that the Lincoln Club will help fund the Hillary Clinton hit piece.
I was worried that the group might waste its funds on communicating positive issues raised by Republican candidates. Since there obviously are no positive issues to communicate, spending money on a hit piece is a splendid idea.
Obviously, Karl Rove will not be missed.
Martin Brower
Corona del Mar
John Wayne, El Toro
Leonard Kranser is right about one thing in his call to arms to the business community about John Wayne Airport,Orange County is in a box with a shortfall of future airport capacity (“Rationing Seats at John Wayne,” Aug. 20).
He is wrong about El Toro’s alternative F, which would cram 14 million annual passengers into one runway at John Wayne. Alternative F requires removal of all private aviation at John Wayne now heavily used by the business community.
There is a solution to Kranser’s dilemma. He can join forces with the city of Irvine and the housing developers to open the much-needed already-planned El Toro International Airport. Based on other airports in the area, each runway will bring in $1 billion per year. The airlines just love the fuel-saving cross runways at El Toro. And nobody is in the noise zone at El Toro.
Kranser is right about demand but he is wrong about alternative F, which deletes general aviation.
Donald Nyre
Newport Beach
Barry Bonds
No matter what anyone says, Barry Bonds (“Unsportfanlike Conduct,” Aug. 13) has been a real shot in the arm for baseball.
Larry Cabaldon
Rancho Santa Margarita
Iraq, Vietnam
George Bush and I share a lot of common ground.
First, we grew up in the 1950s and attended college in the mid-to-late 1960s. About the time young Bush was becoming known as a party animal at Yale, I was serving as the social chairman of my fraternity at USC.
Second, we both married librarians. For obvious reasons, Laura no longer works the stacks. My wife Leah is celebrating her 15th year working at Santiago Canyon College in Orange.
Third, Bush and I both did everything we legally could to remain stateside during the Vietnam War. His route to avoid serving there has been the subject of debate for years. Mine is more straightforward. Having fractured three vertebrae in a fall from a cliff while in high school, I made damn sure I flunked my physical exam two months after graduating from SC.
This is where the common ground ends. Our uncommon ground is rooted in our political beliefs. Curiously, Vietnam is a key dividing point between us.
In his recent speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Kansas City, Bush argued, “There is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like boat people, re-education camps and killing fields.”
Well, yes, all of that is true. But, so what? Today, people from all over the world flock to Vietnam to surf. If I were the parent or brother of a U.S. soldier killed in a rice paddy decades ago, I’d be asking myself one simple question today: Was it worth it?
If I still believed that the geopolitical domino theory was right, then my answer probably would be yes. If, on the other hand, I had my traveler’s visa and surfboard in tow, my answer most likely would be no.
Any way you slice it, losing more than 58,000 troops in Vietnam was a disaster. Clearly, if President Nixon had withdrawn U.S. forces earlier, thousands of young Americans would have been spared their ultimate sacrifice.
Today, President Bush faces a similar dilemma in Iraq. Interestingly, he now is comparing what’s happening in the Middle East to what happened 35 years ago in Southeast Asia. I’m not sure that logic is going to stick.
That’s because the Democrats who control Congress aren’t buying the president’s line, and neither are several leading Republicans. Coast to coast, GOP Senators like Gordon Smith of Oregon, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and John Warner of Virginia are openly critical of the White House strategy in Iraq.
The president wants Congress and the nation to patiently wait for Gen. David Petraeus to issue his report on Iraq. That highly anticipated document is due before Sept. 15, a rather curious date for me. Back on Dec. 1, 1969, my Sept. 14 date of birth was No. 1 in the first Vietnam-era draft lottery.
After all these years, Bush and I still share common ground. We partied too much in college, we still are married to librarians and we still keep thinking about Vietnam.
Denny Freidenrich
First Strategies
Laguna Beach
