Letters to the editor — May 15, 2019

Political party no friend of the working class

I have learned that the Democrat-controlled state Legislature, in the dead of night and using parliamentary gimmicks, passed $2 billion in new taxes destined to make Washingtonians’ household budgets tighter.

It’s time voters face reality: the Democrat party is no longer the party of the working guy. Instead, it’s become the party of noisy special interests, the party of progressively higher taxes, the party of progressively more spending, the party of progressively bigger, bloated government. It’s a party whose biggest donors are the public employee unions, which are Democrats’ puppet masters. It’s a party of cowards who eschew transparency to get ill-considered legislation passed, hoping we won’t notice or care.

Well, I noticed and I care. And I will remember in November 2020.

Paul Schmidt

Sequim

Poster has no place in a parade

It is despicable that the Sequim Irrigation Festival would allow a participant to display an enormous Trump poster. The logging truck with the poster was the last truck in the parade — the last thing we saw — and it ruined the parade, the day, and the whole Irrigation Festival for us.

I thought this was supposed to be just a small-town, good-natured, non-partisan parade and festival where we could all at least pretend to get along for a day.

Shame on the driver who thought it would be funny to ruin the parade for others, and shame on the parade officials who allowed it.

David Meissner

Sequim

Response from Irrigation Festival director Deon Kapetan: “In the festival’s parade rules it says participants cannot campaign. We do allow existing elected officials to be in the parade. If it’s an incumbent running for office they cannot put out signs on cars or floats. For example, if President Trump wanted to come to our parade we’d allow him to do that, but he couldn’t campaign. We plan to follow-up with this entry. They should have read the parade rules and we should have caught it. We intend to do better next year to ensure the rules are followed.”