Editor:

Woodward and Bernstein (one Dem and one Rep) did the dogged reporting which resulted in the Watergate hearings. That was the all-time biggest Congressional investigation until the current Jan. 6th commission.

The public portions of those Watergate hearings were televised daily and ultimately brought down a crooked President 48 years ago. Woodward and Bernstein are now releasing their audio tapes of ex-President Trump and say Trump thinks nothing of things Nixon would never dream of.  So what will the hearings bring. Fireworks it appears.

Thursday (June 9) starts the public portion of the Jan 6th Commissions results to date after interviewing a thousand witnesses.

The first night they have a tape of the leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers meeting in an underground garage doing final prep for insurrection. We will finally get to hear what they say. Those  supremacists (replacement theory and worse) were so sure that they and Trump would usurp the election results the next day that they brought a video documentarian.

But where is Fox News in all this?? It’s not showing the hearings! Fox learned its lesson when it correctly called Arizona for Biden first and lost viewers for months. You know who was angry and you can’t have that.

If Fox is not an alt right, cancel culture operation with woke politics. The fact is that after running 1,000 Benghazi segments, Fox would run the Jan 6th Committee hearings for real unvarnished testimony. It will even feature Vice President Cheney’s daughter for impeccable conservative creds.

(Anyone who wants to read the proof of the “big steal” can join “Pacer”. Look up the Court name and case name each time Trump lost. So long as you only look and do not print (which costs money) you can look at all the bogus exhibits Trump and his gang said proved the election was rigged. (Last count 65 Trump attorneys have had their licenses pulled or under review.  They are getting scorched for pursuing TV style fakery.))

So between this hearing and the discredited Court exhibits you can get an education Thursday night and start to figure out who is pulling for you or just pulling your leg.

It’s just not going to be on Fox which would lose viewers for showing real democracy in action.

For real reality TV, Thursday night is a must see.

Conrad F. Cropsey

Albion

Editor:

I would like to point out a correction for the article titled “Rock the Park returns to Albion on August 6th, at first big event at new amphitheater.”

This is absolutely untrue. Royal Body Shop Outreach Ministries held a 100% free event on June 4th. This event offered the community a place to talk, praise worship and have a meal with each other. Offered by the church were hot dogs, hamburgers, French fries, cotton candy, popcorn, snow cones, bounce houses, face painting and family-friendly lawn games.

While they could not get coverage in any of our local papers, digital or otherwise, the event was very successful with over 400 hot dogs and hamburgers given away by word of mouth and Facebook sharing only.

Great things are happening here without being a paid event.

Nicole Horn

Albion

Editor:

A statute outlawing the purchase of protective vests passed both legislative houses and signed by Governor Kathy Hochul early this week.

Many of the regular citizenry want to know what reasons underlie such action. Apparent reasons for passing such a foolish legislative edict seem spurious at best.

The salient question here is: How do protective vests endanger anyone?

Are protective vests not defensive devices? How is anyone in the public potentially endangered when a law-abiding citizen purchases or wears a protective vest in public?

Indeed, this action seems to raise questions about public safety, but not in the way promulgated by Governor Kathy Hochul and company.

Is it true that government officials in NYS and much higher up have goals of reducing world population by up to 50 percent as evidenced at the recent meeting of world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland?

A top transhumanist advisor to Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the Forum, Yuval Haari, stated that a rising class of “useless people” urgently needs to be addressed “both politically and scientifically.” There are many others proposing drastic reduction in world population, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

This needs to stop. The first thing that needs to happen is waking of the people to increasing restrictions on defending ourselves and the dire situation afflicting our Republic.

A prohibition of law-abiding citizens to purchase, possess and wear protective vests is an embarrassment to NY and undeniable proof of what agenda NY leaders are following.

Dr. Randall Shortridge

Albion

Editor:

Congressman Chris Jacobs announced his support for some common-sense gun laws to make our communities safer. Making our communities safer so offended the Republican establishment that they demanded Mr. Jacobs not seek re-election.

