Letters to the Editor

Eminent domain, New Hampshire style

To the editor:

Eminent domain in China means brute force and bulldozers. In Russia and countries like them, they throw the property owner in jail and confiscate their property. In New Hampshire, the Senate and the House Judiciary committees pass eminent domain laws that are unconstitutional.

Since 1970, the New Hampshire Legislature has participated in the intentional misinterpretation, manipulation and deconstruction of the state’s eminent domain statutes in violation of Article 12 of the New Hampshire Constitution.

The New Hampshire House did it again, April 26, 2006, by a voice vote. The people who claim to respect and believe in the Constitution were nowhere to be found. By passing Senate Bill 287, we encouraged greed by developers, corruption by dishonest public officials’ illegal plunder of private property, intimidation and abuse of the old, the poor and the most vulnerable of our citizens.

Special interests have managed to get a partial victory by the passage of SB 287.

The Senate and House Judiciary committees claimed that SB 287 would protect people’s property. This is NOT true. Under certain circumstances, properties could be condemned and handed over to developers. Article 12 would make SB 287 illegal and abhorrent to our constitution.

Our responsibility as legislators is to protect the constitutional rights of over one million three hundred thousand of our citizens, and we failed them on April 26, 2006.

N.H. Rep. Maurice Villeneuve
Bedford

Bush oil moves are meaningless

To the editor:

Nonsensical policy is routine for the Bush administration, but recently we saw the president go all in with a bucketful of obtuse, knee-jerk, counterproductive nothingness.

The president, in an effort to slow the increasing cost of gasoline (it is an election year, remember) proposed to relax the environmental laws that are designed to produce cleaner-burning gasoline. How moronic is that? Let’s save a few bucks for the sake of the election and, if it contaminates the air and kills off a few more people, who gives a damn – this is about an election.

Further, the switch from one oxygenated fuel, that with MTBE, to another containing ethanol, is practically completed. To stop that transition in the bottom of the ninth is ludicrous.

“You’re going to have to be careful that you’re not upsetting a plan that already is in the last stage of implementation,” said the head of the National Petrochemical Refiners Association.

Then the president declared that we would no longer be adding to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve of the country. These repositories of oil are to guard against the country suddenly needing a lot of oil in a crisis. They are not there to assist Ma and Pa America to whip back and forth to the country club in their Humvees.

This administration has squandered five years that could have been spent preparing for this moment. Had there been a sincere national commitment to start weaning Americans off of oil, we would be way ahead of where we are today.

Automobile mileage standards are the poster child in that argument. But this administration, working with the American automotive industry, has keep mileage standards down. Such coziness has resulted in the American auto industry following its crash-test dummies into a brick wall and the president being credited with an “own goal” in the fray.

Ted Leach
Hancock