Trash on the beach
It is a shame that wealthy Naples, home to some of the most beautiful beaches in the country, does not empty its trash cans regularly — especially during holidays when beaches are crowded.
At the 14th Avenue South beach parking area on Memorial Day, the trash cans were overflowing to the point that garbage was falling out and being blown all over the beach and surrounding area by the wind.
Visitors and residents alike expect better care for such a beautiful and valuable public place. Overflowing trash not only looks terrible, but also harms wildlife and the environment. On busy holidays especially, trash collection should be increased to keep Naples beaches clean and enjoyable for everyone.
Helmut Krayer, Naples
Powerful Memorial Day Service
North Fort MyersThanks to Fort Myers Memorial Gardens and all participants for another annual poignant, moving, powerful Memorial Day Service. We must NEVER forget.
Stuart Morgenstein, Fort Myers
Alternative to I-75 widening
There is a better alternative to widening the noisy six lane I-75 freeway to eight lanes for 18.5 miles from Golden Gate Parkway to Corkscrew Road. This freeway expansion is estimated to cost $578 million or $31.25 million a mile, and it will take several years to complete. A smarter use of taxpayer dollars would be to construct 200 miles of bicycle and pedestrian pathways costing less than $3 million a mile to build. These systems would improve our cities immensely by reducing traffic congestion, while promoting business and workforce housing development, and providing places for our citizens and tourists to ride bikes, run, walk, and enjoy the outdoors. This will increase the health, wellness, and quality of life of everyone living in and visiting our cities, and this will increase tourism. For too long, we have focused on how to add more vehicles to our already crowded roadways. A better choice would be to significantly expand park-like bicycle and pedestrian pathways to provide more enjoyable and healthy alternatives to driving vehicles. This has been overlooked for decades. Now is the time to reinvent Southwest Florida so we can compete with other cities that have great community pathway systems. Building these vehicle-free transportation arteries for bicycle riders and people walking and running, will reduce serious roadway injuries and fatalities, and Florida has the highest bicycle/vehicle injury and death rate in America. Implementing this project will reduce this critical problem and it will create cleaner, healthier, quieter, and more livable communities.
Patrick Post, Naples
Physician fees
Sunday May 24, I read the “Your Turn” editorial by a Cape Coral resident. There were several exaggerations and misinformation that benefit from correction. He stated that “Medicare reimbursed the doctor 35 dollars” though he mentioned several times he had to pay $60 for several visits for his “deductible.” Likely his $60 was his copay − a fixed amount determined by his insurance policy and doctors are almost always reimbursed significantly more than the $35 he quoted. We do not get “kickbacks” for prescriptions nor a “referral fee” for sending patients to specialists as he boldly claims. He was correct that offices are often kept cold − the staff is busy moving from room to room and often wear lab coats and we keep things cooler than patients sometimes prefer − but no one wants to be tended to by a perspiring physician! Doctors are under time pressures during examinations, but I still believe you can find one to tend to your needs and one that takes the necessary time to provide good care. And I am a physician.
Scott Ross, Bonita Springs
Nuclear Iran
Control over Iran’s nuclear weapons was Trump’s rationale for his war against Iran. Iran’s 900 pound stockpile is enriched to 60% — almost at the enrichment levels required to make nuclear weapons. Experts agree that if Iran were to try to use the stockpile to make weapons, it could create a modest number of nuclear bombs.
Trump, himself, caused this mess. He tore up Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran during his first term. When Iran was cooperating with the uranium restrictions in the 2015 deal, Iran’s weapon designers were left with too little nuclear fuel to build a single bomb. Only after Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018 did Iran undertake “an enrichment spree” that moved them far closer to a bomb than before.
At this point Trump will be fortunate to get anything near the Obama agreement which limited Iran to a uranium enrichment of only 3.67% purity (far below weapons-grade), which made Iran cut back its operating centrifuges significantly, reducing enrichment capacity, which reduced Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile by roughly 98%, capped at 300 kg, which gave the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) expanded outside monitoring and verification authority over Iran’s nuclear facilities and which imposed sanctions if Iran violated the deal.
Trump will never get a deal like Obama’s because Iran knows it is dealing with a TACO Trump. The Art of the Deal proves that bullying just doesn’t work.
Joe Haack, Naples
Bias in letters?
