Letters for Dec. 7, 2022

Dec. 7

As a native Hawaiian and Vietnam veteran, as we annually approach Dec. 7, I been having this recurring thought …

What if the U.S. didn’t overthrow Queen Liliokalani, make Hawaii a U.S. territory and build military facilities, would the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and put us into the war? Today there are 14 active military facilities in the state, eight on the island of Oahu alone. The isolated Hawaiian islands are still a U.S. military force and liability for future attacks.

Anthony Yuen

Spokane

Ranked choice voting

I was surprised to learn that Republicans are starting to use ranked choice voting to choose their candidates in their internal primaries. I thought ranked choice voting appealed only to left-wing types. One reason I’ve read that many people like ranked choice voting is because it allows everyone to vote for their favorite candidate without worrying their vote will be wasted if their first choice does not win, since if their favorite candidate gets tossed out, then their second choice gets counted as their vote.

Another reason is because ranked choice voting makes campaigning more civil as candidates don’t want to alienate voters by harshly criticizing opponents because while any candidate might be a voter’s first choice, any candidate remaining after the first tally might be any voter’s second choice; so when a candidate gets tossed out, any remaining candidate could now get the votes of voters who listed the eliminated candidate as their first choice. I guess these reasons make as much sense to right-leaning voters as to left-leaning voters.

I predict it will not be long before ranked choice voting becomes the voting norm in all elections in the United States. Learning to use ranked choice voting will feel like learning to use a smart phone. At first a bit intimidating, but as soon as we get used to this new thing, we’ll see it is much more useful and it gives us more of what we want than the old thing ever did.

Jeremy Street

Cheney

More balance is definitely needed

This is in response to Craig Grossman (“More balance needed on the editorial page,” Dec. 1).

Yes Craig, many thousands in Eastern Washington are continually disappointed and dismayed at the grotesque alt-left bias of the S-R. We sadly get our daily Hutu Radio-like racial hatred articles and hideously far-left editorials, mostly discarded as dogmatic diatribes by the usual self-hating, woke, white S-R contributors. We’re all used to it now, so we just dive into the sports or local nonrace hate stories. They obviously don’t care about the number of subscribers now, their agenda is publishing almost total misinformation, disinformation and far-left propaganda.

We all share your pain, Craig … is there any way you could start publishing an alternative paper that prints the truth?

Now that would be welcome.

Jon Hall

Chattaroy

Thank you, Spokesman

Many thanks to S-R for protecting its readers from reading any of the news related to the data dump from Twitter that documents the details of how the DNC and the Biden administration used the online social media platform to infringe on our citizen’s First Amendment free speech rights by silencing any dissent or information negative to the DNC.

Fortunately we were spared from the seeing the Hunter Biden emails that detailed the ongoing influence peddling the Biden family participated in for at least the last 10 years with players in China and Ukraine. Thank God someone is filtering our news so we do not have to read about the brazen corruption, bribes or potential for this administration to compromised by China. I only want to read about all the good this administration is doing in our cities, schools and our national economy. If it’s not in the Spokesman, it never happened. Keep up the good work!

Tom Schenk

Valleyford

Rights

As an American citizen, as shown by my passport, and a resident of Washington state, I find it very puzzling that my “God given rights” as an American change simply because I cross an invisible line between states. How did this idea that “states rights” should take primacy over my “God given rights as an American” come from and why would any American who values their individual rights agree to that idea? States have no rights, we the people do.

Bill Todd

Spokane