SPEAKUP! !?!

ARE YOU RETIRED from the military and are 65 or older? Please stop using the Veterans Administration for your medical care. Medicare and TRICARE covers all your medical expenses. Not using the VA will make room for a younger vet who really needs the VA for medical care. — D.W.

ANOTHER YEAR of almost zero COLA for Social Security recipients and military retirees. You can personally thank the Obama administration for intentionally holding the interest rates down. Leaves funds for their pet programs. — J.E.H.

I HAVE ALMOST hit the panhandler who makes his living at Montaño and Edith with my truck mirror. He stands on a skinny, dangerous median, impedes traffic while loitering and is a public nuisance. Now we see panhandlers in wheelchairs, walkers and canes! What happened to safety? — M.G.

INTERESTING THAT throughout human history, people have been willing to fight and die for freedom and liberty. I’m not aware, though, of people being willing to fight and die for socialism. Makes one wonder if something is wrong with the progressive or socialist agenda? Think before you vote. — C.S.

VOTING FOR SOMEONE because of their sex is the same as voting against someone because of their sex. — L.W.

DRUNK DRIVERS are a major problem in Albuquerque — not teenager drivers. As a teen driver myself, I question why the insurance is more expensive for teens, but we aren’t getting behind the wheel drunk. Also, drunk drivers are a huge problem and have killed 1,254 people (in New Mexico from 2003 to 2012) — P.K. A REPUBLIC will fall when the government becomes corrupt and power is abused. America is getting there. — C.B.

SO THE GREAT “poet” Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. What’s next? A posthumous awarding of the Nobel in Chemistry to Timothy Leary? — P.D.

UNM PLANS to cut $450,000 from a budget of $2.8 billion. That’s a reduction of 0.016 percent, an amount otherwise lost in rounding. Is that really all that UNM can do to save money? — J.G.

THE NEXT MAYOR should be a new person — no baggage, no attachments. Might as well come from Mars. — M.B.

IF THE INSIDERS of both political parties find a candidate detestable, then we know we have the right candidate! — L.W.

IF THE GOVERNMENT can’t or won’t make things better for us why should they get to raise taxes or even collect them at all for that matter? How ‘bout this? No government employee gets a raise bigger than Social Security’s cost of living adjustment. — C.P.

DESCRIBING THE 2016 presidential campaign — my favorite saying, “Repeated enough, perception becomes reality, and what was the true reality becomes total fantasy.” Do you really know where the candidates stand on the real challenges and opportunities facing our nation? — J.K.M.

TAX CUTS ARE tax cuts, period. You raise taxes to slow an economy and lower them to speed up an economy. That is an economic law. — B.C.

MANY offenders OF to THE go laws free thatare state allow laws, violent not local Everyone’slaws. Considergot the right bail, to for affordable example. bail unlessan immediate they’re threatan imminentto the community.flight risk or — R.A.W.

ILLEGALliberal, sanctuary IMMIGRATIONstate. I’mis surging shocked in I a say, shocked. Not! — N.B.

COLLEGEMany colleges COSTS are today extremelyare way hard too to high.pay for college without morea scholarship.affordable for We the need collegesto makeof our choice! — K.B.

YOU WOULDN’T build a pipeline through a U.S. military cemetery, but you’d build it through a Native American reservation? You wouldn’t stand for someone essentially destroying your home, but you’d stand for the murder of sacred trees, the pollution of water and the destruction of people’s homeland? — M.B.