Burton blinker thief

From the north and the south of Burton, the speed limit is 40 miles per hour.

Burton has a small commercial neighborhood that contains, among other businesses, Harbor Mercantile, the Burton Coffee Stand, Burton Marina and the Yacht Club. For that reason, the speed limit in Burton is 25 MPH. People cross the street from one side to the other. People at the Yacht Club park in a parking lot on the west side of the highway and cross over to the club on the east side. People going to the club also park on both sides of the road.

Many years ago, King County installed blinking speed limit signs at the south end of Burton and at the north end of Burton. For at least the last several years someone has removed, within a week or two, the blinking sign at the north end. Whoever is doing it must have quite a collection of signs of signs by now.

I do not know how much it costs King County to install a new sign, both for the sign itself and for labor, but our property taxes pay for it.

Ted Clabaugh

WWII letter beyond the pale

Shelley Simon’s last missive (“Modern Day Fascists” 27 Mar.) is beyond the pale. That he oversimplifies the Gaza/Israel strife, that he ends by telling readers if we don’t think as he does that we’re fools, is immaterial.

But his conflation of the current political crises, here and in Israel, with the monstrous evil of the Third Reich, is indefensible, and infuriating. He states “WWII history [applies] today.” So that means Trump as Hitler? Musk as Goebbels? The United States as Nazi Germany? The I.C.E. as the SS? And lastly, most disturbingly, detention centers as Auschwitz?

The comparisons are ludicrous, and outrageous. It is clear that Simon understands nothing of Nazism, nothing of WWII. He ought to be ashamed.

Regarding his absurd comparisons, Simon employs the indescribable evil of the Nazi regime as a cheap turn-of-phrase. The cold-blooded murder of millions of humans — gassed, shot, beaten and worked to death, starved, and buried alive — is used to vent his spleen. He also denigrates the memory of the millions more who died, both civilians and soldiers, who fought against Nazism.

As the last Holocaust survivors pass on, the rest of us must not allow the reality of that time to be distorted, to be minimized, to be turned into a rhetorical football. The foolishness, the sheer idiocy of Simon’s rant does just that — it makes an unimaginably horrific, tragic event in human history into just another turn of speech.

It is disgusting.

Michael Shook