Driver ed lacking
Regarding “Use your headlights” (Your Views, July 3) by a visitor from South Africa: I suppose people living on the Big Island do not see the problem; it requires someone from another continent (not even the mainland) to realize it. I endorse what Mr. D. Excell wrote!
I worked as a professional truck driver throughout the European Union and for the last eight years before arriving in Hilo as a bus driver. My wife and I arrived in Hilo in 2004 from the Spanish Canary Island off the west coast of Africa.
On July 3, while driving from Hilo between Kurtistown and Volcano — often with rain and/or low clouds — I noticed that even at dusk, 50 percent of the cars were not using dimmed headlights, nor even position (parking) lights, at a time when you actually should use fog lights.
Almost all heavy trucks carry the necessary lights, but 90 percent of tourist buses … use no lights at all. It is not possible to overtake a slow car when you do not see a bus coming toward you without any lights at all.
Driver education on this island is apparently not teaching that at night you dim your lights when encountering opposite traffic — not even when you blink your high beams as a reminder.
Also, especially in the Ka‘u District, 75 percent of drivers do not use turn signals when suddenly turning.
J.B. Gebhardt
Pahala
Romney a ‘phony’
Mitt Romney is the quintessential poster boy for the elite class of Americans referred to as the “one-percenters.” As president, he wants to roll back banking reform because it inhibits his rich friends on Wall Street from more effectively pillaging the economy.
He wants to overturn “Obamacare” because its implementation involves taxing his rich friends. His goal, in fact, is to lower taxes on the rich.
As a vulture capitalist, he profited by bleeding companies of their assets, human and otherwise, and then either selling off or bankrupting the residue. He hides money overseas, including in Swiss bank accounts and tax shelters in the Cayman Islands.
He did not come from the middle class, and he cannot in any way relate to them.
And perhaps most disturbing of all, in order to gain power that he can translate into more wealth for himself and his elitist friends, he has engaged in a bumbling effort to make people forgot that in actuality he is a former liberal governor of Massachusetts.
Incredibly enough, the wing-nuts on the right who hold the key to him getting the Republican nomination seem to be buying into his breathtakingly transparent effort to flip 180 degrees on every major position he has heretofore held, an effort that reeks of psychopathic behavior.
I find it hard to believe almost half of all registered voters are giving this phony serious consideration. It’s more evidence that recent events have picked our pockets of common sense and perspective.
Andrew Blaine
Puna
