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Denver District Attorney Beth McCann.

Lack of respect for the law

District Attorney Beth McCann’s performance with regards to the Jennifer Watson fiasco was no surprise to me.

In 1992, then-manager of safety McCann halted Denver’s Columbus Day Parade by having police officers stand down and turning over the streets to another group of demonstrators.

Because, as you suggest, “to enforce the law would disrupt last summer’s prevailing political narrative”. I have often said, that as a Denver police officer, it was one of my worst days in 35 years on the DPD. We shut down a lawful assembly and allowed an unlawful one to take place. Beth McCann will always be a politician first as lack of respect for the law seems to run in the family.

E.E. McGuire

Denver

When we no longer have trees

How dare Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers {“City eyes revenue for wildfire mitigation”) think he has the right to control the funds and mitigate Black Forest. I still don’t see help from the city or anywhere else for recovery from the 2013 Black Forest fire. We, my 78-year-old husband and many others, are still trying to cut down burned trees and remove slash, etc. from our properties destroyed in that fire. So now the city thinks they have the right to come cut down more live trees.

I hope I’m not around when we no longer have trees on this earth to produce the oxygen we breathe, the cool shade they provide for us and animals, and their root systems to hold the soil from washing down the streams to the ocean, lost forever!

Where was the city after the fire except to criticize us with “Oh, you should have done something before now.” We all pay sales taxes in the city and county for that matter.

Get out of our community unless you are ready to provide manpower and money to actually help, not just cut down more trees!

Mary Addington

Black Forest

Marxism never really goes away

1619, 1776 .... or 1917? Since we are all utilizing dates to enforce our political case these days, why has Marxism become such a renewed fad after apparent post-Cold War desuetude? Think of the vaunted cicada swarm that appears out of nowhere after 17 years.

They never did really go away during their slumber, did they? The same is true with Marxism in America, which, I will contend, never has disappeared in the minds of Americans who today are committed to revolutionizing their country. It has largely lain dormant, albeit kept simmering over the decades by such writers as Howard Zinn, Derick Bell and John Dewey.

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Go back to 1917 and the coming end of the Great War, whose major accomplishment amidst the devastation was the collapse of European empires — the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire the Prussian Empire and the Russian Empire. Tsarist Russia was seen as a particularly onerous place with its peasantry for centuries having been under the heels of medieval tyranny.

Nothing could be more welcome to contemporary observers than the end of tsarism, and it was the Bolshevik Revolution that offered the socialist promise of redemption, salvation and betterment of the Russian masses.

So welcome in the eyes of Western ideologues was the arrival of anybody or anything that could rid the world of the tsarist scourge that the Bolshevik Marxists could do no wrong. So imbued was Western thought with Marxist salvation that, like a certain virus today, it became impossible to eradicate, even through the social, economic and political devastation of the Stalin era.

Even the roundly condemned Sen. Joseph McCarthy can be seen, after the release of the Venona papers containing 1940s Soviet intercepts and more recent post-Soviet findings, was often correct in his anti-communist suspicions. Once the pro-Marxism of the 1920s took hold in what was then the liberal west, no political or social vaccine has been able to threaten its existence with its multitude of historic variants.

So, “What is to be Done,” that prescient pre-revolutionary tract of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin, which offered a game plan for destroying western capitalism and the establishment of a communal paradise with what would become an “all power to the Soviets” mentality we now see as the game plan of much of America’s Democratic Party. As was true in 1917, today it is our neo-Marxists in their continuing conviction over generations that they can do no wrong. Can they?

Whitney Galbraith

Colorado Springs

Leadership from Rep. Lamborn

As a political conservative, I am writing to applaud U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn for joining the new Conservative Climate Caucus in Congress.

Conservatives have always been strong stewards of the natural world. In our community, we know that we all have to play our part in protecting and preserving the earth for generations to come. That means we must work together on environmental issues including addressing climate concerns in a thoughtful and responsible manner.

Rep. Lamborn clearly shares the concerns of his home district and knows that we can be part of the solution. But he also recognizes that climate change is too big for us to solve alone — too big for even America to solve alone. Eighty-five percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from somewhere other than the U.S.

When politicians on the left talk about “solutions” they are often talking about policies that push our jobs overseas to countries where emissions and pollution are not a concern.

So overall emissions will go up instead of down, and we’ll have fewer jobs here at home. Why would anyone think that could be good for America or for the planet?

That’s why I’m excited to see this leadership from Rep. Lamborn and the other members of the Conservative Climate Caucus. My hope is that they will help bring common sense to the climate issue through conservative policies that empower our small businesses, secure our jobs, leverage the free market and reduce global emissions.

Evan Kinney

Colorado Springs

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