Letters to the Poughkeepsie Journal

Thursday, February 01, 2018

See source page(s) for full text of letters.

District Attorney stands up to lawsuit from Civil Liberties Union

Dutchess County is lucky to have District Attorney William V. Grady. …

Robert M. Winn
District attorney of Washington County
N.Y. from 1990-2005
Granville

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Stop the reckless spending by the Department of Defense

I have written a letter to the editor in the past regarding military spending and the absolute lack of oversight on its fiscal accountability.

Department of Defense has a budget of over $700 billion, and is the biggest recipient of the nation’s discretionary spending. Despite this enormous budget, the DOD has never been audited in the past until this year.

David Norquist, the DOD comptroller, told Congress that the department will be audited for the first time ever. It will cost a lot of money and time but it has already discovered that 39 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, totaling $830,700,000, were missing on the books. It also found that the DOD and HUD may have spent as much as $21 trillion on mysterious items between 1998 and 2015.

There was a feeble attempt made to audit DOD in 2016, and the report was conveniently deleted from the report when there was an evidence of massive waste and fraud.

I am hopeful that this audit will go through without an interference from the government and the result will be reported to the tax paying citizens who have a right to know how their money is spent.

Also, our political representatives have an obligation to demand a due diligence on our national budget because the fiscal accountability is a bipartisan issue. I encourage people to keep pressing their elected officials to fulfil their obligation to work for the good of people of this county.

Brook Nam
Highland

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Stop exiling immigrants to countries that won't protect them

My mind is overtaken with our current relationship to our immigrants. I cannot help but re-live the Holocaust and always wondered what I would have done had I lived in those countries when the Jewish people were being murdered and put on trains in order to one day be burned. The general community at large was impotent and did not have the resources, and many times the knowledge, to intervene. …

Gloria Robbins
Poughkeepsie

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New York State needs voting reform now

Democracy is a system of government in which people choose their rulers by voting for them in elections. New York needs voting reform now. …

Valerie Carlisle
Pleasant Valley

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Further investigation needed in dismissal of soccer coach

I am writing to address the Arlington High School coach Kieran McIlvenny situation which has caused many people to question the fairness and principled behavior of the Arlington administration. I do so from a fairly unique perspective, having been an Arlington soccer player, the parent of an Arlington soccer player, a long-tenured (25 years) soccer referee, an officer in multiple soccer organizations, and most pertinently, Coach McIlvenny's administrative manager in the Eastern New York Olympic Development Program, in which he served as the girls head coach, supervising and designing training regimens for about 200 high-proficiency teenage female players. …

Richard J. Ceonzo
LaGrange

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High school concert left a lasting impression

My wife and I just attended the Prisms concert presented by the Franklin D. Roosevelt High School Music Department. The entire program was presented non-stop from different sections of the auditorium, hence the title prisms. …

Gary Veeder
Pleasant Valley

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