How can we rate each misleading prevarication?

So White House Communications Director Hope Hicks resigned only one day after testifying before a congressional committee that she occasionally told “white lies” for Trump. Hopefully, Hope, since that testimony was under oath, it was truthful. Still, several questions remain. How frequently is “occasionally?” Was it multiple times every day, or only every other day? Would it be fair to say those lies in themselves constituted “fake news,” intended to deceive and mislead the public about something the President did or said? Did Hope come up with all those lies on her own, or did she have help both in determining which things to lie about, and how to script those lies?

And by the way, just where do “white lies” fit on the prevarication spectrum? Would it be somewhere between “liar, liar, pants on fire” whoppers and a simple “fib?” And who gets to rate just where on the “forked tongue” scale each intentionally misleading untruth falls?

— Glenn Nolte, Carmel Valley

Trump blathers about tariffs as Putin threatens

Putin has just threatened the United States with nuclear warheads. Trump’s response is to blather over tariffs. This is extremely scary and shows just how inappropriate and unable Trump is to lead our country. When will enough be enough and Republicans in Congress actually take action to remove Trump?

— Marilyn Van den Bogaerde, Marina

Negligence was cause of sewage spill

I was stunned by the report Monday in the Herald entitled “Curbing The Problem of Sewage Spills.” It was in fact a propaganda piece for Water One Monterey, our sewage treatment agency. Its negligence was the cause of the spill.

Over three million gallons of raw sewage was discharged into our ocean, the largest illegal discharge of raw sewage in the history of the West Coast. And Water One Monterey wants to continue treating raw sewage and then dumping the residue into the ocean. Why was the practice ever permitted.

Could it be worse? Of course, Water One Monterey is requesting a permit to mix toxic agriculture waste with the human sewage, apply a primary treatment before the water is purified and sold to us as drinking water. The residue sludge would be dumped off shore. Legally!

Water One says the sewage catastrophe was “a wake-up call.” But in fact, such systems fail. Unless the dumping stops there will be repeats.

— John N. Moore, Pacific Grove

Not cowardly to deal with issue of gun violence

Brian Burleson’s letter is typical of the tired rhetoric of NRA members. He accuses common sense individuals who see no justifiable reason for assault style weapons to be sold in our country, meant to only kill humans on a mass scale, of being “cowards.”

Certainly, the Second Amendment is important and I know of no one who opposes it. However, unless people are willing to sensibly acknowledge the issue of horrific gun violence in our country the problem will not be solved.

The U.S. is among many other countries managing mental illness, however, those other countries do not have the scourge of gun violence and mass murder. The factor that sets us apart is the accessibility of assault style weapons.

— Linda Hylle, Pacific Grove

Billionaires should pay cost of tax reform

The Trump Tax Reform Bill is misnamed. It should be called the “Voter and Donor Purchase Bill.” The GOP, in behalf of all 330 million of us, is going to borrow $1.5 trillion dollars from China, Japan, ourselves, et al, and is giving about 70 percent to the wealthy, and the rest to the middle class that needs it. We all have to pay it back, with interest.

The wealthy are astonished at what they call “windfall” grants of many billions of dollars. They will be happy to give some of that back to the Republican candidates that gave it to them. The workers are getting about $1,000 a year for five years. That is money they needed, and they might be grateful enough to vote Republican.

The corporate tax rate needed to be reduced from 35 percent to 21 percent, to be globally competitive, but that will take hundreds of billions of dollars away from our treasury, The multibillionaires should pay for it, not you and me. They can afford it.

— Bill Burleigh, Big Sur