Readers’ Column for the week of February 2, 2020

You may call the Owego Pennysaver Readers’ Column at (607) 687-2378 24-hours a day, or e-mail comments to readerscolumn@stny.rr.com. We reserve the right to revise or reject any message. 

I seem to be having TV trouble. There are times when my picture cuts out and the screen gives a message, ‘no video picture’. I turn off the machine, wait some, and then turn it back on. All is well. Sometimes I have to pull the plug and go through the startup gyration. I pay about $180 a month for email and TV, no phone and no (.com). Assistance is useless. Is anyone else experiencing this type problem?

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The fear mongers are at work on the bail issue. They want you to think bail is now allowed where it wasn’t in the past, thus setting criminals free. In fact bail was always allowed. The well off could afford it and went free while waiting for their trial. The poor could not and waited in jail. The Reform is just letting everyone out while waiting for his or her trial, not just the well off. And guess what. With fewer prisoners, the jails no longer get as much income from housing inmates from other jurisdictions. 

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To the person asking about BelAir BBQ – he closed his business and is not in the area anymore. Jackpot Richie’s Chicken BBQ, located at 16 State Route 96 in Owego, announced on Facebook they will honor his gift cards for half of the gift amount for a limited time. Follow them on Facebook or Instagram to find out when they will open in the spring season! 

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This message is in regards to the reader inquiring about EPIC. Tioga Opportunities, Inc. offers free, unbiased Medicare counseling and works in conjunction with EPIC to assist with related questions and the application process. Please call Tioga Opportunities, Inc. at (607) 687-4120, ext. 344.

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If you want to get rid of junk cars and other blight, go to the Town or Village Board and request strongly that they ask the Supreme Court to order the removal of the violation. The Code Enforcement Officer cannot order the removal of anything; it has to start at the local Board. Most likely the Code Enforcement officer has cited the offender in the past. The Local Court can only fine not remove the violation. Again, don’t blame the Code enforcer; it is all up to the governing body.

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“That kind of thinking shaped my perspective on values and cultural norms. Instead of wanting more things, I wanted fewer things. Instead of high-capital farming, I wanted low-capital farming. Instead of supermarkets, I wanted larders, root cellars, and backyard abundance. Then, the alternative fuels movement took off. Wood gas, solar, windmills, and woodstoves – the pages of each issue fueled our minds with alternatives. If I could boil down the magazine’s persona to one word during that time, it would be ‘hope’. The can-do spirit pervaded every page.” Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface Farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, reflecting on 50 years worth of Mother Earth News.

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You had the fire at the recycle center, but this morning I put my recyclables that were full out, they came and left half of the stuff in each bin. The stuff you left was Gatorade bottles and cardboard. There is no reason for this. Now I start off the week with half of the recyclables already full.

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What complete arrogance and desire for dominance. Cuomo wants to dictate terms that stifle your life and strangle the New York economy. He wants control from the grave. Fracking is so safe and necessary. More than 30 states are doing it and have been doing it. We are so behind the times because of this buffoon. New York State buys fracked gas from Pennsylvania. How dumb is that? What an economic boom to the struggling farmers and landowners of the Southern Tier that he is withholding. Vote this dictator out! He’s killing us!

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Every day it’s something more ridiculous out of Albany. Watching Cuomo just fortifies the case for term limits for governor. They have term limits for president, how about for our governor? Let’s get term limits. Vote Cuomo out! Term limits, term limits, term limits. He’s killing New York State.

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Well, it happened, our family experienced a break in this morning by a perpetrator who was arrested last week for the same crime and he’s out on bail. Thank you Governor Cuomo for keeping New York safe. Hey, let’s vote this bozo out; he’s bad for New York!

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Cuomo savors the criminal over the hard working honest New Yorker. This bail reform law has got to go and so does he! Never, ever vote for Cuomo! What an idiot.

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The Pennysaver should limit calls to about 150 words or 25 lines. The artists who have discovered the filibuster tactic to limit the amount of calls being printed should be eradicated and sent packing. 

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To the person who took my big foot a few months ago that I gave to him to have repaired, I’ve been trying to reach you but all I get is a message saying the mailbox is full. Please give me a call at 687-5854. I would really love to hear from you. 

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This past Friday and Saturday, Jan. 24 and 25, the Tioga School Play was Shrek. Those kids were amazing! It was funny, it had you in tears, and it was wonderful. They did a fantastic job! Quite a few of the kids had to do three to four changes into different characters. They were all great. They had a live band too, that was fantastic. I know everyone enjoyed it.

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Drugged driving is impaired driving. What happens when they legalize marijuana?