Occasionally a letter to the editor will accuse the Naples News of bias in not publishing enough letters from President Trump’s supporters. While it is true there seem to be more letters published criticizing the president than supporting him, I suspect there are reasons other than political bias on the part of the newspaper. (If there are great numbers of newspaper subscribers out there who support the president it would make no business sense for the News to knowingly offend them.) Among those reasons, I believe, is the heavy challenge faced by his supporters in frequently having to defend the indefensible. And such is the case with the president’s most recent gambit: the $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund designed to compensate those who may claim to have been unfairly prosecuted by the federal government. In recent television appearances, the Acting Attorney General has refused to rule out the possibility that those who were convicted of assaulting police officers in the January 6, 2021Capitol riot (even those convicted of felony assault) would be eligible to receive payments under the fund. I encourage those who believe this fund (paid for by us taxpayers) is a good idea to step up and send in a letter stating the basis for your belief. I urge the Naples News to publish as many of them as possible, and I can’t wait to read them.
Ray D’Agostino, Naples
What’s the alternative?
Week after week I read letters in the Naples Daily News from “righteous” Democrats asking how anyone could possibly vote for Trump. Did you ever consider that it might possibly be because you gave us such a terrible alternative?
Tom Tess, Estero
Threat to women’s rights
Woman, thy fate is servitude. Your right to vote is in jeopardy. Contraception is destined to be regulated. The employment of women is already being curtailed. There is a movement afoot to reroute women to a role of servitude to men. “Barefoot and pregnant” lurks. States are considering the revocation of No Fault Divorce laws to make it more difficult for women to escape a marriage which is abusive. Women military officers have been purposefully demoted. Right-wing evangelicals talk about removing women’s right to vote. The Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for Trump’s second term, Project 2025, expresses a vision where “men are breadwinners and women are mothers” Take Scott Yenor for example. Yenor has taught political philosophy at Boise State and he assisted Ron DeSantis in rolling back Florida DEI programs which help women in the workplace. Yenor has declared that modern women are “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome.” Yenor maintains that feminism, with its attendant horrors of work outside the home, birth control, and financial independence, has made women neurotic and dependent on pharmaceuticals. Like JD Vance, he carries a scorn for women who do not have children. Yenor now operates as chair within the Heritage Foundation focused on his masculinism and as an example of the writing on the wall for women in America. If women do not vote liberal in the fall elections of 2026, their rights will soon tumble thereafter.
Sally Lam, Naples
Vote Republicans out of office
In the face of our president’s brazen and unchecked corruption, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that every Republican congressional representative and senator is either a coward or a crook or both. The Republican majority Congress lets Trump get away with his personal money-making schemes time and time again. It’s hard not to blame him for raiding our Treasury when no Republican even attempts to stop him.
With so much popular backlash to his latest scheme of a $1.8 billion fund to lavish on whomever he wishes, the House GOP cowards decided to leave town rather than stiffen their spines and vote against funding it. So, running away is their solution? Hoping no one will notice when they let it happen later? Praying that Trump won’t primary them?
Trump and his family have made billions during the short time he’s been president again. And the billions he’s made belong to you and me.
If you want to stop his picking our pockets, vote to throw every Republican out of office in November. Let the enablers of his corruption know that we, the people, won’t stand for it any longer. Why do we have to follow the law, pay our taxes, and suffer the consequences of a failing economy if our elected officials and Supreme Court justices are allowing corruption to run rampant in the federal government?
And while you’re at it, don’t forget that Byron Daniels is one of those GOP congressmen who has supported Trump on every issue. He’s in the lead for governor of Florida. If he wins, he’ll bring the same Trump loyalty to our state government that he’s exhibited in D.C.
Jennifer Walker, Naples
Extortion of taxpayers
Each day that goes by, Trump one ups his corruption, but the latest is his extortion of the U.S. government. He dropped his $10 billion frivolous lawsuit against the IRS and in exchange got a $1.776 billion slush fund (taxpayer money, yes, you too MAGA will be paying for this) to pay Jan. 6 criminals and his other sketchy cronies.
But that wasn’t bad enough, he tossed in a one-page amendment to the “settlement” that bans the IRS from auditing him, his companies and members of his family now and in the future. This man has no morals or ethics and those that stand by him − in Congress or the everyday man and woman − look in the mirror and ask if you have the same lack of morals and ethics. He is by far the most crooked and corrupt president this country has ever had. The U.S. under Trump is an embarrassment.
Byron Donalds doesn’t care about taxpayers. He defended Trump’s slush fund saying it was the right thing to do. He claimed Trump was victimized and thus the IRS simply took settlement money which was not paid to Trump and used it for the slush fund. A few facts Byron ((which you should know being a member of Congress), there was no settlement, Trump extorted the IRS saying he would drop his $10 billion lawsuit if they gave him the money for the slush fund and only Congress can appropriate this type of fund.
