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Show A5 The Emery County Review, Tuesday, July 15, 2008 VIEWPOINT Opinion and Letters to the Editor Distant Drums at Sarah’s Party Patrick J. Buchanan Established January 2, 2007 James L. Davis, Publisher & Editor w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w Colleen A. Davis, Co-Publisher, Office & Advertising Manager Josie Luke, Assistant Editor Lyndsay Reid, Advertising Design Charlotte Williams, Advertising Sales Kathy P. Ockey, Staff Journalist Casey Wood, Webmaster Our Vision To be a valued member of the communities we serve and to be trusted as an honest, truthful and reliable source of news. w w w Our Mission To inform, entertain and provide a public forum for the discussion of events impacting the people of the Emery County area and to inform with news and features relevant to those who call the Castle Valley area home w w w Our Principles We will be ethical in all of our efforts to provide information to the public. We will be unbiased in our reporting and will report the facts as we see them and do our best to focus on the good news of the county, its people, history and way of life. We will be strong and active members of the community and assist in any way that we are able. We will strive to provide the best quality product possible to our readers and advertisers...always. We will verify the details of news we are reporting and if a mistake is made on our part we will correct it immediately. We will always listen to suggestions on how to do our job better. Editorial Submission Guidelines The Emery County Review welcomes and invites letters to the editor and guest opinion articles on public policy or current events. We welcome letters of thanks to individuals who have helped make our community a better place to live, work and play. The editorial staff reserves the right to edit all submissions for space constraints, clarity and errors in fact. Submissions must include author’s name and contact information. Contact information will not be published. Letter’s and opinion articles can be sent to jldavis@theemerycountyreview.com, mailed to The Emery County Review, P.O. Box 487, Orangeville, UT. 84537 or faxed to 435-748-2543. The American Right has just died and gone to heaven. The Republican convention address by Sarah Palin in St. Paul has confirmed the bold decision of John McCain to choose the Alaska governor as his co-pilot and united the Republican Party as it has not been since the second term of Ronald Reagan. A wild enthusiasm for Sarah Palin has brought conservatives home to John McCain, and GOP leaders of all hues -- from Fred Thompson to Mitt Romney to Mike Huckabee to Rudy Giuliani -- to the rostrum to lacerate the liberal media for their five days of feral assaults on Sister Sarah. The war the right lives for, against the people the right truly loathes -- the liberal media elite who savagely “Bork” every true conservative who gets on the path to national power -has been reignited. Positive polarization has been achieved. The Republican Party has been united and invigorated. The enthusiasm gap with the Democratic ticket has been closed. And the issues upon which the base loves to fight -- the Culture War and Right to Life -- are back on the table. Palin’s beautifully crafted and delivered acceptance speech, after Rudy’s gleeful excoriations of the pretensions of Obama, will rank as a night to remember in convention history. Yet, as the familiar battle lines form up for the delicious eight-week war that lies ahead, one hears a distant thunder. And the seriousness of the hour we are in comes home. U.S. troops have crossed into Pakistan to attack Taliban and al-Qaida units in the privileged sanctuary of the tribal areas just across the border from Afghanistan. Have we just thrown a rock into the biggest hornet’s nest on earth? How will the Pakistani government and people react to this U.S. incursion into their country to fight a war their own army has been reluctant to wage? How will the tribal peoples react? Will the weak new democratic regime, united only in its hatred of deposed President Musharraf, fall? What is the future of this Islamic nation of 170 million, with its fivedozen nuclear weapons, that was once America’s great ally in South Asia, but is now seething with anti-Americanism? In Afghanistan, the Taliban move closer to the capital Kabul as hardly a day goes by without U.S. armed forces being charged with the accidental kill- ing of Afghan women and children. Is this even a winnable war, after seven years of fighting? And, if so, at what cost? While the convention hears claims of victory in Iraq and an early return of U.S. troops, there are reports the Nouri al-Maliki regime, in collusion with Iran, wants the Americans out to settle accounts with the U.S.-sponsored Sunni militias and the Kurds over who rules in Baghdad and Kirkut. Is the end of America’s long and costly war in Mesopotamia to be an Iraq incorporated into a Shia crescent led by Tehran? Arnaud de Borchgrave reports that Israel, having supplied Mikheil Saakashvili’s army with weapons and training prior to his invasion of South Ossetia, had hoped to use Georgian airfields to fly strikes against Iran. The Russians are said to be furious and considering new military aid to Syria. Now one reads of Dutch intelligence agents, who had infiltrated Iran’s nuclear program to sabotage it, being withdrawn, as the Dutch believe a U.S. strike on Iran may be imminent. Vice President Cheney is in Tbilisi promising $1 billion in new aid, as Prime Minister Putin of Russia is asking why, if this aid is humanitarian, it is being brought into the Black Sea in U.S. warships. In Moscow, President Medvedev and his foreign minister are talking of a Russian sphere of influence like the one the United States has demanded for two centuries with its Monroe Doctrine -- a sphere from which all foreign military blocs and foreign troops are to be excluded. This is a direct challenge to administration and neocon plans to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. John McCain may declare, “We are all Georgians now!” -- but, are Americans, or Europeans, truly willing to go to war with a nuclear-armed Russia to keep Joseph Stalin’s birthplace under a regime led by