Jimmy Carter

It is appropriate that on Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday two major events are making headline news: a major East Coast port strike (the first since the Carter-Mondale Administration), and Iran launching a major attack on Israel. The mullahs who ruled in Iran took over during Carter-Mondale. The inflation we have lived through the last few years is the worst since that administration. Things can go horribly wrong when incompetents are in the White House, and the Biden-Harris administration is a stark reminder of that. Hopefully voters will take heed in the upcoming election.

— Jeff Thomas, Irvine

Pickleball

Maybe I should be playing pickleball to understand all this gobbledygook your columnist Larry Wilson is presenting to the readers on Sept. 29.

I am lost and I hope I am not the only one. I hope he wrote better compositions or essays when he was in high school or in college.

— Christine Peterson, Woodland Hills

Hochman-Gascón and the L.A. County DA race

Re “Nathan Hochman has some major blind spots” (Sept. 29):

Your columnist Rafael Perez may be Gascón’s long-lost twin. Perez’s characterization of our justice system as “infamously unjust” tells you everything you need to know about his position. Gascón’s utopian vision is what has led us down this destructive path of ever-increasing crime. Hochman is not “exploiting” our justified fears, he is responding to them. Perez’s convoluted and nonsensical rationale for Gascón’s ineffective response to criminality is easily refuted by what we plainly see. We are worse off, not better off, than before Gascón and his pampering policy toward criminality arrived in Los Angeles. The clear results are tearing at the fabric of our once civilized society, i.e., the rules we expect everyone to live by.

— Thomas Swift, Sun Valley

Prop. 6

What a deal, don’t be fooled if Prop. 6 is passed (Sept. 27). If I were homeless, I could commit a crime worthy of going to prison, have free room and board, and also be paid as an employee of the state, minimum wage for work I do in prison. Who cares if it costs California taxpayers billions annually? Certainly not our clueless elected state officials in the Legislature.

— Antonella Bennett, Pasadena