Rail offers smooth, hassle-free ride

Five years from now, as drivers watch their friends overhead glide to town on the rail while sipping coffee and reading the newspaper, they will await the opportunity to move their car another 4 inches forward on their two-hour commute to the city.

Stephen Ugelow
Hawaii Kai

Don’t be driven to war with Iran

Benjamin Netanyahu’s only reason for speaking to Congress is to try to commit the U.S. to war against Iran — our men and women fighting and dying for Israel because Israel can’t do it.

What amazes me is that the news media, including the Star-Advertiser, don’t publish well-known information that Israel has numerous nuclear warheads with U.S. missiles to deliver them. The more than 60 estimated nukes in Israel would be a deterrent to a strike by Iran.

Many of the Bush administration — John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others — openly opine this war mentality.

I have been to Israel and have seen how the Israeli military treats the Palestinians — squeezing them into unbearable living conditions, taking their homes and land and killing them when they are challenged.

Let’s not get into a fake war again.Thank God we have a president who will not allow this to happen.

Joseph Alexander
Waipahu

Nuclear deal would be very dangerous

The Israeli prime minister was invited to address Congress by the speaker of the House. Had an addressfrom the White House been desired, the president would have invited him, so there has been no breach of protocol nor any insult to the president.

Indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu was most gracious, effusively praising the president — thanking him for past assistance to Israel — in marked contrast to the contempt with which the president has treated him.

Addressing the conflict between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic State,Netanyahu reminded listeners, "The enemy of your enemy is your enemy," highlighting the perils of a dangerous agreement Iran could exploit to threaten the world.

Having thus forced the president to venture out onto a high wire in high wind,Netanyahu has shifted the onus to Congress to defend America byrefusing to accept needless risk inherent in a dangerous deal the president is determined to achieve no matter what.

Thomas E. Stuart
Kapaau, Hawaii island

We must build on forefathers’ legacy

Collectively, we enjoy great prosperity.

Little or none of it would be here for us to use without the framework built, layer by layer, by our forefathers and the divine guidance that propelled them. This is important for us to understand, because the normal condition of man is abject poverty.

Thomas Hobbes famously observed in 1651 that "the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Saving us from that fate is our own efforts, sitting on top of and drawing from an accumulated capital structure of savings, tradition, purpose, vision, faith, self-government and creativity.

Our choice is to decide to use it wisely, taking special care to renew and replenish it as we go, or to simply use it and slowly lose it forever.

Our public debate, including media and politics, must thus include two elements:

» Gratitude for the legacy.

» Determination to continue and enhance it.

In summary: Gratitude + Attitude = Altitude.

Richard O. Rowland
Chairman and founder, Grassroot Institute of Hawaii

President shouldn’t get library here

This is in response to Gov. David Ige’s suggestion that a library for President Barack Obama be built here in Hawaii.

Why? Most tourists won’t come here to visit a library for a president who so far has given nothing to America and taken way too much for his supposed legacy. Where would the money come from? Oh yes, just increase the general excise tax again.

Hawaii has more important matters to solve. Do we really want to honor a president who spent all his adult years not living here? However, he’s managed in the last seven years to spend millions on his vacations, play golf almost daily, eat at Oahu’s most expensive restaurants, and not given anything back to the state he claims to love so much.

Perhaps Ige and his staff should change their priorities and hope that Chicago gets awarded the library.

Marilyn Knox
Kailua

Rail should end at Middle Street

The rail system was built on the pretense that it would ease traffic to and from the west side to town.

So much work costing millions of dollars has already been done, starting from Kapolei to Waipahu and into Pearl City and Aiea, that it would not be wise to stop it now.

My solution is to continue, but end it at the Middle Street station, which is also the hub of our bus system. From there, riders would transfer to buses that would take them to their destinations in town (University of Hawaii and Waikiki included). Reverse this process on the way home. All monies saved by shortening the rail system (if anything is left) would be used to upgrade the bus system and the transfer process.

This gets people from the west side to and from town and hopefully finish the project under the original $5.2 billion price tag.

David Hayashi
Waipahu