Letters to the editor Dec. 20

Bigfork senior center

If Commissioner Mitchell wants to know what is going on in Bigfork, he will have to get off Bridge Street and talk to someone other than Realtors.

There are a lot more year-round residents than “snow birds” and a lot of us are sorely missing the senior center since the Covid shutdown.

— Gary House, Bigfork

Voter ID idea

An open letter to Governor-elect Gianforte:

Congratulations on your great election win. You have taken on an enormous task that brings to you a lot of responsibility. Thank you for taking a lot of time out of your life to serve the people of Montana.

As you know the nation’s election system is a mess. Montana seems to do pretty well the way it is, however there seems to be a lot of problems in areas of high population density. Most of those problems are on the East Coast and in the major cities all over our great country.

My question being, how would it be if Montana would champion a voter registration card? Similar to a Social Security card. The card would carry the voter’s name, and date and place of birth, and also a voter registration numer. This would be a lifetime ID and the number would be placed on every voted ballot.

There are some who would argue we have too many government regulations and rules already. As taxpayers and citizens of this great country, I for one would be proud to have a voter ID number. When we were drafted into the military at a very young age, I was 19, we were all issued a set of dog tags. These dog tags were made of stainless steel with our name, serial number, religion and blood type. The dog tags also had a convenient little notch on one end. The notch was placed on the tags for a purpose, that being if you were killed in combat the dog tag could be pushed between your front teeth. This would ID your dead body. No, I don’t have any argument against a voter registration number.

Perhaps Montana might lead the pack in getting a handle on some of our election problems. Good luck on your upcoming tenure as our new governor.

—Jerry Fisher, Bigfork

Media coverup

From my vantage point, I feel like there are at least 72 million plus American voters like myself, who have been disenfranchised due to massive, widespread voter fraud. I sincerely feel that the media have been and are censoring, ignoring and dismissing this. Soon after the election the media quickly decided Joe Biden was the President-elect. They continue to push their conclusion.

Now there are many whistleblowers who have come forward in all the contested states, that have signed affidavits under penalty of law, claiming fraud from ballot harvesting. Also have said there was counting the same ballots numerous times (like thousands), not verifying signatures, ignoring overdue postmarks on ballots, not allowing poll watchers to observe the voting and counting, etc.

What about ballot counting being abruptly stopped after midnight in crucial states where Trump was leading? Mainstream media has not examined or investigated these claims, instead they are covering them up. And yet, many of these election workers have put their reputations, jobs, families in jeopardy to do this. In fact, they have been threatened, intimidated, had their tires slashed, and worse.

Where is the reporting and facts disputing their stories? Or why isn’t someone at least interviewing these whistleblowers and listening to their stories? As best as I can read or see, there is no reporting on this in the media. Perhaps I have missed the coverage.

—Arline Hankins, Whitefish

Not so great

The Great Barrington Declaration has a lot of appeal: protecting the vulnerable, while everyone else goes back to normal, becomes infected/recovers and then achieve herd immunity (>70%). The problem is, it is shy on details and has unverified limiting assumptions.

Two countries tried the herd immunity strategy to protect the vulnerable and still have normalcy. The United Kingdom quickly abandoned that approach when they found their health system overwhelmed in theory and actual practice. Sweden tried this approach even longer, unfortunately they were unable to protect those who were vulnerable and had a death rate twice that of the U.S. for March to August. Why not choose a model where countries were able to prevent large outbreaks altogether, like Iceland, Norway or South Korea.

We do not know who is vulnerable and who isn’t, just correlations, not causality. Is it all 75 million people over 60? Just the 13% over 60 living in long-term or assisted living facilities? How does this declaration propose to protect the other 87% of those over 60 living independently? Who is going to fund this? How will they demonstrate actual protection? What will they do if their approach doesn’t protect the vulnerable?

What about those under 60 (253 million in the U.S.) who account for 25-30% of current hospitalizations? Who pays the insurance deductibles and surprise bills for a group case hospitalization rate of 4 - 11%. Infect 70% at a case fatality rate that ranges from 0.15 to 1.2% translates to 0.27M to 2.1M deaths.

There are also large gaps in our knowledge about long-term effects of Covid-19, especially the presence of silent symptoms in both symptomatic and asymptomatic recovered people. The Doctrine doesn’t seem well thought out.

—Bob Bridenbaugh, Columbia Falls

A revisited ‘Noble Lie’

In his “Response to Noble Lies”, Gary Goers asserts that I misrepresented facts about the 2nd Amendment when I stated that Judge Amy Coney Barrett was wrong when she declared that the amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms for self-defense. He asserts that the Federal papers demonstrate my misrepresentation.