Mr. Jacobs could have easily won re-election in the new 23rd district which voted for the Republican Presidential candidate by 59%. However, standing up and fighting for what is right requires moral courage, something lacking in Mr. Jacobs and his Republican clan.

However, the real story here isn’t the lack of moral integrity by Mr. Jacobs, it is the refusal of the Republican Party to even consider making our streets and communities safer. Strengthening background checks and closing loopholes would prevent criminal activity.

The Gifford Law Center reported that 80% of firearms acquired for criminal purposes were obtained through unlicensed sellers to avoid background checks. Furthermore, they reported 96% of inmates convicted of gun offenses would have been stopped with tighter background checks.

The Republican agenda is to force us into armed encampments with locked doors guarded by battle-ready forces of dubious allegiances. This is their dystopian dream. For a better future we need common-sense gun regulations.

William Fine

Brockport

Editor:

The 2022 Medina Unified Basketball Team just finished their season with a three wins in seven games. But the record does not reflect the quality and accomplishments of this team.

The Mustangs started quickly, winning the first three games. They defeated Newfane, then Lewiston-Porter, and finally Lockport.

The next two games Medina played short-handed with their point guard and leading scorer out due to sickness. In the third game Medina lost to Akron by only two points.

In their regular season finale against Pembroke, and now without both their starting point guard and backup point guard, Medina lost 39-30. The players gave it their all without two of their best in the lineup.

Next came the playoffs. In what was probably their best performance of the year the Unified team met Williamsville North in the first round. Williamsville North had not lost a game in over two years and was the highest scoring Unified team in Western New York this year.

The Mustangs played right with the best team and even led after three quarters. A huge upset was in the making! However, with a roster of over 35 players, Will North was able to control the game. They dominated the last quarter to get their deserved win. Medina held them to their lowest point total of the year.

In the playoff consolation game with Olmsted the Medina team lost by one point. Olmsted made a layup just as the buzzer sounded. The kids deserved a better fate than a 3-4 record but they held their heads high. They rarely, if ever, complained.

There were a couple obvious differences this year compared to the Unified teams of the past.

Number one, no one complained. If someone made a mistake you would not see a teammate yelling at them. If a call went against them, they just played on. Competing was nice for them, but just playing was so much fun. And it showed!

Number two, the team performed as a basketball TEAM. Plays were run, and players knew their positions on both offense and defense. Each player had a role and they performed it to their best. It was an eye-opener and a joy to see this year.

There is one person responsible for the high quality and character of the 2022 squad, Coach Gary Scholes. What Coach Scholes did with the kids this year was amazing.

At first, there was doubt that Medina would even have a team due to a lack of players. Coach Scholes (and others, I am sure) started recruiting, asking many kids not already playing a sport if they would like to play basketball. The effort paid off with approximately 13 players on the squad – the largest Medina has ever had.

The level of play this year was light years ahead of any team in the past. Coach Scholes treated them like a varsity squad and the players acted like varsity players. The skill was not as high but the effort and desire surely was. Coach Scholes is why.

The job done by Gary Scholes this year can only be described as heart-warming. I hope he continues to coach in the future. He treats the kids fairly. He treats them as a team. He gets them to play basketball. The kids played so well!

Anyone who knows Coach Scholes knows that he is a kind, giving person. He coaches because he wants to. I do not know how much basketball he played when he was younger but he coaches like he has played for years.

In 2022, the Unified Basketball Team truly was “unified.”  I thank Gary Scholes for this.

Carl Tuohey

Medina

Mr. Tuohey is a father of a Medina Unified Basketball player.

Editor:

Heritage Wind was issued an amended permit for their industrial wind project in the town of Barre, NY. Now they want to make major changes to that permit which include turbines with bigger rotor size.