He claims he wants to be the next governor of Florida. He has no original thought, if Trump says it’s good then he says it’s good. If Trump tells him to jump, he says how high. He’s another puppet of Trump. Many Trumpkin Republicans are voicing opposition to the slush fund, yet you are right there, side by side with Trump defending his actions. Floridians beware, he will do nothing for the state, he has bigger political ambitions. He is hoping to lose the governorship so Trump will appoint him to a Cabinet position or ambassadorship. It’s time Floridians take back our state and not vote for these Trump disciples. Dump Donalds.
E. A. Blair, Naples
Irony of left’s position
The left wants to eliminate the Second Amendment disarming legal gun owning Americans but won’t support President Trump who wants to disarm Iran that will use a nuke to kill Americans and destroy Israel. The irony.
Arthur A. Maranian, Naples
Open borders
How stupid has the world become. Open borders all over the globe was the beginning of this illegal immigration disaster we have, across the world. The recent deportations of illegals residing in the UK, is just the beginning of what will follow. I am a legal resident of our great country called America. I came to this country in 1962 from England. It took me two years to get the clearance I needed to board a ship in Southampton and cross the Atlantic Ocean to America.
After only one year in America, I met the woman I married, we loved this country and lived a good life together for 50 years. My legal immigrant wife also came from the European country of Holland, also known as The Netherlands.
A few short years after our adventure in America, my wife and I made a return visit back to Holland. We had decided to make a road trip from Holland to Germany; my wife’s brother-in-law was our driver. As we approached the border, our brother-in-law glanced at me with a huge grin on his face and began to tell me how wonderful it was to drive through the border without having to stop and show identification. As we got closer to the border, I glanced at the many cars going in the opposite direction toward the great cities of Holland, and many other countries of Europe, not one of those cars had to stop at their border crossing. I noticed a huge bus going into Holland, loaded with unrecognizable people with a huge, covered load strapped to the top.
At this time my brother- in-law was still bragging about not having to stop at the border. I patiently waited until he stopped talking. Then I asked him, if he had seen that loaded bus traveling into Holland. With a puzzled look on his face, he asked me why I would ask such a question. I then asked him if he, or anyone on security at that border, knew how many people were in that vehicle, and what their nationalities might be, did he have any thoughts on their destination. What country they might have come from, and what might be the reason they are traveling to Holland with a huge, unknown covered load on top, and an uncountable number of people in the vehicle. My brother-in law sat quietly for a while, then solemnly said. “I never thought about it that way! Our world leaders also never thought about it that way!
Our America is a huge country; we can absorb illegals much easier than Holland or the UK, and we are seriously addressing the situation. Holland has done a reasonably good job of absorbing illegals, but the UK is a disaster. If nothing is done to change this situation. It is only a matter of time before the English language that I grew up with in England will become the minority language of the UK. Once again, I ask, how stupid has the world become. For those who love open borders, I ask them, why do you have locks on the front and back doors of your home. I also ask them, why do you think the Chinese built The Great Wall of China centuries, ago. Was it to keep their people in?
Brian Whitehouse, Cape Coral
Where does it end?
OMG ! Now the president has arranged to protect himself, his family and who knows who else from the IRS! Now he and family can go scot free after he is done, and his family after he is gone!
How much more do we have to put up with? Now he is going to pay off the insurgents who attacked the Capitol! They were all criminals of one kind or another, he pardoned them all and now he is going to pay them off!
Where does it end? November elections ? or do we have to wait until his self dealing ends at the end of his term? The average citizen doesn’t stand a chance.
Franklin Warner, Fort Myers
Trump’s corruption
With more than two and a half years remaining in his presidency, Donald Trump has begun making preparations to safeguard his family’s fortune from any IRS “weaponization”/tax fraud claims. If the Republican lawmakers support his latest bill that forever exempts him from IRS wrongdoing, then Mr. Trump’s exit strategy in 2029 will be Exhibit #1 in his Presidential Library alongside Quatar’s gifted $400 million Boeing 747 augmented with golden sneakers, Bibles, and cryptocurrency coins. The parallels between Trump II administration and that of Fernando Marcos (Philippines President 1965-1986) are noteworthy: rampant government corruption, economic stagnation, unwarranted prosecution of political adversaries, and a steady widening of economic inequalities between the rich and the poor. While Imelda Marcos may have left behind 1,060 pairs of shoes when the Marcos abdicated Manilla, the sitting president stands to retain all of his ill-begotten largess courtesy of a cowardly Congress, a politicized Supreme Court, and 74 million misinformed voters.
James L. DeBoy, Fort Myers
This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Trash cans overflowing at Naples beach access | Opinion letters
Reporting by Letter writers / Fort Myers News-Press
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