Letters to the Editor (Dec. 24)

It’s not double talk about Tyson

Yes, I strongly objected to Tyson bringing their chicken processing industry to the area in which I live. And when I hear the argument that I must be planning never to buy chicken again, my answer is this: Yes, I continue to buy chicken.

But no, I don’t buy Tyson chicken. I haven’t for years. I don’t approve of their industry’s cruel practice of animals crammed into buildings with artificial light, unnatural roosting facilities, and questionable feed. Nor do I approve of concentrating a bunch of these chicken “farms” in an area where people like to breathe decent air and have access to water that hasn’t been so polluted that it kills fish.

The same goes for eggs. Not only are healthier eggs available to us than those factory-raised eggs, but they’re also readily available locally. I try, whenever possible, to buy eggs from chickens that have been humanely raised outdoors by local farmers.

To those of you who simply cannot understand people like me who choose to spend our money on a healthy lifestyle rather than carcinogenic factory foods, I have three words for you: Quality of life. Try it. You might like it.

The great tax giveaway

Kansas Congressional delegation, don’t insult our intelligence by pretending the Trump tax giveaway is anything but a gigantic gift to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. This select group will receive 83 percent of the benefits, while the poorest among us will actually pay more in taxes.

The standard deduction doubled, but at the same time we lost the personal deduction, usually about $4,150 per person, so a single parent with three children will get a $12,000 standard deduction, but will lose the personal deduction of $16,600, along with the loss of other deductions.

You surely know what happened to our state’s economy when the Brownback administration rammed this same tax policy into law. Our state is now bankrupt, critical programs have been severely cut or eliminated. Now you have voted to do the same thing to our nation.

None of you will ever have any credibility to complain about the federal deficit again. You just voted to add $1.5 trillion to the federal deficit.

Surely your real objective in voting for this giveaway to the rich is to deliberately bankrupt our country. Then you will have an excuse to cut and/or eliminate Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

Reasons for trouble in Iraq

The newly liberated land in Iraq is turning out to be a hell hole for all those who did anything to cooperate with the ISIS government before it fell. People have been given ridiculously long prison terms and they are being executed for simply having had a job that in any way helped the ISIS officials who ruled over that part of Iraq for the last few years.

There has been a report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) that criticized Iraq and the autonomous Kurdish authorities over mass trials of suspected ISIS group militants.

It would be easy to just claim that this is Iraq and this is what passes, in that culture, for normal behavior. But the truth is that it was the U.S. armed forces that trained the Iraqi troops and led their armies to remove ISIS from all Iraq territory.

The Iraq Army is a part of the government that the U.S. built from the ground floor up. In other words this is an extension of the U.S. government and armed forces.

I keep hearing that we must thank our military people for defending this country and our freedom. I hope our freedom does not rely on such repressive regimes.

This story was originally published December 24, 2017 at 4:02 AM with the headline "Letters to the Editor (Dec. 24)."