On LUBA, health care, war and terrorism

LUBA ruling derailed a pretty good deal

A Land Use Board of Appeals decision was handed down last week for the development named Seventh Street Station ("City loses Seventh Street appeal," Nov. 27).

It's been years now since the first plan of townhouses was hatched.

A long series of meetings before the City Council and Planning Commission and the once overly constrained general industrial strip has been upgraded to a residentially zoned medium- to high-density plot, with the single exception that the development be held open for public input and city approval.

Pretty good deal. Good enough that the developer could then sell the land for almost three times their purchase price.

Recently, incredibly inept state legislation was passed that somehow allows the developer to have the requirements for public input and city approval removed and they applied to do just that back in March.

Seeing no legal recourse, the city dropped the requirements but re-zoned the land to the initial state the zoning change had been conditioned on.

Now here's the good part: The developer won the recent LUBA decision in part by presenting a strong argument that the city's decision to re-zone this land failed to provide the ample time required for public hearings.

Wow! Good one.

Once more:

Originally, the city reverted the zoning since public hearings would no longer take place.

Now, the developer has won rezoning by arguing that the city didn't allow public hearings to take place on their decision to revert the zoning.

This is truly the land of capitalism.

Jeff Hess

Corvallis

Health care system needs to be fixed

Something is terribly wrong with our health care system.

We have 40 million Americans uninsured, and by most estimates 60 million are underinsured.

That means that one third of our population is not able to afford and receive routine health care. Yet our costs are more than twice that of any other country per person.

When you remove the one third of our population with inadequate care, the costs are surreal.

Except they aren't, and American people suffer and die in huge numbers each year. There are 3-4 million people employed in this country today whose sole job is to deny people the coverage that they have been promised, in black and white, and that has been paid for.

Eighteen thousand Americans die each year from inadequate care. Care delayed kills even more, but slowly and with more agony and despair.

Is this the American way? Would you do business with any other who took your money, wrote contracts and then broke those contracts routinely, without remorse, without cause?

Is this who we have become? Deny people a basic human right and then blame them when they become ill? I'm afraid we have.

Americans are sicker than any other advanced nation. Women survive pregnancy in 41st place, children survive in 29th place, all other advanced nations outlive us.

They are all universally cared for; we are not. The results speak for themselves.

Demand universal care today.

Shelley Ries, R.N.

Corvallis

Don't let Cheney drag us into new war

Every time I hear Dick Cheney tugging the American people toward war in Iran, I am reminded of the famous quote by Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg Trials following World War II:

"Naturally the common people don't want war … But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

What have Iranians done to draw the deadly attention of American leaders, whose buddies can only be called war profiteers and who wish to drag the rest of us along to do the fighting?

The real sin of the Iranian people is having a president who is loud-mouthed, arrogant and aggressive. But the Iranian president, unlike the American, is not the ultimate "decider" about war and peace and foreign policy.

Surely many Americans recognize that this drumbeat sounds much like the one five years ago. The one warning us of weapons of mass destruction and uranium cake from Nigeria.

I, for one, don't want to be a "good German," led by lies into another war by Dick Cheney.

Valori George

Corvallis

Acting like terrorists won't make U.S. safe

On Nov. 21, Chuck Lane defended waterboarding ("Waterboarding: Tool against terrorism").

Professional interrogators have stated that torture is a poor way to get information. The tortured person will say whatever he thinks will end the torture.

If Chuck were to be waterboarded, he would not only confess that he was a terrorist, but give details on how he planned to detonate a bio-terrorism weapon in Corvallis.

I have to wonder why anyone thinks that acting like a terrorist makes our country safer.

We, as a country, are now less popular worldwide than at any time in our history. How does this make us safer?

We torture, deny rights to those accused of terrorism, invade countries without cause, support dictators and other governments that deny rights to their citizens. How does this make our country safer?

The Bush regime has successfully convicted only one person as a terrorist and, despite claims, hasn't prevented a single terrorist act.

Sept. 11 occurred because the Bush regime was either incompetent, or . . . actually there isn't an or. The Bush regime is incompetent, blinded by their desire to establish a single party government corptocracy.

Jeffery K. McGonagill

Corvallis