Letter to the editor Hal Chorny

 Killing Iran's Major Gen. Suleimani impresses the uninformed as a big, bold assertion of US might. It is that, but the military significance is questionable since there are surely others in Iran ready to continue his murderous plans

However, the downside is potentially enormous. His death will provoke serious retaliation. It is the kind of act which could lead to war. Killing Osama bin Laden made sense because he was a renegade leader hiding from our retaliation. A similar argument can be made for targeting Isis leaders. None were official leaders of a country with ample backups to carry on, and removal seriously weakened their threat.

This killing is another error by a dangerously unfit president. It is further reason to remove him from office to avert more disasters. We will suffer the consequences of this act but could at least prevent more to come.

Publishing HIstory: Daily Freeman 1/5/20

Letter to the editor Carol Nolan

I am writing to second Christine Dinsmore’s assessment of the behavior of both Board of Elections commissioners and to expand on it. I spent many hours during the past week as an observer during the Ulster County DA recount, and I have two takeaways.

All of the Board of Elections employees have been handling the recount professionally, efficiently, and without letting their political differences interfere with the job they have been doing or with their interactions with each other. This is inspiring to see, especially in an era of so much political mudslinging. To top it off, the work is repetitive, their day to day normal work is stacking up and at least some of them privately doubt the added value the recount process will bring.

I didn’t know a lot about the machines’ reliability and the BOE security measures going into the recount. What I have witnessed couldn’t be more confidence building. Virtually every discrepancy I have observed between the machine counts and the hand recount has been the result of human error and was resolved by finding a handwritten column of numbers added incorrectly, a ballot hand sorted into the wrong stack or a stack of ballots counted incorrectly.

Publishing history

Daily Freeman 1/5/20