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Well thank you Governor Cuomo. I know the small business that was broken into over the weekend and robbed of cash. Our local police tell us the crook will be back on the streets, free as a bird, long before we even clean up the broken glass from the break in because of the new stupid, no common sense cash bail law. Crime in New York City is already on the uprise. What were these politicians thinking! They are ruining New York State. They must see people are leaving in droves and this does not help. All they’re interested in is a vote. Why aren’t they concerned with the daycare centers that are closing instead of how many days our dumb state fair is open. They are not working for us. I’m praying and hoping they all are defeated at the ballot box come November. Hopefully they will resign. They are not doing a thing for New York and they are not keeping us safe.

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I just read that the town supervisor received an $11,000 raise. Are you kidding me? That’s almost $1,000 a month and I’m on a fixed income. I am just shocked, totally shocked! 

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I see where somebody is complaining about one person hitting all the free food places. That used to be me when I was able to do it but the food was not for me, and nobody complained because they knew I was picking up food for people that had no way to get there. So before you start complaining, you better check things out and make sure you have a right to complain. The people that are getting that food, they really need it.

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I was wondering who is responsible for the spillover on Blodgett Road? There’s a creek and all the debris is out into the road where two cars can’t pass. If you are not paying attention you can really scratch your car. Just wondering who is responsible for taking care of this. 

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I heartily agree with the old coot. The Tappan Zee Bridge should have kept its old name. Governor Cuomo is arrogant and pretentious in naming that bridge after his father. His father never lifted hammer one on that bridge. It should have been named after a common ironworker. How does the governor get away this? Where does he get the power to do this and everybody just follows along? It will always be the Tappan Zee Bridge to me.

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As of Jan. 27, the U.S. has not stopped travel to and from China. The Wuhan Coronavirus is a pandemic with a minimum of 1,500 cases being reported across the world and the number of cases being doubled up about every seven days. A travel embargo must be instituted immediately! Period, end of story!

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This is to the inconsiderate driver of a truck with no muffler at 1:15 a.m.; he decided to zoom around our street and wake everybody up. There are like 11 people that get up to go to work and school on this little street; so that was very uncalled for. I hope you had a good time not counting the people who were yelling out in the street, too. 

National Political Viewpoints

If not now, then in November we must drain the swamp. Get rid of Trump and his Republican cronies.

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Can someone tell me what happened to the caravan and diseases that were coming to the U.S.? Mr. Trump hasn’t addressed that in awhile.

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You have got to be kidding! Hunter Biden was paid $83,000 per month for 17 straight months, is currently paying a $12,000 per month mortgage payment for his home in Beverly Hills, but he didn’t have enough money to pay support for his love child? Kind of sounds like a typical Socialist Democrat. Like Bernie Sanders, free everything for everyone, on someone else’s dime.

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To my friends and neighbors of all parties who support the politicians currently running our state (into the ground, apparently). They are daily enacting (or going along with) policies that are accelerating our decent into being notoriously one of the worst states in the entire nation in an ever-increasing myriad of categories. The latest is hospital care. We are 47th out of 50 states! Maine, of all places, is tops at number 1! Seriously, our state is becoming more like an impoverished third world country every day. Is this what you want for yourself, your kids and grandkids? Keep voting for these egocentric dumbbells like Chuck Schumer and King Cuomo. Seriously, the evidence mounting daily indicates they care zero for decent, hard working citizens caught on their sinking ship.

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To Nancy Pelosi, thank you for locking up the 2020 election for Donald Trump. Thank you Mr. Bloomberg for spending a billion dollars of your hard earned money on your losing campaign. Too bad you didn’t spend that money to improve New York State. To all those folks in the Owego area who have a mortgage and your annual income is less than $60,000, I hope you can keep your property for a few years; Governor Cuomo doesn’t want you to. He wants those who make 200,000 annually to live in New York.

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“Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D,R,I), who wrote a book on corporate influence in government, told me he doesn’t ‘think there’s ever been such political might assembled on one issue in the history of the Congress’ as oil-and-gas interests fighting climate change regulations. Globally, fossil fuels receive roughly $5 trillion annually in government subsidies, a figure that includes the cost of environmental damage caused by industry that’s left to everyone else to clean up, according to a 2019 International Monetary Fund paper.” “Shell’s Crude Awakening,” by Justin Worland. Time magazine. Jan. 27, 2020.

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It appears Trump supporters and elected Republicans have received the memo and have all the talking points down. Some I don’t dispute, but I have to keep asking at what cost to our Democracy. It is like an addiction, and makes us feel good. We keep supporting our habit despite the cost, until we can’t. Will there be a naloxone to bring us back and will there be enough public support to make sure we never return to this addiction that can’t sustain our democracy?

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A house divided against its self cannot stand. I pray to God the Democrats get on board with good, common rational sense.

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President Trump pledged that he wouldn’t accept his $400,000 annual presidential salary if elected. But because he has to be paid under law, he has been donating his salary in quarterly payments to different departments of the federal government to include Veterans, Homeland Security, Education, and Health.

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Senator Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham don’t want any witnesses; their minds are made up. Well, 70 percent of Americans do. The senators work for us, not the other way around.

