Letters to the editor June 11
Tranel’s housing plan
Regarding the June 7 article about House candidate Monica Tranel’s housing plan to force investment firms to sell off single family homes over the next 10 years.
The plan to interfere in the free market of housing is a bad idea. Whenever the government interferes in the economy bad things happen. The Democrats never learn this lesson.
The free market is perfectly capable of providing housing. The source of the problem is inflation and high interest rates. No Democrat wants to address those issues because it all points to our leadership and their excessive spending.
She does mention some issues which are important — reducing regulatory barriers. We do not need more government spending and interference in trying to solve a problem that they created in the first place.
— William Fry, Kalispell
Contraception access
On June 5, the Senate voted on advancing a bill to protect access to contraception.
Sen. Steve Daines voted against it. Sen. Jon Tester voted for it. The bill did not advance because it did not meet a 60% majority vote to advance.
The federal government is not interested in telling my orthopedic doctor what options I have about my knee pain, or telling my eye doctor if he can prescribe contact lenses for me. But the federal government is now interested in telling me and my women’s health doctor whether I may use birth control or not. That’s despite polls (Gallup poll 2023) showing more than 85% of both Republicans and Democrats approve of access to birth control.
I’m sure there were good things about living in the past, but not having access to birth control wasn’t one of them.
— Stephanie Brancati, Big Arm
Northern border
I was outraged to learn that Gov. Greg Gianforte recently sent Montana National Guard troops to Texas to defend our southern border.
Does he plan to leave our northern border unprotected? Doesn’t he know Canadians plan to poison our blood by sending their criminals and mentally ill to take away Montana jobs, threaten our wives and daughters, bring terrible diseases, and also flood Montana with cheap and probably addicting drug products?
Fortunately, Canadians can be easily identified by their extreme politeness, strange speech, like saying “aye” instead of “yes,” and love for drinking tea. Once identified they must be immediately body-slammed, put in detention camps, separated permanently from their children, and then deported.
Texas, with 30 million people, should be sending troops to help us, not the other way around! Our National Guard could work with theirs to build a beautiful border wall right across the Rockies, using readily available rocks mortared with cow droppings. This would, of course, separate Glacier National Park from Canada’s Waterton Provincial Park, together an International Peace Park. The border, however, must be defended, and Canada must pay for it, as Mexico did.
What was Gianforte thinking?
— Jerome Walker, Missoula