They also want to move several of the turbines and add four new ones. They have also asked for a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity Pursuant to Public Service Law Section 68 and for an Order Granting Lightened Regulation.

In western NY there is no need for more green energy as we are supplied with hydro-electric power from Niagara Falls which does not run at 100% capacity. Why trade a reliable energy source for an intermittent one?

Why should they be granted lightened regulation? They knew the rules before they started. Why should the health and welfare of Barre residents be minimized?

I hope that there is a public hearing so that residents can be informed and have an opportunity to voice their concerns to this redesigned project.

Tom Chandler

Barre

Editor:

I would like to thank all the veterans for their dedication and service to our great country. It is because of them that we can enjoy the freedoms and privileges that we are afforded today.

However, I am extremely disappointed in the lack of remembrance efforts for our veterans in Albion. In recent years, families of many local veterans had the opportunity to purchase banners to commemorate their family members who served our country. However, they were not displayed on the light poles during Memorial Day for all to see.

I’ve seen banners on display marketing the Strawberry Festival (both big and small), and I understand that those banners will be replaced with the ones for our veterans after the Strawberry Festival is over.

However, I think the importance of our veterans’ sacrifices is lost on the current village leadership, which is hard to fathom considering the newly elected mayor is a veteran himself and would foster this lack of appreciation.

I enjoy the Strawberry Festival like everyone else, but I think the promotion of the festival should wait a day or two as we pay respect to our local veterans. Some of them made the ultimate sacrifice so that we could enjoy our freedoms, so that we could put on festivals, and so that we could assemble as a community.

I hope that this error in judgement can be a lesson learned, and will be corrected moving forward.

Suzanne Sheldon-Bourke

Waterport

Editor:

I’m disappointed in the county legislators’ decision to not participate in the sales tax relief on gas. All roads in New York State are in need of repairs and ours is no worse than neighboring counties. Was this a unanimous decision?

We will probably lose out as we can travel to nearby Niagara County and the Reservation for a savings and buy less gas in Orleans County. And once again they say it’s Albany’s fault for the imposed 2% tax cap.

And no thought about the price that our farmers are paying for diesel. This was a poorly thought out plan.

Jeanne Crane

Carlton

Editor:

Am I the only one who plans to be filling up his car in Monroe or another nearby county for the duration of the gas price crisis?

It will lower my expense by a dollar or two each time, and Orleans County will not get sales tax on any part of a gallon. I don’t intend to make special trips, but every time I go, I’ll eat in another county, grocery shop at Wegmans instead of Tops, and perhaps go to a Wal-Mart not near Albion.

Do the local leaders really believe they will receive more sales tax revenue by encouraging local residents to “buy elsewhere”?

Tom Taber

Albion

Editor:

Leigh and I have been on a grief journey since June 1, 2019, the day our son Mark passed from a substance use overdose.

There have been times when we were angry, sad, frustrated, and depressed – sometimes separately, sometimes all at once. There are so many others who have shared this experience, and too many who are, and sadly will. This madness of the opioid epidemic has to stop!

Orleans Recovery – Hope Begins Here, Suite 190, 243 South Main Street in Albion, offers “Missing Angels” a program to help those coping with grief from substance use passing.

Orleans Recovery offers this program as an outreach to the citizens of Orleans County, Genesee County, western Monroe County, and eastern Niagara County in Western New York. Leigh and I are happy to do this, to be A Voice For Mark, in this continuing struggle.

Leigh and I have had the opportunity to share this mission with so many others from so many walks of life. Some lessons learned: it does not benefit anyone to stigmatize the person who has passed – addiction is a disease, not a character flaw.

Many who have suffered from the disease have recovered, and work daily to maintain their recovery – their loved ones also deserve support and recognition. Memorials for our loved ones, pictures, paintings, or other items provide a place for us – parents, grandparents, siblings, relatives and friends – to heal as well and to keep their memory alive.

