MAILBAG:

Editor’s note: The following are in response to Jim Righeimer’s Feb. 28 column, “Obama wants to limit our choices.”

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Please save us from any more columns from your resident extremist Righeimer. Every week you give this guy a front-page column to put out his right-wing rants on national politics. For years he supported President Bush, as he took our nation to the brink of ruin. Now he is allowed space to attack our new president for trying to fix things. Righeimer calls himself a “patriot.” Where I come from, words like whiner, sore loser and reactionary are more descriptive. Give us a break!

Don Abrams

Balboa Island

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Scare tactics just another boogie man

I was intrigued that Righeimer actually read articles in Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times. I always thought that to write a column he just re-arranged the Republican slogans on his desktop. However, he quickly did resort to sloganeering. He says that under Obama’s health-care plan we will no longer have a choice of doctors and hospitals. This is the same old boogie man. He cannot point to any such restriction in the plan. Moreover all of those people who have no health coverage would love to afford a doctor.

He also worries about the government taking over the auto industry. But the government is just the coroner arriving to take away the corpse.

While Righeimer is on his front porch warding off any socialist that shows up, the Wall Street capitalist free marketers are at his back door carting off his valuables.

Theodore I. Wallace Jr.

Corona Del Mar

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Americans more dissatisfied with care

Once again, Righeimer uses the standard GOP scare tactics to distort the facts. Jim, your party has brought the U.S. to the brink of a depression — Republican policies have not only failed, but have greatly failed the American people.

Other than South Africa, America is the only developed country that does not provide healthcare for its citizens. And, despite ludicrous right-wing anecdotal claims of high dissatisfaction among those who live in countries with universal healthcare, Americans are more dissatisfied than are the citizens of every other developed nation.

Stop trying to scare people into believing that we are going to lose rights under Obama, when in reality it was your party’s president who took away rights and suspended basic American principles like habeas corpus and issued illegal wire taps among a host of other basic rights.

Ed Mazzarella