Flat-out Endorsement

When Fifth District supervisor Mike Reilly first announced that he would not be running for re-election, we—like many longtime residents of western Sonoma County—immediately started thinking of the people we hoped would run. When the first few candidates threw their hats in the ring, there were no surprises; we knew those announced candidates as friends, neighbors and community activists.

But the person we hoped would join the race is the one we had known longest—before Guerneville had a sewer, before Santa Rosa's infamous sewer spill into the Russian River, before the 1986 flood. We knew Rue Furch as a parent of children at Guerneville School, as a local businesswoman, as an environmentalist. We knew from experience that the issues and problems of concern to us were the same ones that absorbed her thinking.

As a veteran member of the Sonoma County Planning Commission, Rue has been actively involved in dealing with those issues for over 15 years. She knows the devil is in the details; she also knows which of those details count the most. If Rue is elected, she will change hats, but in a very real sense, she will be doing the same job from a different angle. She is well respected throughout the county as a person who listens and studies the facts before taking a position on a subject. We have no doubt that she will be an effective participant in board deliberations as well as an alert guardian of Fifth District interests.

Rue Furch is running as a citizen, not as a politician. When done being supervisor, she has made it clear that she will retire rather than seek another office. Because we think of the supervisor's job as providing constituent service to fellow citizens more than as pursuing a political agenda, we believe Rue is the candidate who will best serve.

We thank all the other candidates for stepping forward to seek this office. They are aware that being supervisor of this diverse district is a demanding and sometimes monumentally frustrating job. But of all of the declared candidates, we think Rue Furch best understands what she's getting into. We support her as the most effective steward of our beautiful area and of the way of life we have long treasured.

Wallie Kass, Alby Kass, Darlene Kersnar and Scott Kersnar, Guerneville

The Criminals in Charge

Lynn Woolsey is my Congressional representative, and Lynn has been a great rep on the issues that concern me. Even though I live in the Sixth Congressional District, I plan on working for the Cindy Sheehan campaign, in the Eighth Congressional district. Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the house and current representative for the Eighth District, needs to get the message loud and clear that the issue of "impeachment" of George Bus, and Dick Cheney must be put back on the table now!

I was in Washington, D.C., the week of Sept. 22, and while there, I sat in a Senate subcommittee on funding appropriations. The committee was hearing testimony on whether or not to approve more billions of dollars for the illegal, misguided wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

How can anyone say that impeachment is not worth the time and energy or just shrug that he'll be gone in a year anyhow? Impeachment is a critical issue. These two men are criminals, they have violated the Constitution, they have lied to the American people and they are aggressively planning an invasion of Iran!

Not only must they be impeached, they should also be tried for war crimes, crimes against humanity.

barry latham-ponneck, Sebastopol

Edwards for the Criminals' Job

I support John Edwards' candidacy because he strongly supports our troops. First, he wants to bring the troops home from Iraq as soon as possible. Second, he is very angry about the mistreatment the administration is dealing out to our returning medically disabled troops. The actions of the acting Surgeon General of the Army, Maj. Gen. Gale Pollock, parroting the administration's efforts to save budget dollars by denying medical care, is unconscionable. No other candidate has stood up and as forcefully called on the administration to account for its actions.

Gerald W. Hunt, San Jose

Send a letter to the editor about this story.