an erratic hothead who launched what may be the dumbest war in history, which he lost within 24 hours? In June of 1914, a powerful flotilla of the Royal Navy was anchored in the German port of Kiel on a friendly visit where British naval officers visited German warships on the invitation of Adm. Von Tirpitz, and the Kaiser himself inspected the great new British battleship George V, in the uniform of a British admiral. The festive occasion was interrupted and ended by news of the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo in the Balkans, where neither British nor Germans had vital interests. Six weeks later, the two nations had plunged into the bloodiest war in history. Today, as Republicans celebrate the last hours of a hugely successful convention, and Democrats seethe at the hiding they took, are we as a nation drifting inexorably for new confrontations and larger and wider wars? Who is minding the store, as we party in St. Paul? (Copyright 2008 creators syndicate inc.) PUBLIC FORUM Excited to be Back to Work for Emery County Citizens To The Tax Payers of Emery County: Several charges were leveled against me in the past several months and it is important to me that you receive a fair and accurate depiction of the nature and extent of the wrongs of which I was accused. The charges against me resulted from me being reimbursed mileage when I attended various county related business meetings out of the area- primarily from Nov. 2005 to May 2006. When it was brought to my attention that I had been reimbursed for mileage when in fact I should not have been reimbursed mileage, I promptly repaid the County for the overpayment. I repaid Emery County and the SEUALG in September 2006. Most, if not all, of the requests for reimbursement were on pre-filled forms, with the pre-filled information listed on the back of the form. I signed the front of the form as evidence I attended the meetings and did not know that the second side of the form contained pre-filled information concerning mileage reimbursements. Not reading the back of the form was a highly regrettable oversight on my part, but I had no intention of depriving the State or County of funds. It is true there was a period of three or four months when I received reimbursement checks, and I did in fact not sign them over to Emery County. They stacked up on me as I was attending to various County related business, particularly the voting machine nightmare in January 2006. Another basis for me not immediately signing the checks over to the County was the fact that, at the time, there was no policy on reimbursing mileage to the County. In short, I did not know who to give the checks to, what amount should be reimbursed, and whether I was being taxed for money I ultimately was not receiving. To my knowledge, Emery County still does not have a policy for reimbursing mileage and there are others who are unwittingly doing the same things I have been accused of doing. In fact, at the time, I did not know whether the reimbursement money was CIB money, State money or County money. I felt like the greater wrong would be to give the money to the wrong entity and in doing so cause an even bigger headache. In June 2006, I spoke with various county and state officials regarding who I should pay the reimbursements checks to. I could not get a clear answer. It became clear to me in September 2006 that an answer was not forthcoming so I just wrote a check for the amount I felt was owed and believed that would take care of the issue. My belief was supported by the fact that months earlier, the County records were audited by two independent auditors who reported that they did not have any reason to believe any money was missing or any money had been misappropriated despite claims by others I was taking money that was not mine. Upon my filing for re-election in April 2008, the issue came up again, almost a full two years after the fact. In the winter of 2007 and spring of 2008, I voluntarily met with the Attorney General’s Office and Special Investigator and produced all of the records asked of me and answered all of the questions posed to me. I met with the Emery County Sheriff’s office to be investigated without delay. Simply put, I felt I had nothing to hide. I did not intend any crime or wrongdoing. Later, in June 2008 charges were filed against me. On Sept 2, 2008 the original charges against me were dropped and I plead guilty to a Class A Misdemeanor charge of Misappropriation of Funds. Immediately after the hearing, I returned to work in the County Offices and began working with the other Commissioners to better Emery County. Initially, my attorney and I sincerely felt we could take the original charges to trial and clear my name. However, it would have taken several months beyond the election to do so. The trial would have lasted well beyond the election and I sincerely wanted the citizens of Emery County to fully know and understand the issue and vote accordingly. If we had chosen to go to trial, then most certainly you would have not gotten the entire picture come November and would not have made an informed vote one way or the other. Additionally, rather than waste tens of thousands of dollars on attorney’s fees and require the County to waste tens of thousands of dollars of the tax payers money to prosecute me, I plead guilty to lesser charges. I realize that at the time the alleged wrongs were committed, I should have put the County issues aside and worked to figure out who to pay the money back to. Of that decision, I am guilty. However, I never stole any money and never committed a theft of any kind. My main concern here is the welfare of Emery County and that of my family. I am excited about getting back to work for the people of Emery County and look forward to the elections in November. I want the people of Emery County to know I did nothing criminal. There was no theft or embezzlement, or reckless use of County money. It was simply a misunderstanding of procedure that I thought had been cleared up. Finally, I hold no ill feelings towards those who have pressed these charges against me and wish only to get back to business as usual and continue striving to make Emery County a great place to live. - Drew Sitterud Emery County Commissioner |