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Adam Schiff came across as an Atticus Finch in his final summation. Whether you agreed or disagree with case against Mr. Trump, you must admit that Senator Adam Schiff gave a brilliant speech.

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It is hard to believe that anyone still supports Donald Trump. The national debt is over a trillion dollars under his watch, he has told over 15,000 lies, he childishly calls people names, and he is an embarrassment to the U.S. on the world stage. Donald Trump is more concerned about himself than what is good for our country. As we have already seen, he gets rid of anyone who disagrees with him, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he has intimidated the Republicans in the House and Senate to support him no matter what. We have three equal branches of government in the United States of America, not a kingdom. The best thing for our country would be for Donald Trump to be impeached.

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“He believes these things because he’s two parts crazy, one part stupid, but also because he’s been engaging in corruption his entire life, to the point that it’s second nature. It’s not so much that he doesn’t understand the difference between right and wrong, it’s that corruption is his first instinct, and the only course of action in his mind. His brain, like a compromised immune system, was defenseless against the infection that is Rudy Giuliani and the bottom-feeding, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about the Biden’s.” “Nuking the Hurricane” by Bess Levin. Vanity Fair. December 2019

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Stone cold hard facts – The only thing democrats have done is go after Donald Trump. They’ve done nothing for the American people. Vote straight republican. 

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I have an idea for Donald Trump’s reelection bumper sticker. Reelect Donald Trump, impeached but not removed. 

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“We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked and circumventing the line of people waiting patiently, diligently and lawfully to become immigrants in this country.” ~Barack Obama 2005

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I’m not into politics much at all but I’ll say one thing about those democratic congressmen, they are a patriotic bunch. They are doing according the constitution. I wish I could say the same thing about them jokers, you know, the republican congressmen. If I were a democrat, naturally I’d want my man to win or woman; if I was a republican, same thing. But if they didn’t win I would never resort to help Putin, that communist leader of Russia, to give me a hand. I would not sell my country out like you republicans do. That’s too bad, you guys should be Americans instead of stupid party republicans.

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I miss good old honest Richard Nixon, don’t you?

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So I ask, if President Trump is so bad for our country why don’t the democrats just defeat him in November? Because they know they can’t, that’s why. They know as the rest of us know that Trump will be reelected by a landslide. Their only hope was to remove him from office and they have now failed miserably at that. For their own good and their own good health, they best get used to four more years, because that’s who the American people want and that’s who the American people will vote for, President Trump 2020 in a landslide.

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The house democrats should be impeached for the lies, deceit, abuse and the phony Russian dossier against President Donald Trump and for fabricating their version of the transcripts. Thanks to the republicans’ legal team and senate, the truth was proven with fact, yes with facts. The democrats in the house cannot read minds as they claim and they shouldn’t be fabricating their own version of what happened; and they blatantly omitted information from the transcripts and witnesses to manipulate the impeachment outcome. Not sorry democrats, you got whipped again. Go Donald Trump in 2020! 

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I think I remember seeing Chuck Schumer on the Ed Sullivan Show and he was a clown juggling bowling pins. Yep, that’s where I saw him. 

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President Trump’s lawyers, and in only two hours, totally destroyed the 3-day, 24-hour argument that the democrats put up for impeachment. They did not have one drop of proof of anything, and yet they went on and on and on. The whole deal is they have to stop him because he’s going to get reelected big time, and they just couldn’t take it for another four years. 

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The average person has to wonder how many lies does Trump have to tell before his supporters think that maybe he lies. Trump preys on the young, foolish and stupid, but people who don’t know any better than to think for them selves; and it’s a sad state when a person like him is the president of our country. We are the laughing stock of the world. What a dishonest man. I feel sad for the next generation because he’s taking away protection for our environment. It’s sad. 

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Back in 1999, Trump, the outspoken celebrity and real estate developer, told NBC’s Tim Russer that even regarding late term abortion he was very pro-choice. Now, in his late 70’s, he is not going to change his mind. He just wants the votes from the Evangelists and the pro-lifers. That’s how he works. We should all know this by now and the pro-lifers fall for it. He was at the Right for Life Rally just for votes, not for the unborn. Who is he kidding? He’s not kidding me.

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I hope and I pray that this impeachment garbage will blow up in the democrats’ faces; and I also hope and pray that Trump gets another term for president.

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The left wing Marxist losers proposed changing from the present legal Electoral College vote to a popular vote. I propose we change the two term presidential limitation to four terms for the greatest and most honest president of all time, Donald J. Trump. 

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I know the democrats don’t want to hear this, but the president’s lawyers have completely destroyed anything that the democrats have said in the senate. They didn’t have anything to start with, but they’re making those democratic prosecutors look like fools. 

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I wish that escalator went in reverse. We wouldn’t have all these problems with Trump like we have now.