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LETTERS: Masterful Maddux merits admiration

To the editor:

The Review-Journal did it perfect with its coverage of Greg Maddux and his Baseball Hall of Fame induction (“Baseball’s Wit King,” “Taking measure of Maddux,” Sunday Review-Journal). Now there’s a role model if there ever was one.

Maddux was one of the best pitchers who ever played the game. When I watched him pitch, I was just amazed that these batters couldn’t hit him. He was such a master tactician. Congratulations to Mr. Maddux.

CHARLES BERBERIAN

LAS VEGAS

Immigration crisis

To the editor:

President Barack Obama has been whining for weeks about the need for $3.7 billion in emergency funding for the immigration crisis created by his administration. The same week he began making his pleas, there was an Associated Press article stating that the federal government was making illegal payments to the tune of $104 billion for various issues, including unemployment payments, welfare, etc.

So, Mr. President, you apparently have the money available to you. All you need to do is start managing the waste pointed out in the AP article, right? But no, it’s just more fun to blame the Republicans for the ongoing crisis, isn’t it?

This manufactured crisis is not about those poor folks from Central America, it’s about making the other party into the bad guy. How pathetic can these Democrats get?

JAMES M. MAGNUSON

LAS VEGAS

GOP fear-mongering

To the editor:

The evolution — or devolution — of the Republican Party over the past 20 years stems from using fear as its driving force. In the 1990s, the religious right rose to power by deftly exploiting churchgoers’ fears of a rising culture of loose morals and family breakdown. The government shutdown and debt-ceiling debacle last year revealed how Republican congressional leaders let a noisy and scary contingent of the tea party cloud their judgment. The leadership of the entire Republican Party operated on fear of its own members.

Now anti-immigration partisans, supporters of Sen. Ted Cruz and do-nothing, delay-everything tea party Republicans are perpetrating a fear-motivated border crisis: the fear of children crashing our border.

The Republican image is crashing nationally, with 70 percent of the respondents in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll accusing the Republicans of putting their own political agenda ahead of what’s good for the country. With all this, the Republicans losing the House of Representatives in the 2014 midterm elections has to be treated as a distinct possibility.

RON LOWE

NEVADA CITY, CALIF.

Congress creates mayhem

To the editor:

It is hard to understand the outrageous reaction to young immigrants flowing through our southern border. It has been noted that most of these children are fleeing other countries for self-preservation. After freeing America from foreign intervention, our great nation has opened our lands to many oppressed masses. But these newfound negative positions on immigration are being aided by our do-nothing Congress, which has a lower approval rating than whale dung.

The border crisis has created so much media attention that it is severely dividing a once unified nation, to the point where people hate not only the oppressed migrants, but fellow American citizens.

Let’s assume that 100,000 of these immigrants were accepted and proportionally divided and housed by the four border states — California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. This would amount to an extremely small increase in those states’ populations. Mass immigration, huh?

Since Congress can’t get its act together over the 100,000 undocumented migrants, can we expect anything on our home front but discontent and mayhem? Congress has a constitutional mandate to govern and provide unity to our nation, but it is failing beyond belief. We citizens of America do not need civil strife; we need a civil uprising on the steps of the House of Representatives. If a CEO ran a company as John Boehner is running the House, he would be relegated to the trash heap.

DON ELLIS

HENDERSON

Traffic laws

To the editor:

Richard N. Fulton wrote a good letter in the July 26 Review-Journal, in response to Steve Sebelius’ July 13 column (“How about these laws?”), but I have to comment on the part about keeping traffic flowing. Mr. Sebelius would like a law that requires slow motorists to keep to the right on freeways. That used to be a law and might still be on the books. However, there is a law that says the left lane is for passing only.

The problem with so many laws is that some people are not aware of them; some people just don’t care, as they use their cellphones while driving, etc.; and lack of enforcement. I don’t see the police stopping anyone for hogging the left lane.

JACK OLIVER

LAS VEGAS

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