Who’s worse, O.J. or Craig Titus?
To the editor:
I have never been a fan of O.J. Simpson, but after reading about the body builder who killed and burned his personal assistant ("Shorter prison sentence sought," Tuesday Review-Journal), I find myself a little concerned about our legal system.
Let's compare these two crimes. Craig Titus was sentenced to at least 21 years in prison for murder, but he wants that reduced to 17. His wife, Kelly Ryan, got at least six years for arson and battery with a deadly weapon in that case. But Simpson might get life in prison for armed robbery. Oh yeah, the same judge, Jackie Glass, presided over both cases.
Our system is a joke, and so are the district attorney and the judge. This is like the referee who made a bad call in the first quarter of the football game and makes up for it by making another bad call for the other team in the fourth quarter.
Justice really is blind, and so is our district attorney.
Dennis Larounis
PIOCHE
Blatant socialism
To the editor:
Sen. Barack Obama, in answering a question posed to him about his plan to raise taxes, said Sunday that he wanted "to spread the wealth around."
Spread the wealth around?
Doesn't that require taking wealth from those who earned it just to give it to those who did not? Doesn't that punish those who sacrificed to produce their wealth only to reward the nonproducers?
Isn't that socialism? Didn't that economic plan fail in Russia and Eastern Europe?
Be afraid. Be very afraid anytime the government comes to take your wealth. What else will they come to take away from you?
That is not the kind of change America needs.
S.G. Hayes
LAS VEGAS
Raw deal
To the editor:
So the economic bailout went ahead without regard to the citizens who were against it. All those e-mails and phone calls to members of Congress were ignored.
So now let me ask, who will have to pay for this bill? What do we get? I have worked all my life, paid taxes and paid my bills. My house is lower in value, my mortgage is the same as always. Yet for those who have borrowed unwisely on their homes and credit cards, I am expected to pay their bills?
What happens when the equity in their homes increases and they move on to greener pastures? They have a profit, and I am still stuck in my home having paid all these taxes to benefit a few?
Who will give us honest hardworking folks a break?
Susan Hooper
LAS VEGAS
Big spender
To the editor:
Every day, Sen. Barack Obama is offering new tax cuts or new spending plans. It sounds like he is trying to bribe the American voter.
Sen. Obama could become the trillion-dollar man -- that is, he could become the first president to generate trillion-dollar annual budget deficits.
James Nance
HENDERSON
Informed electorate
To the editor:
Regarding the article in Monday's Review-Journal, "McCain seeks Hispanic vote":
Cindy Florez, while registering to vote, told The Associated Press's Kathleen Hennessey that she does not always remember the name of her favored presidential candidate, but she knows she will vote Democratic.
Fine. I respect anyone's choice and views, politically. But what concerns me about voters such as Ms. Florez is whether they understand the platform their candidate is running on and the issues of the campaign.
Let's hope Ms. Florez will do her homework before Election Day and know why she is casting her vote.
David Byars
LAS VEGAS
Life in an HOA
To the editor:
Edward R. Duffy hit the nail on the head many times in his Wednesday letter to the editor ("Homeowner associations"), but he also missed by a mile on a big issue.
What the Legislature also never fathomed when it passed its 1973 legislation establishing planned-unit developments was that homeowners associations would ever grow to the size developers have made them today, or that owners would be so apathetic about the governance of their communities.
Yes, the developers write the covenants, codes and restrictions, and 99 percent of the time those documents are faulty and self-serving, and most assuredly many inflame ire rather than bring peace to a neighborhood.
That said anyone who has ever served on a board knows the agony of attempting to make changes, even minor ones, in those documents. Thanks to the Legislature, the percentage of resident votes needed to accomplish this task is huge; given the size that most HOAs now are and the apathy of most residents, forget about it.
Several years ago, I was serving on the board of a 1,200-home HOA, and all we wanted to do was make the CC&Rs current with Nevada Revised Statutes and rewrite them in plain, simple English, so they were not in legalese, but easy-to-understand language. After having our attorney do a rough draft and send it to the residents twice, with few returns, we sent a letter putting into dollars and cents what these mailings were costing the association. We left the documents the way they were.
Rana Goodman
HENDERSON
