I’m really frustrated that the mainstream press is focusing only on Cynthia Dill, Charlie Summers and Angus King in this very important Senate race. While we hear about the “top three,” rarely do we get any information about Andrew Ian Dodge, Steve Woods and Danny Dalton.

Angus King’s campaign strategy is basically to remind Mainers how good the 1990s were and insisting his “independent” presence in the Senate will make it more functional. Rarely does King even talk about issues, and everyone who pays attention knows he will caucus with the Democrats.

While Charlie Summers is still secretary of state in charge of elections, he plays up his “everyday guy” image. Of the three, I think Summers’ campaign has been the most incoherent. While Republican-affiliated groups spend millions trying to destroy King, it never seems like any of them can help Summers himself.

The best I can take from Summers is that he wants the Republicans to take back full control of Washington and make major cuts to domestic spending, but do so with less tea party attitude and more George W. Bush-era “compassionate conservative” rhetoric.

Oddly enough, the most amusing thing he has done to excite his base is push the absurd notion that climate change is not real.

Cynthia Dill seems to think she is still in a primary and reminds us of her progressive values. I guess she wants voters to think she can save the country with President Obama and company. Although I am not really that opposed to Dill’s values, I’ve yet to hear what she is going to do specifically about the nation’s woes.

With all this disappointment, I really wish the press would help inform the voters about the other choices on the ballot.

Seth Baker

Waterville

If you are anything like me, you are either aghast or doubled over with laughter at the soda ban now in effect in New York City. It’s laughable because it’s such a short-sighted attempt to fix a serious problem, but it’s also disconcerting when you think about the overreach of the nanny state we see far too often in this country.

If anything, it’s convinced me that Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson is the ideal choice for president, especially at this juncture, when we need someone who can actually bring the two sides together.

For those who don’t know, Gary Johnson was the two-term governor of New Mexico from 1995 to 2003.

Gov. Johnson took a huge deficit and turned it into a massive surplus when he left office, but unlike Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, Johnson knows that the president doesn’t create jobs. No, the president and Congress can only create conditions that will either help or hurt the economy. Gov. Johnson, a Republican at the time, was also re-elected in a state that is 2-1 Democrat.

Gov. Johnson, a self-proclaimed “bleeding heart libertarian,” combines much of what’s respectable in both parties.

He knows that we need to help our fellow citizen, but it is best done by friends and family, not big government. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg might think he can make New York’s children healthy, but ultimately it comes down to parenting. In a free society, parents must take responsibility for their kids.

It is time we take this country back, not by voting Republican or Democratic, but by being responsible for our children and giving a man like Gary Johnson a chance to use his practical and common-sense methods to bring us together.

Sedge Saunders

Fryeburg 

All couples deserve to have marriage’s legal protections 

This is in response to the recent letters to the editor about marriage equality (“Scripture, religion and gay marriage,” Oct. 2):

Marriage equality is a civil rights issue. State-sanctioned civil marriage confers legal protections for stable relationships. These relationships may or may not bring children into them; however, the relationship still leaves two people dependent on each other to weather the physical, emotional and financial good and bad times.

Certainly any two adult people can have lawyers make these provisions, but this can be costly. If you are heterosexual, you do not pay this cost to live together with all the legal protections afforded by the state.

As the song says, “Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage,” so this is where the love part comes in. Love is as natural to marriage as breath is to life. To legally link these together is a constitutional right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

We must leave the definition of marriage to the churches. Sacred rights are different from civil rights.

In a time when churches seem to be losing their relevance, allowing individual religious denominations to define this term and perform the sacred covenant ensures the spiritual integrity to all souls involved with the decision to marry.

Isn’t this really the issue? The state should provide a legal civil marriage for all couples who are consenting adults wishing a loving and stable life together.

Bette Brunswick

Saco 

Today’s economy lives up to Romney’s challenge 

Gov. Romney asks, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

In the last quarter of 2008, the U.S. economy shrank at an annualized rate of 9 percent, the banking system was in collapse, great American companies failed daily and we tiptoed around the edges of a precipice, at the bottom of which lay at least another Great Depression and at worst might lie the nation’s disintegration.

So yes, we are a great deal better off than we were four years ago.

Nicholas Walsh

Yarmouth 

Closure ends decades-long classical music presence 

I can only echo the sentiments of John Hartley (Voice of the People, “Loss of classical station pains longtime listeners,” Sept. 22).

Before WBACH, there was WDCS and later WPKM. For more than 30 years, there has been a classical music presence over Portland airwaves.

How can a city that has the Portland Museum of Art, the Portland Symphony, the world-renowned Portland String Quartet, Portland Stage, et al., not have a classical music station — not to mention classic jazz on Saturday evening with Arnold Olean?

This is so wrong.

Jim Pizzo

Portland