But Mr. Goers is wrong. He confuses the Constitutional right of people to bear arms with the purpose for which that right was enshrined in the 2nd Amendment. The amendment does not say the right of the people to bears arms is for their individual self-defense. Neither that amendment nor any of the Federalist papers, including Federalist No. 29, which is the one most relevant to the purpose of the 2nd Amendment, say or imply anything about individual self-defense.

Secondly, none of the quoted sentences from the letter and two speeches cited by Mr. Goers refute in any way what I said about Judge Barrett’s incorrect reading of the 2nd amendment. Moreover, none of the sentences he quoted are from any of the Federalist papers.

Unfortunately, Mr. Goers chooses to deny an inconvenient truth, something that many gun advocates and gun organizations, including the NRA, share in common. They have to ignore the entire prefatory clause of the 2nd Amendment to avoid even a hint that the language pertaining to a Militia has any meaning at all with respect to the Amendment’s purpose. In 1939, the Supreme Court ruled that “the Second Amendment must be interpreted and applied with the view of its purpose of rendering effective a well-regulated Militia.”

It’s time for gun advocates like Mr. Goers who perpetuate the “noble lie” about the purpose of this amendment to actually read its entire one-sentence text and accept its historical interpretation and purpose as written and intended by the Constitution’s framers.

— Jerry W. Elwood, Kalispell

Democracy depends on consent of the losers

In response to “Biden Can’t Heal the Nation” (Dec. 3 by Mark Agather). I must say I agree with him. For how can president-elect Biden begin to heal us when almost half the country has been falsely led to believe that his win is illegitimate? President Trump continues his attempts to delegitimize the 2020 election. Without exception, his legal team’s challenges have been laughed out of court. He continues, though, to be aided in this lie by his cowardly enablers in the GOP congress.

The result? A large percentage of Trump supporters may think President-elect Biden is an illegitimate president. This kind of thing leads to deep resentment, and possible violence.

Mr. Agather’s main argument against Biden is that he’s “just a politician.” But he also engages in some historical revisionism when he writes that “..it was the liberals who started this fight four years ago...” In reality, our party polarization began much earlier, with Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract with America” in which he advocated scorched-earth tactics to fellow Republicans: demonize Democrats by suggesting adjectives such as traitors, liars, radicals, sick to describe them, and adopt a posture of no compromise and obstructionism: ie politics as warfare. Gingrich became the de facto face of the Republican party, and partisan warfare continued on a direct line to the Tea Party, Mitch McConnell, and Trumpism. Today’s GOP is a direct descendant of this politics of obstruction, demonization, and destruction.

There’s a saying: “Democracy depends on the consent of the losers.”

Biden won the election by over 7 million votes and by 306-232 in the Electoral College.

Until you and your fellow Trumpers concede this reality, Mr. Agather, there will be no healing.

—George McLean, Kalispell

Fast and loose with facts

Wow, what a treat on the Inter Lake’s opinion page (Dec. 3). I cannot tell you how happy I was to see another letter from Mark Agather, who never lets facts get in the way of his commentary. And as an added treat, throw in a letter from the world-renown climate specialist William Gehling who also plays fast and loose with the facts.

First Mr. Agather. Why would the nation need to be healed? Wouldn’t have anything to do with the behavior of the tweeter and chief and his corrupt family and administration would it? So this all happened when the tweeter got elected huh? Short memory, Mark. What did that well-known Senate majority leader have to say when Obama was elected and probably was not even sworn it yet? His No. 1 mission was to make sure he was not reelected, and as such the Senate has done virtually nothing in 12 years. Last but not least Mr. Agather’s lack of memory on Covid is astounding. Maybe he needs to go back and read his first letter to the Inter Lake on the subject. It doesn’t resemble the misinformation he is peddling now. Remember, according to the tweeter it’s a hoax.

Now to the climate scientist. His point number one, heck it may be valid, but he offers up no facts to back up what he is alleging. No doubt mother nature is part of the equation, but to ignore the fact that man might also be part of the equation is close to ignorance in my opinion. It has always confounded me when someone writes about the poor fossil fuel industry having to compete against the clean energy industry because they are subsidized. Why didn’t he mention the over $20 billion a year the fossil fuel industry receives in subsidies?

With that, I will sign off and await the next blast of ignorance to appear on the Inter Lake’s opinion page.

—Jay Adams, Libby