����Ӱ��AV

CBS as inspiration

CBS recently axed showing Stephen Colbert's interview with Texas Democratic Senate Candidate James Talarico.

The past year has seen major networks becoming more Trump friendly to the point that they have lost all credibility with me. I have stopped watching major networks news shows and incidentally have stopped watching their other shows as well. Why should I watch their commercials and support companies that directly or indirectly support Trump? So finally, I have cut the cable I maintained with the same company for 19 years.

Boycotting is an excellent way of voting with our dollars. The money I will be saving will now go to Democratic candidates and causes. I hope others will be inspired, by CBS, to do the same.

Mel Strijdonk

Oro Valley

Black and white

Will the day ever come when we can stop saying "black" and "white?" Nobody likes it anymore��— it's 2026.

Also there are probably 100 other races out there but all you hear about is black and white. I've talked to a lot of people about this��— no one likes to be called "black." Easy to change? No, of course not, but where do we start? Are we not all just "Americans?"

James Coughlin

Northeast side

Cost of a loved one

A recent letter writer questions the cost of the Guthrie investigation. Why would one make it the "elephant in the room?" If it were your loved one, would you question the amount of attention, money, resources that go into finding them? Is there a dollar limit to one's life? How sad that some folks think this way. The letter writer proves that some people have become colder and more indifferent to humanity. Think about if it were your mother.

Jean Getek

Foothills

Vote by mail

"AZ measure would require ID for vote by mail." This headline greeted me this morning, Feb. 19.

Not surprisingly, this proposed bit of legislation has been presented by a Republican. Not only is Sen. Bolick’s measure superfluous (Only registered voters can vote by mail; to be registered, one must present acceptable ID) but also his bill contains a provision for total elimination of vote by mail.

In my many years of working with Democrats helping would-be voters navigate voting laws, I have seen Republicans, time after time, attempt to make voting more difficult.

This one takes the cake.

Jerry Helm

Northwest side

Our elections are secure

There is no problem with non-citizens voting in our elections. Evidence: Georgia has 8.2 million registered voters and 20 are not citizens, and none of them voted in the last election. The conservative Heritage Foundation found 24 non-citizens voted in the last decade of elections in this country. All 2020 Presidential vote recounts found no discrepancies of any consequence. In Maricopa county's recount Biden got 6 more votes than in the original count. Our elections are safe and secure. So why make it harder for millions to vote with the requirements in the SAFE act? The bill would require women to have the same name on their voter registration as on their birth certificate. Millions of women took their husband's last name when they were married, my wife included. Trump knows elections are secure, so this is one way he can stop a group from voting.

Don Ries

Southeast side

Good vs. evil

It’s no longer one side vs. the other, it’s now good vs. evil. What the Trump Epstein files show is there are monsters with so much money and power they have gotten away with horrendous sexual abuse, sex trafficking and possibly actual murder. Even if we don’t see those files, we see the evil on our TV screens, a sweet little boy in a bunny hat taken to a concentration camp where services are not available, but contractors get billions of our tax dollars. Or we see our neighbors being pulled out of their cars and homes, beaten, pepper sprayed, and even killed point blank by ICE, being funded with over a hundred billion of our tax dollars. Our costs for housing and basic goods are increasing while Wall Street makes billions. Over 32% of our wealth goes to 942 billionaires. Some so insatiable they go to parties where little children are raped and abused.

Good vs. evil.

Working families vs. billionaires!

Shirley Pevarnik

West side

The price of education policy

To all those writing in to complain about the naming rights for McKale being sold:

This is a direct result of decades of public policy that many have been more than happy to vote for.

First, Republicans in the Legislature have led the charge in gutting university funding my entire lifetime. They get reelected after pushing these cuts through with much fanfare and support.

That money has to be made up somewhere.

Second, the university is doing what these same Republicans have been telling them to do��— run it like a business. Naming rights is a revenue stream, and it’s a poor business that ignores something that lucrative.

So, if you support these policies, you should be supporting the renaming of the McKale center.

David Reynolds

East side

The SAVE Act scam

The latest attempt by Republicans to restrict voting comes in the form of the so-called SAVE Act, which goes further than an ID requirement by demanding proof of citizenship such as a passport or birth certificate.

And sure, it is a solution in search of a problem as evidenced by multiple studies including the conservative Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, in which examples of "illegals" voting was proven to be exceedingly rare, but it also asks us to accept facts that clearly fly in the face of logic.

Republicans want you to believe that immigrants who may spend thousands of dollars with human smugglers, make a dangerous trek across the desert, potentially escaped life-threatening situations in their native countries, and ultimately established lives in American communities while remaining undetected, would dare risk prison, deportation, and loss of future eligibility, just to come out of relative obscurity simply to cast a single vote. And they would like us to believe this is occurring in large numbers.

Glen Vann

West side

Rep Grijalva's boycott

So much for hope that US Representative Grijalva might be a force for unity. Instead, she has chosen to boycott the President’s State of the Union address next week. Great optics. Perpetuate the divisiveness that plagues our community and our nation. Shame on you, Rep. Grijalva.

Alan Kohl

Northwest side

Gulags of America

Back in 2017, I read the Gulag Archipelago. Even then, the parallels between the first Trump administration and Solzhenitsyn’s account of the early Stalin years were alarming. Recent accounts of Trump’s DHS detention facilities are horrifyingly similar. Indeed, the only meaningful difference between them is that the Soviets locked up fewer children in their Gulags.

While the Holocaust in Nazi Germany gets the most attention, the Soviet Gulags went on far longer, to the present day, and have destroyed even more lives. The corrupt, incompetent cult of Trump has more in common with Communist USSR than Nazi Germany, including that he won’t be stopped by any outside force. For generations, solemn Republicans warned against communism, but now they embrace a Stalinist leader. That leaves it to the American people to shut down these American Gulags before we are thrown in ourselves. No one is coming to save us.

Paul Dailey

East side

Oppose detention camps

The Trump administration is buying warehouses to convert into prison camps, some of which will be capable of holding up to 100,000 people.

If the DHS plans to eliminate so called “illegal immigrants” (primarily brown and black people), why do they need to expand detention centers to this extent? If they succeed in eliminating all brown and black immigrants, who will be the next victims to fill their prison camps? Protesters? Anyone who disagrees with Trump? The regime is monetizing the private prison system. Who profits? Private prison corporations like CoreCivic and Geo Group, alongside giants of surveillance infrastructure like Palantir, will make billions from this endeavor. Only these corporations and parties stand to gain, everyone else stands to lose. And hundreds of thousands of our immigrant neighbors stand to lose the most.

We can and must resist the cruelty and terror of this plan through constant and relentless public protest, blockades, boycotts, and local government pressure. We need to stop trump and his loyalists from completing their authoritarian takeover.

Margo Itule

Midtown

Democrat hoax takes down a prince

Trump is mentioned 40,000 times more than Prince Andrew in the Epstein files, just in case someone here in Trumplandia wants to do something about it.

Terry Louck

East side

��