Letters: 11/7/19

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Austin deserved better

Regarding John Lendorff’s article, “The final stage” about Jeff Austin (Re: Buzz, Oct. 31, 2019), if the goal was to bring together quotes from music industry professionals prior to the Nov. 4 event benefiting Jeff’s family, Chuck Morris’s quote should’ve been left out. To summarize, Mr. Morris thinks Jeff Austin’s legacy was that he wanted the spotlight, and well, things just didn’t work out for him. Imagine Jeff Austin’s wife and children reading this quote after his tragic death. Did the editor think this was a good tribute to him? Also, “If You’re Ever In Oklahoma” is not an original Yonder Mountain String Band song. And was it appropriate to include a picture of Yonder Mountain String Band and not just Jeff? Jeff hadn’t been in YMSB for five years prior to his death. Jeff Austin lived a lot of his adult life in Nederland. This article in the Boulder Weekly could have better memorialized him.

Leah Franks/Louisville

What about the children

When I hear our current president say “he died like a dog… crying and whimpering… with his children,” I want to throw up.

I’m guessing he was saying that Baghdadi was attempting to use his children as a shield, but either way, if in fact “the target” was in a cave, what sort of negotiation was attempted to save the lives of children? Put another way, what did the children do?

The alleged benefits of targeted assassinations are fraudulent; a child is not luggage; those children weren’t Baghdadi’s carry-on bags.

Children aren’t “presumed innocent,” they are innocent precisely because they are children.

Forget Trump, is there anyone in office or in the media who might — on behalf of dead children — ask further questions?

Rob Smoke/Boulder

Open letter to GEO

As a Boulder resident subject to the expenditure of taxpayer funds spent negotiating illicit practices of your ankle detention program and its affect on those subjected to your product resulting in oppression, abuse, pain, separating children from parents, sequestering your clients from legal representation, discrimination against LGBTQ individuals and now cutting off communication with the public protesting that very treatment, I have a novel idea.

How about I, as an invested party in the community, notify you that a letter on behalf of the City of Boulder complaining about these practices is in process to be drafted. A lot of City money will be spent doing this in times of high-expense housing, demand for services and underfunded maintenance programs and capital improvements in multiple departments throughout the City. These expenses were outlined on first reading of the budget recently.

Instead of causing this personal expense diversion from essential City services, how about coming clean unprovoked and answering  some of these concerns preemptively? I, for one, would think better of you for doing the right thing rather than having you react to a letter the City Council will be drafting to you, and depending on your response following it, a potential resolution against such behavior.

It just so happens that the City’s expense attending to this will only increase the very demand for the services you provide, which are certainly a drain on resources in times of the need to address climate change. Alternatively, how about considering an approach that will improve your company’s status?

Lynn Segal/Boulder

Nixon the socialist

If simply supporting a federal government social program that helps people such as Social Security and Medicare makes someone a “socialist,” then that would make Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon “crazy socialists” because they both signed new federal government social programs into law/existence and both supported Social Security.

Stewart B. Epstein/via internet