HOA and “hardball” tactics

To the editor:

I believe most homeowners associations are implemented to benefit the home owners in that area.

However, there are a few HOAs that can cause discontent and disagreement with neighbors. This pits neighbor against neighbor and can be expensive for those people who are struggling with retirement.

There even may be times when a homeowner may disagree with an issue that is to be voted on, thus, being labeled as a troublemaker at which point that person may just give in out of sheer peer pressure.

Sadly, the general attitude of the homeowner is to just give in to the HOA rules or move out of that area.

An officer of the HOA may know little or nothing about the state statues regulating the associations. Therefore, I believe any officer of a HOA should have training as to how to conduct a meeting and training on the state statues regulating these entities.

Bonnie Hanson

Maggie Valley

Great selection

To the editor:

I would like to ask sportsmen in the area to buy from Waynesville Bait and Tackle. They have a good selection and will order what you need. A real nice man owns it. The business also stocks minnows.

Kevin Jones

Waynesville

There are two sides to PAC spending

To the editor:

A recent letter to the editor complains that PAC spending is corrupting the political process.

The writer, it seems, can only find examples among Republicans and conservatives.

I don’t recall any objections in the past concerning the enormous political spending by the labor unions in support of liberal big government socialism that helped elect the current president.

I can, however, understand his pain. When your side has had 40 years of unrestrained spending to push your agenda, it’s painful to see your opponents having the same opportunity.

Robert Persons

Waynesville

Flier filled with fraudulent accusations

To the editor:

There couldn’t be a more flagrant, pants-on-fire fraud than the Romney-Ryan flier that oozed out of my mailbox, and probably yours, last week.

It accuses Barack Obama of being “the only president in history to raid Medicare of $716 billion.”

Consumers Union and dozens of other impartial authorities have exposed that claim as a lie. Yet Paul Ryan brazenly repeated it in his convention speech last week. He never mentioned that his own budget assumed the same $716-billion in Medicare savings.     They’re contained in the Affordable Health Care Act that Ryan has voted 33 times to repeal.

Hypocrisy is to politics as oil to an automobile engine, but sometimes, as in this example, it turns to toxic sludge.

Fact: Obamacare adds new benefits for traditional Medicare enrollees, such as cancer screenings and annual wellness visits without deductibles or co-pays, and eliminates (by 2014) the prescription benefit “donut hole.”

Fact: The $716-billion is money to be saved over ten years by reducing excess payments scheduled under present law to hospitals, certain other providers, and to the private insurance companies that run Medicare Advantage programs. Those plans cost, on average, $1,000 more per person.

According to a Consumers Union health blog, “Opponents of health reform spin the facts to claim the ACA ‘cuts $716 billion from Medicare’ while failing to mention that the law does what many of the politicians say they want: Preserve the existing program while finding savings from insurers and providers, extending the solvency of Medicare, and giving new benefits to seniors.”

Most campaigns--even Obama’s--fiddle with the truth when it suits them, but Romney and Ryan must be out to set a record. There were four other whoppers in Ryan’s speech, followed later by his admittedly false claim on talk radio to have once run a marathon in less than three hours.

Emulating his running mate’s hypocrisy, Romney claimed to have wished success for Obama. If so, he kept it secret from his fellow Republicans in Congress as they refused time and again to do anything for the country that might help the president in the process.

How can they lie so persistently, so brazenly? It’s because history teaches that such tactics succeed, if only for a time. We’ll know on Nov. 6 whether that time is in the present or the past.

Martin A. Dyckman

Waynesville