Missing Angels meets the first and third Thursday of each month either in person or online meeting. Meetings are held at Orleans Recovery. Please contact us at 585-721-7332  or chuckandleighkinsey@gmail.com for detailed information.

We welcome any and all who have gone through this horrible experience of living with, and losing, a loved one who has suffered with, and died from a substance use disorder.

You are not alone in your grief.

Chuck and Leigh Kinsey

Clarendon

Editor:

The NRA, the old NRA, was a national club for hunters, marksmen and various stripes of gun enthusiasts. There were some problems with home-made zip guns and the like but no mass killings. That NRA was supported by dues and subscriptions to its informative magazine.

The old NRA, for example, supported a ban on the sales of assault weapons. It discussed red flag laws although it was sure to be sure they were not knee jerk. It discussed fingerprint activated trigger locks.

It was skeptical of a national data base but that was before SCOTUS made clear gun ownership was a constitutional right (subject to rational regulation) that could not be simply taken away.

But big money got into the club and politicians’ bank accounts from the gun industry – including  in 2016 a Russian gun club whose members owned no guns (go figure) – which changed the NRA to a massive arm of the gun industry.

Excuses for all gun problems except blaming the exponential increases in gun sales which the US has experienced over the past 25 years were advanced for the equally exponential increase in gun deaths.

Taking money and politics out of the equation is where we start but these newer excuses have been repeated so often that fringe advocates (about 10 to 15%) have come to believe them.   For example they think  “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”,  “the best way to protect yourself from a gun is to have a gun”, “gun violence is a solely a mental health issue, not a gun issue” and so on … It’s folklore now.

It’s as silly as people forgetting the 9th Amendment provides all our rights are not written down in the Constitution; they are out there undefined for Courts to consider. But baseless beliefs are hard to dispel with fanatics. They will take longer.

We have to face it. There are a minority of gun owners who have flipped out over the issue.  We will have to face down their scorn and ignorance if we are going to stop mass murder.

Factually the number of guns and gun violence is NOT a chicken and egg problem!  We know, for example,  that “hardening” schools does not work. (Texas, inter alia,  made huge, fruitless, investments pursuing this myth.)

The fact is the old zip gun crew can now buy guns far better and more lethal than the police have. They can buy armor as good or better than we provide our soldiers. That just happened in Uvalde, Texas – a state in which this 18-year-old shooter, who can not legally drink, had a modified AR-15 and body armor.

The truth is fewer gun “sales” because of simple measures to keep them in responsible enthusiasts hands does work. Populous counties with similar social problems as ours have school kill rates in single digits this year. The US just hit 288. Numbers don’t lie.

There are a mix of easy matters we need address at the national level to ensure a fair balance between safety and gun rights. We have to act nationally to be sure individual states can not continue to be bought off and help crooks etc. if they cross state lines to safe havens.

We need to ignore the crazy fringe and their insults and nonsense. It’s stand up to them or continue to fear or our kids’ lives. Living in fear at school is no way to grow up.

As an example of red flag laws: we know to a certainty that men who impede a woman’s breathing (choke them) will, 75 percent of the time, eventually escalate to killing someone.  Should any state give them a gun? The FBI say white supremacists are our greatest domestic danger. Of course those involved in child abuse/neglect and being on the no-fly list should be included.

Should we feel sorry for  miscreants like this if they can not get a license? No, of course not.

This uniquely American problem – mass shootings – will not be  solved overnight. We are at point that taking on the now corrupt NRA and captive politicians will not stop the mindless whining by the minority not savvy enough to study and understand the numbers and real issues. Periodic reregistration will be part of the mix.

But we have to start somewhere and it’s with money and politicians. They need to be voted out no matter the party. Let politicians try to get re-elected by fringe elements only. The leaders are not loyal to the members anyway so why vote blindly for them because of a party label or they come across well. Look at what they do and where their money comes from.

Until we do all this children’s lives are just a cost of getting elected. Until then – we can remove special legal protection for gun manufacturers protecting them from responsibility for treating deaths as a cost of doing business – mass shootings will continue. They need to pay if they refuse to put fingerprint trigger locks on their guns or specifically advertise guns and violence to teen-agers. (The recent Connecticut suit shook that information loose).

Kids’ lives are a single issue that crosses party lines. Children can not be brought back to life when each cheap excuse for doing nothing fail. The evidence for reasonable ways to bring these sales numbers down in line with the rest of the world is there. The evidence to drastically lower deaths from mass shooting is there. We just have to vote for what is proven.

Conrad Cropsey

Albion

Editor:

I understand that the Strawberry Festival has been cancelled due to Covid for two years; however, that does not excuse the fact that this weekend is Memorial Day and the banners of those men and women that defended and still defend our county are not visible.

The Festival is June 10th & 11th.  There is plenty of time to display those banners after Memorial Day. Every village and town in our area has their patriotic banners displayed.

I feel this was a very poor decision on the parts of the Village and Committee. My son is an active military member and his banner and those other fine individuals should be displayed.

Jane Murray

Albion

Editor:

The domestic terrorist who killed 10 people in Buffalo cited a racist theory called “replacement theory” as his rationale. This racist theory was proclaimed by neo-Nazis in Charlottesville Va. at a Unite-the-Right rally in 2017.

It was also the rational for the racist killing of Jews at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, the killing of Muslims in New Zealand and the killing of Latinos in Texas. This vile theory is racist but beyond that it is deeply anti-American as it asserts that some people – white, Christian – are superior to other people.

This racist hateful theory is promulgated almost nightly on Tucker Carlson’s show and by Republican leaders like Elise Stefanik. This vile, repugnant concept has no place in the idea of America.

Tucker Carlson and Republican leaders like Stefanik try to give this vile, despicable, racist idea an air of respectability but all it does is show the racism of those who proclaim it. Indeed after the Buffalo killings Ms. Stefanik double down on this hateful idea tweeting the vile lie that Democrats want open borders to replace white voters with immigrants.

The frequent promulgation of this hateful theory by the right wing media and political leaders increases the possibility of the next violent attack. Ms. Stefanik and Mr. Carlson may claim plausible deniability of this or the next racist mass killing because their accountability is unactionable, but they bear responsibility for their hate and the racism they promulgate.

William Fine

Brockport

Editor:

I am a veteran. I am the father of four and grandfather of eleven. I am an avid hunter and gun owner but something has to be done to keep weapons out of the hands of killers.

I am not saying ban guns but l am saying ban assault rifles. These are weapons meant to kill enemies during war. Anyone who was in the military can tell you what happens if you call your weapon a gun.

I don’t want to hear all the B.S. about it’s a political issue. It is not, it is a humanity problem.

There is no reason for not having background checks. They check it when you apply for loans, credit cards, enhanced licenses and many other things.

I am not talking politics, l am talking common sense. This is not a Left or Right opinion.

No more kids have to die.

Harvey Campbell

Lyndonville

Editor:

Memorial Day on May 30 is the day that we honor all deceased veterans, those that paid by giving their lives in the wars and all that have died since serving their country.

We gather to honor them. We do not mourn them. We praise them. The deceased veterans made this country safe and free.

Today, the eagle cries as he did on 9/11. Why, we ask? The answer is loud and clear. Open your eyes and ears, see and listen to what is happening in this country.

School children dying in mass shootings killing other children, wide open border so anyone can come in, criminals, rapists, terrorists, sick, you name it. The powers that be hold a blind eye to what is going on in this country…the eagle cries.

The eagle cries for the veterans that have fought and served this country to keep us free and safe.

Take your children to a Memorial Day doing, whether Lyndonville, Medina or another community. They will learn and so will you. God bless America.

Carl Boyle, U.S. Army veteran

Medina